Content Note: Broad and ranty discussions of eating disorders, body dysmorphia, gender dysphoria, death, abuse, and mental illness.
The following post is likely going to be extremely triggering. I left out a lot of perseverating details in how my disorder manifests, ways that are particularly personal in method and thought. I still included the specific process of how this post came to be on this very night, so please take care of yourself should you continue to read. I say take care of yourself when this subject is about my own self-care hypocrisy, so I can only hope I don’t create unbearable pain if you read on.
It’s National Eating Disorder Awareness Week. I don’t think I was ever really aware this week existed, or maybe I was and deliberately stuffed it away like I do with everything eating disorder related. I’m dreading writing this. I’ve been thinking about this week for months now, seeing how it lines up with my Clinical Assessment and Diagnosis module for Eating and Eliminating Disorders which just happens to coincide with this week as well as every other fucked up triggering thing related to food and body image, all perfectly enmeshed with Mercury in Retrograde which, yes, I believe in fully. I’m not editing this. I’ll probably reread it once, post it, and try to forget it exists. I’ll promote it once on Twitter and regret it instantly (I already regret it).
My tits hurt. They’re swollen from my weight gain, they hang heavy on my bloated body and I’m nowhere near my period. I have nothing to blame it on hormonally and I’ve been off Testosterone for months. I’m sucking the sugar from my teeth still left over from the half of a Kings Cake I polished off before my shower, making sure to rub extra lotion on my belly and breasts to reduce potential stretch marks from these last few pounds. What the fuck am I doing writing this? I’ve been dreading writing this more than I’ve ever dreaded writing anything in my life. More than hundred-page curriculums, more than painful revisitations of abuse and trauma, more than writing about dead best friends or relationship nightmares still alive and unwell. This is the last skeleton in my closet, and it hangs there because I simply don’t know how it will fall apart once it hits the sunlight. I don’t understand my eating disorder. Okay, fuck it, moving on, digging in.
I put on makeup before writing this post, like I always do when I am about to do something tear-jerky and the risk of ruining my mascara or eyeliner is supposed to protect me from falling apart into water. But I’m going to cry. I’m inevitably, and possibly at this very moment, going to cry. I can spend hours in therapy pouring my brain out, content that might make another person cry but just comes into analysis and feeling without a saline breakdown. I don’t talk about my eating disorder often. To anyone. My loved ones, my therapist, anyone. Or maybe I do and I just don’t remember because my trauma brain is really good at erasing things. Maybe I stuff those away, too. But I’d like to think I’m a pretty open and vulnerable person, and this, this I just cannot touch.
I don’t want to touch it. It is ugly and uncomfortable and triggering as fuck for me and so many people around me. It is poison and I don’t know what to fucking do with it. My new therapist says this is what we are going to unpack from now on. And every time we talk about it, a new closet opens, more bones exposed, a reality that this skeleton belongs not to one body but many, many ugly morphs of dysmorphia from which I don’t understand their birth or origins, creatures I cannot name. When I talk about my ED to my therapist, even for just a moment, I am reduced to tears, completely out of control.
I need you to understand I have an eating disorder, but mostly, I myself need to hold a better understanding of this eating disorder. My heart and all its SVT quirks is palpitating right now, appropriately so. I am horrified. “This eating disorder.” “MY eating disorder…” all thoughts I had when anticipating this post…would it be a history when I have no linear conception of how and why this has manifested throughout the entirety of my life? Do I get generational and write about friends and family for their own past contributions and how I see it cycling through their own lives to this day? How I know we all suffer and how lonely it must be? Do I get cultural and talk about what a fucked up world we live in, where even someone like me who claims to be a sex-positive person can feel so much hatred toward my physicality? How my idea of “body positivity” applies to every other human I see but myself? How it relates to gender feelings, how I’ve always felt ugly, how my sexuality has been a crutch, a shield, a transaction, a mirror to understand myself in reflection of how others see me, want me, use me? How once I start to pick apart the bones, I have no idea which ones will crumble to dust and disappear or which ones will stab me and splinter, how this weight piles onto my chest to the point where I’ve forgotten to breathe?
I have an eating disorder. I am deeply ashamed of it. I am ashamed of how hard I try not to have one, how I know I’ll live with this for the rest of my life just as I have lived with it thus far. When can it transform? When will it mutate? When do I get the chance to shift this from a burden to another disability, something that can define me but in enlightening ways? My therapist wants to focus on this from now on. I feel terrible for him. I feel terrible for everyone and anyone who reads this. I told two other people in my life that I was considering writing this post. Coming out, so to speak, after years of feeling unworthy of the diagnosis and simultaneously drowning in it. These people have seen me in it. They’ve seen the suffering and they’ve suffered with me.
I’m sick. I’m addicted. I have an eating disorder, and I’m hoping by typing it over and over, by naming it, by putting it naked and exposed to the universe and saying “something’s gotta give” that I can’t hide it anymore. That no matter how much I exercise or eat “clean” or cook fresh meals, I will always see these as punishments, remedies to “fix” how I look. Food is decadence, it is decay, it is hedonistic and lush and sexualized and immoral in all these contradictory ways that make zero sense to me, even theoretically. My body is not my own and never was. I don’t know if it ever will be, even when I try to reclaim it through a vector of sublimated sexual autonomy. If one day, I’ll be able to massage lotion onto my belly and actually feel my hands touch my skin.
Mike peeks his head into the living room as I write this. He knew I was going to try, but he didn’t know when. I’ve got the lo-fi beats on the TV and a cat curled up next to me; I’m pantsless and in tears. He doesn’t ask if I AM okay. He knows I’m not okay. He knows what I’m doing, he doesn’t need to ask. He just simply says “I love you.” I love you, too. I love all of you and any of you that trudge through this mess in whatever way you do, I admire you for existing even if I don’t know you. This shit is fucking hard. I have an eating disorder. It still doesn’t feel real. Maybe this will help and maybe it won’t. But the work has to be done; life is too fucking short to pretend a huge chunk of it doesn’t exist. So here it is. Guts and all.