Bullet

I am afraid to write of it.  I am afraid to speak of it.  Because the whisper has only just recently become a voice.  And I'm afraid that if I write or speak of it, I will prevent that voice from becoming a roar. 

I am feeling old sensations quivering like a waiting bullet in the chamber of my veins.  For I am feeling the rustlings of my eating disorder's return; a playing around of behaviors. 

Physically: I feel the occasional pricks of cold penetrate my skin.  I see the blue and purple veins peeking at me from beneath the flesh of my feet.  I see the narrowing of my fingers.  I sense the swimming of my head come lunch and the shallow pricks of hunger inflicted upon a gurgling stomach. I notice the familiar way my eyes have of distorting colors, shapes, and dimensions during conversations. I sense the silk of my work pants brush the points of my hips as the excess fabric 'round my wasit shuffles side-to-side as I walk.  Side-to-side.  Swish, swish. 

Psychologically: I feel the fear of weighing in due to the disapointment that will follow if I don't lose weight.  Or worse yet, if I gain weight.  I feel the anxiety of needing to know the number.  I think tonight of tomorrow morning's weigh in and how I hope to have lost.  I sense the dread of certain calories and foods for the foreboding risk that they may stall my losing.  I feel the fleeting sense of excitment when I notice I've lost four pounds and the setting in of the determination to keep going.  I feel the pride that maybe, just maybe, I do have what it takes to get skinny again.

Because, although the excitement of weight loss is rapidly replaced by a drive to achieve better, higher numbers, to Ace my eating disorder's entrance exam on the topic: how to starve yourself successfully, there is a persistent sense of control and a constreat dread of losing it.  It as though the eating disorder is Jane clutched in the hands of King Kong, anticipating the moment when she will be crushed and killed;  constant anxiety.  There is a sense of wonder and amazaement, of superiority, when you realize you don't have to eat.  Don't want to eat.  And you fear becoming "normal" once more.  Of being average and dreadfully human.  Where's the excitement in that?  Much more interesting to be super-human.  To have your own little life drama play out on the big screen! 

Such a fragile brute she is.



 

"Ana"piphany

     I've been noticing myself falling back into old habits.  Feeling immense guilt after eating certain "unsafe" foods, bingeing, attempts at purging, spending every waking moment I have that is not invested in work thinking about food, calories, and weight, devising "plans" to follow and "goals" to meet, talking more often and for longer periods of time about food to the people around me, tracking foods I eat and calories I consume, doodling mantras and slogans in my notebook, "Be a Food Snob!", revisiting the series of questions that used to run through my brain whenever food was around, "If I'm offered any, should I say yes?  But won't I feel so much better if I just say no?", thumbing through my favorite trigger book that I've religiously read cover to cover countless times, playing with the thought of not eating, turning it over in my brain, remembering what it was like to taste hunger on my tongue and smell it on my breath, isolating myself and withdrawing from others, retreating further and further inside of myself, wanting to "be alone" so I can focus attentivetly to the voice inside my head without distraction, not caring who I push away in the process, craving silence, feasting on solitude, sleeping away the afternoons.
     I'm tired of recovery.  I'm fucking bored.  And I'm fat.  I went to my primary care doctor today as a follow-up to my medication dosage increase last month.  As the nurse led me to the examining room, she paused at the scale, "Hmm, when was the last time we weighed you in?  Let's see...well it's been awhile, hop on up."  I started panicking; backing away from the scale like it was a rabid dog ready to pounce.  I started shaking my head, and then said, "I may have to go on backwards."  I took off my boots and my coat and my sweater.  The nurse could tell I was visibly uncomfortable, and said we didn't have to if I didn't want.  I ended up weighing in, face first.  I was devastated when I saw that number and started crying hysterically.  It's so easy for people who have never had an eating disorder before to try and comfort you by saying that there are other more important things to worry about than weight.  They don't realize that telling that to a recovering anorexic is like telling someone who has just claimed bankruptcy and lost everything they've spent their life building that there are more important things to worry over than money.  Unless you've been there yourself, you just DON'T fucking get it.
    I left that appointment crying like my dog just died and called my boyfriend.  He decided to comfort me by saying, "so lose weight if you want honey, just do it the healthy way."  So that's the end of recovery.  If the man who witnessed me on the brink of death by starvation can tell me that, which my diseased brain interprets as, "he thinks you can afford to lose weight otherwise he wouldn't have said that fatty," obviously I need to shed a few. 
    Every day, every meal I have a choice.  No one's watching anymore.  No one's watching except the girl inside my head.  She sees everything.  She sees how far astray I've gone and proffers her help.  She promises a steel-willed self-control.  She promises beauty and perfection and happiness.  She promises understanding and friendship and support.  She promises admiration and esteem.  When everyone else forgets and abandons me, she breaks through offering "ana"piphany...you can do it again, you can start over, you have the control, you have the power.

