Fixing Everything

I didn’t fall asleep until 6:00am this morning, and I slept until 6:00pm this evening, at which point I rose only to feed my dog (read: I would probably still be out).

Some lifestyle this is, yeah?

Somewhere in me, I know that what (or whom) I secretly and in some deeply repressed way want is some Night in Shining Armor to come “save” me from my eating disorder.  Have you ever considered that?  I spend a lot of time considering it now.  In fact, I suspect it’s an impulse we all have–to be searching constantly for the Right Person to Fix Everything; to keep our eyes peeled and our irregularly beating hearts open for the significant other to end all significant others.  That Relationship.

I know I am.  I want it with everything in me–I’m unrelentingly dedicated, even if unintentionally, to this desire–which is awful, because that level of dedication should be reserved for God.  So I took the first and…simplest? step and ended my relationship with J, which had been as fixed as anything could possibly be: secure, stable, and firm for eighteen months and counting…but wait, I need to get my life in order, and I’m sorry, I have to learn to be happy without a boyfriend, and I know it’s cliche but it really is about me, but it’s about you too, even though I love you, and maybe someday eventually we’ll try it again, it’s possible after all, and really I’m really really sorry but I just really just have to do this now, I’ve been agonizing over it for ages.

When I can’t even rationalize my own decisions, how can I rationalize my eating disorder?

I need somebody to fix me.  I cannot do it alone.  But giving one’s heart to God does not instantaneously eliminate the desire to yield oneself recklessly to another human who can/will physically touch and hold and vocalize sweet, sonorous compliments which may or may not hold any meaning and laugh and hold hands.  Neither does it instantaneously squash the voice that tempts me with control that I don’t have and reminds me that control is what I need.  The desire and the voice diminish, become muffled; however, they fight back twice as hard.  I can feel them in my head and in my chest and in my stomach at all times, shoving and kicking and twisting relentlessly like an unborn child long overdue.

Am I really trying to get better?  That’s questionable; even within myself, arguable.  I am trying to better myself, stable myself as a person by reducing my dependency on others and finding my total sufficiency in the Father.  But in the mean time, suppressing the behaviors of the anorexic basket-case I am just seems like Faking It–moreso even than pretending not to struggle with them at all.

I wonder whether I’ll be awake wrestling these concepts again for the next six hours.

Staying Asleep

Crying and eating are the two most disgusting acts in which a person can be caught. And I am doing both. Of course, I’m not just crying, and I’m not just eating–especially not just eating. That’s too simple, too primal a word. I’m burying every human sensation alive inside my stomach to burn in the acids my body makes. That’s what this is. That’s the extent to which this aching has consumed me.

You know, I hate television; realistic series in particular. Watching humans exchange emotion like that, like it’s nothing, even though they regard it as if it were everything–even if they are actors, it’s like someone’s grabbing my wrist and wrenching my hand backwards. Uncomfortable–and unnecessary.

But ultimately unavoidable. Something washes over my heart; and then I’ve got two unwanted feelings to squelch: this one–whatever it is–and the total desire not to feel it or anything else at all.

I don’t want to die, but neither do I want to exist anymore, not strongly…not particularly. But I can’t simply kill myself–it’s just not in me; I need to disappear. God, yes, the thought is overwhelming, and I think it with such obstinate resolution that my heart tightens up like a violin string and actually almost breaks, stops in my chest: I can disappear! And I will! How incredible–no…How absolutely perfect.

People think it’s an ordinary choice one makes–the “quick” way to perhaps a more “desirable” body. The typical understanding goes apparently someway like this: wake up one day, stop eating entirely–on a whim, and drop those pesky Last Few Pounds, fast (pun somewhat intended). But then–? Well, who knows? The whole misconception is completely illogical. Does it yield success? Is there happiness at the end? Is prom exactly what you dreamed it would be in your size whatever dress? Do you feel worthy yet? If so, of what..?

Actually, it’s life in slow motion–subdued; and when you watch it, it’s got this manic quality to it, too–you’re laughing at yourself all the way, and sometimes, you’re crying. You cut out a bit and then a bit more and then a lot, really, and eventually you’re only surviving–subsisting, being, existing–because you haven’t half the energy required to do anything else. In fact, life becomes sleep, and when you’re awake (which is seldom the case), it’s all feeling and emotion and other painful nonsense, and in the end, you realize that you much prefer sleep anyway.

Why wake up just yet–why stop now?

