On the nature of my relationship with food
What is truly and deeply going on inside of my mind right now? It seems so deep and so shallow in different places, but I don’t think either perspective is really right. If it were as simple as wanting to be thin to be attractive, I’d run into the conundrum that there’s very few reasons for me to want to be attractive, and I know what it was like to be somewhat thin and I didn’t love it that much. But if it’s not, why does every example of my growing thinness bring me such disgusting euphoria?
Fitting my fingers around my wrist, even just barely, the most sickening smile came across my lips. I started laughing and bouncing around when I noticed that I had clearly lost weight in my thighs. Drying off after a shower I moved in such a way that I could see my individual ribs and I repeated the motion as many times as I dared. I still can’t fit my fingers all the way around my thighs like I could last time, but the gap is visibly smaller than it was even just quite recently. It makes me so proud, and I really wish that it didn’t.
I’m not underweight. I’m barely even in the “healthy weight” range, a stark contrast to a year or two ago when I was skirting the line between underweight and healthy weight. I was overweight until a few weeks ago, when I finally crossed the threshold into “healthy weight”. But it doesn’t feel healthy. It feels dangerous. I am losing muscle as well as fat. I have constant headaches, I constantly make excuses for skipping or skimping on meals, my head swims when I stand, I can’t think straight, I lose control of myself around snack foods, my eyes are getting worse, I often feel feverish. A lot of those symptoms are unquestionably unhealthy, but many of them still feel like achievement. And once I reach those states, I am hesitant to correct them, because they feel like progress and I’m not making progress in any other aspect of my life.
It is a mistake to attach my self-worth and identity to thinness. But that is what I have done. It feels so good when it feels good, and I can feel myself reinforcing it even more than it is already ingrained. I don’t have anything else that feels really good right now. I don’t have anything else that I feel in control of right now. I’m so lonely, and this has spun that around into a good thing. It’s like a secret that I have with myself. A crushing, aching, lonely, terrible secret that I need to share, but just as much I need people not to know and I need them never to know.
I could go into the reasons this might have happened, where childhood is concerned. Anorexic mother, anorexic sister, anorexic society. Pressure and anxiety and trauma. I’m sure it’s relevant in some ways, but mostly it just seems like an excuse.
This isn’t the first time. I don’t remember last time very well– what set it off properly, what stopped it. I don’t remember, partially because of the nature of the illness. I was starving, significantly more than I am right now. Last time it all happened so fast. Why did that happen? Why did it stop? Was I in control? Did I know how to stop it then? How come I don’t know how to stop it now?
That’s sort of a lie. I know how to stop it now. All I have to do is eat. It’s so simple. Food is so tasty, I just need to stop restricting myself. It’s not like I hate food. Some people are like that, but I’m not. When I hate being full, it’s mostly because I want to hate being full so I try to give it negative associations. I don’t even experience that much anxiety around food, and I only recently began to get properly high on starvation. But if it was fully that simple, I would have stopped already. I need to find out the cause to correct it, but I feel like I’ve interrogated every possible cause, and found them all lacking.
I can’t help but feel like I’m glaring myself in the face and glaring at myself right back, each me refusing to yield. Like I have this profound self-knowledge and some lack of motivation or fear of failure or fear of success has formed a massive road block to prevent me from seeing this glaringly obvious thing that I already know in every fibre of my being.
I don't know if I want to recover, but I want to want to recover. It upsets me, that I don't have that motivation right now.