Gummy Worm

     I weighed myself today.  ::Sigh::  I shouldn't have done that.  ::Cringe::  So I tucked my scale away into the recesses of my bathroom closet.  I guess that's a good thing that I put it away, that I recognized and attempted to prevent the destructive force of that inanimate object from draining the reason from my brain.  But hiding the scale doesn't hide the number I saw there or the flood of panic and depression that followed.  I'm tired of caring, of giving a shit what that number is.  Why should that number define me?  I am not a prisoner anymore...my weight is no longer my mark of identification.  Yet, tired as I am, as much as I don't want to, I do care.  I do still care what that number says.  I do still feel the anxious hesitation and fear of stepping onto the scale's cold platform as though I am ascending a diving board whilst a rapt audience awaits the gracious descent.  Yet the only plunge that follows is my heart as it plummets into my gut when the number appears, when it flashes black and ominous in front of my eyes, and I look down on it in shame.  As I woke this morning, I wasn't going to do it.  I told myself not to.  I asked myself what was the worst that could happen if I left the house and went about my day without weighing in.  I settled on the answer that the curiosity would kill me, and I didn't want to die that day.  So up I went, plunge goes the heart, and away it went, banished to the closet.   
     As I put the scale away, an intense feeling rose up inside me.  My fingers burned as I gripped the edges of the cool glass.  And I realized it was hate that I was feeling.  It was rage.  And for a split second I thought of taking that menacing square of glass and smashing it into shards on my kitchen floor to prove I was in control, to prove I had the power.  (How fitting.)  But something prevented me from doing it, something that felt like love, like forgiveness and fear.  Was that something the crippling dependency of my disease?  Should I have smashed it rather than half-assedly hid it?  Or would it have even mattered?
     I approach the mirror with trepidation, craning my neck until it hurts in order to view my backside.  That feeling rises within me again...the feeling of an intense and immense rage, of hate.  It scares me the level of virulence with which I despise myself in moments like these.  Moments in which I grab my flesh between my fingers and tug on it, maneuver it flat, and tuck it away to catch a glimpse of the bones that lay beneath.  But when I let go, the health bounces back into position and I close my eyes shut imagaining weightlessness, how I had it and how I let it go.  And as the weight of my considerations bear down upon my consciousness, I deliberate the deal I made with the Devil: sacrifice my skeleton in exhange for happiness and the hand of a loving friend.  Now my body is a gummy worm, a body with no bones.  I should have asked for an erasure of memory along with the disappearance of my ghost.
     I open my eyes to see myself encapsulated within the confines of the mirror's glistening edges and feel my knees go weak.  I feel the tears begin to well up behind my eyes.  And the frightened little girl inside of me begs for me to take her home, to curl up with her in a corner and stay there until she's skinny enough to be visible through my skin.  She wheedles and whines that she can be my friend instead, that she's all I need for happiness.  I search my reflection, trying to put a face to the voice of that little girl and wonder why she's too cowardly to look me in the eye, why I can only ever hear her, never see her. 
 

Thoughts For a Tuesday

     When I was sick, I fruitlessly tried to pinpoint what began my illness.  I tried to catch the cause with my bony fingers and put my wasted print upon it.  And now that I'm recovering, I find myself thinking back to how it happened, how I didn't notice what was happening or else didn't care until it was too late.  I suppose I never really wanted to get well.  Rather, I had to.  It was not like I woke one morning with the resolve to eat and put on weight.  Granted, yes, there were many nights when I cried myself to sleep because the pain in my chest or abdomen was just too much to tolerate, or came home from work to face another lonely and restless afternoon staring down the toilet bowl, and said to myself, "I can't do this anymore.  I need help.  I'm out of control."  But the distinction which needs to be made here is that, although I was tired of the disordered behaviors and the pain and anxiety and insomnia and guilt and lack of energy and depression that came along with them, I never wanted to give up the badge of honor that came with the disease.  In other words, I never wanted to gain weight.  I was tired of being "sick girl," of the ceaseless sins suffered in silence.  But I was never tired of being thin.
     Maybe my body just finally rebelled and said, "to hell with you, I'm fucking eating."  This theory may have weight considering I have always been a bit rebellious by nature and hate to be told no.  Maybe I just got hungry.  Maybe I just got tired.  Maybe my body became so deprived, it clinged to any ounce of food I fed it in the hopes of survival.  Maybe the very real and haunting prospect of losing my job and everything I spent my life building was the final kick that started my engine into gear.  Funny thing is, the prospect of losing my life didn't make a dent in my diseased skull.  Maybe I copped out right on the brink of being institionalized because I feared losing my freedom more than I did gaining weight.  Maybe I just got bored.  Maybe I just didn't care anymore about being so goddamn impressive.  Maybe I realized no one gave a shit anymore except me, and when there's no one left to goggle with wonder at your disappearing act, I guess it feels as though you've already disappeared, so what's the point?  Or maybe when I started working out less and eating more I realized...it felt good...and I...ahem...liked it.
     Even now, it feels good to come home from the gym and not feel a crazed anxiety to start piling food into my mouth.  To know that if I'm hungry, I can eat dinner.  That I don't have to fear.  I think over the past couple of months during my initial stages of recovery my body has been making up for lost time and so many months of denial.  I equate my recovery state to that of a starved runt wrestling her way through the mounds of her siblings' plump frames to get to her mother's teat, fearing there won't be enough milk to feed her, there will never be enough milk to feed her.  It is almost as though when I began eating, I feared the food was somehow going to be taken away.  That any opportunity I had to eat, in which I was allowed to eat, had to be relished and taken advantage of because I never knew when that moment would cease to exist, when the food would disappear and I wouldn't be allowed it anymore.  The crazed anxiety for starvation became a crazed anxiety to eat away the fear of emptiness.   
     It's been a few months now, and I'm starting to learn that I don't have to starve nor do I have to binge.  I don't have to fear food, it's presence nor its absence.  I hate using phrases like "my goal is...", "my plan is...." because it implies the possibility of failure.  It implies the possibility of not reaching your goal or following your plan.  So I'll say my committment to my health and happiness is to begin exercising again a half hour four or five days a week.  That I will begin eating healthier and "normal."  I will have a breakfast, lunch, and dinner and snacks in between if I want or need to.  And hopefully, I'll end up balancing out and losing a few pounds in the process!  I can't think of this as a plan to lose weight...it becomes fraught with too much self-loathing and competition.  Too much guilt and a sense of defeat.  But I'm realizing that I don't have to eat everything in sight or drive myself crazy thinking about food because it will still be there if I need it, if I want it.
     I wonder if it's bad that I'm hungry but the thought of getting up and cooking and eating seems too tedious of a task to undergo.  I wonder if it's bad that I secretly hope I will lose weight by committing myself to a "healthy lifestyle of exercise and nutritious eating."  I wonder if it's bad that I put off making that appointment with the nutritionist like I was going to because I "want to try doing this on my own."  I wonder if it's bad that I figure in my head the number of days until the next holiday and how long I should go "sticking to plan" before straying.  I wonder if its bad that I go to the gym and stand in front of the full length mirror in a desolate corner of the women's locker room, the same mirror I used to have to sit down in front of just to tie my shoes because it was too much effort to stand and tie them, and examine my protruding belly, jab my thighs with probing fingers.  I wonder if its bad that I cringe when I feel my thighs rub together as I jog on the treadmill and that I say to myself, "I'll just go until there's a space there again.  I mean, it's not healthy that my thighs touch."  I wonder if it's bad that I assess whether my jaw line or chest bones are evident.  I wonder if it's bad that I'm sitting here writing this right now because it means I'm thinking about it.  I wonder if it's bad that my thoughts of a Tuesday are my thoughts everyday.