Compartmentalization

Anorexia is a vacuum; a bell jar; an inner conflict.  And the spirit knows when the body and mind are struggling against one another as such.  I lie in my bed, many nights, unable to rest though exhausted by this pressure in my head which results unfailingly from the nonsense of having allowed my mind to degenerate insofar that it will not let me feed myself–not even when I am so hungry that I cannot sleep; when I cannot sleep solely because I am so hungry.

Last night or in the severely early hours of this morning–depending on one’s perspective, I can only suppose–I sat up in bed, dreadfully awake, wishing with such hysterical fervor for the ability to sleep that I was finally reduced to tears by the frustration which inevitably comes with being disallowed to eat when one’s body most craves nourishment. More than any other feeling, consideration, or concept I have encountered, the unrelenting fight between ravenous flesh and indignant intellect is bizarrely and especially unsettling.  Only in such moments as these, when I am absolutely alone and thus particularly lucid to the disturbance within me, I recognize how truly troubling, how utterly useless it all is–to pit self against self; to be forever caught between natural and unnatural desires; to be tasked with knowing that to please the world will be to disappoint self and vice-versa.

Eventually my body surrenders, and I slumber for an obscenely excessive number of hours before rising sometime in the afternoon–only because the light and the din of the raucous waking world refuse to leave me at peace, mind you.  On a day like today–wonderful, wilted Wednesday–over the next several hours, I will typically ingest roughly six hundred calories, drag myself into a scalding shower, scrub myself raw, apply a moderate amount of makeup, halfway dry my hair, and at last go through a dozen different outfits before deciding upon and settling on whichever makes me look the least “fat.”  In the hours following, I assume a new persona–I will drive to church, smile, greet dozens of people, share a hug with a cute boy (and feel almost normal in the moment that my heart palpitates due not to physical weakness but to human attraction), raise my arms during worship and mean it, genuinely enjoy an intriguing and thought-provoking message, tithe, chat some more with old friends(?), see a movie, have a few bites of somebody else’s snack, sip my bitter diet soda into oblivion, and disembark once more for home, where the miserable, insomniac cycle begins again.  My legs will ache and my throat will burn and my stomach will church, but I will not indulge.

I convince myself that this is all well and acceptable because I am “functioning.”  The scale is my only judge.  Nevermind my happiness–that can certainly wait for a lower number.  It always has…

Anything and Everything

I read somewhere that when one craves “anything and everything” as opposed to, say, salty or sweet food or specifically carbs, it is indicative of jealousy.

As I force the thousandth calorie into my throat, I realize how true this is indeed.  At the same time, I become suddenly aware of my own obscenely elevated heart rate and am injected by some force with the impulse to regurgitate–purging, if not stopping, would be a welcome change from this stuffing, hurting, palpitating–but I cannot and so do not; rather, I continue eating, binging. I am absolutely conscious and have absolute command over my actions; I know that what I am doing is entirely unfounded in any sort of healthy logic. Yet, I do not stop.

How easily Jealousy persuades me; how often I turn my face to her guile in submission. I may feel phantasmally blessed or on the cusp of a great blessing or simply nothing at all, but I never remain self-oblivious for very long: here is this great thing, this fabulous new person just given to me, and–! oh, we’ll never be so close as we were in that I dream I had once, when we were still strangers. Reality never compares.

Indeed, I have only Jealousy…Jealousy and food.

Metaphysical Anorexia

The mouth is more than an orifice. It is a tool which executes some of society’s most controversial of dirty deeds: it interacts carnally with food, drink, with other bodies, with dishes and thus germs, and with the conglomerate consequence of all those things once more after it’s all pooled in the stomach and then been rejected, if particularly disgusting. The mouth signals self-control and as well carries the stigma of base humanity–some can control their mouths better than others; some have especial command over the orifice, the tool, the symbol. Some sin often; others are too paralyzed by their own fear to sin. Neither circumstance fosters any productivity or growth of character.

Sometimes, I wonder how different we’d be without mouths. From the mirror, my sallow reflection stares emotionless at me. She’s weird, her presence offsetting in that she mimics my expression without any of the feeling I humanly possess (is that really my face? Am I so blank?). In the dim almost-darkness, liquid shadow seeps from the sockets where my eyes belong and fade at my cheekbones. I’m ghastly: everyone’s ghastly-looking in the dark. But most notable of my blackened features is the bleak, black cavity of my mouth. It’s so stark that it almost seems to threaten the entirety of my being–as though it might invert one day and collapse upon me, imploding my weak sketch of a body with the crunch-crack-thwack-squelch of bones against sinew against fat.

Maybe my soul will float from my mouth by the grace of God and time when it goes. No one will hear my soul, then, because it will drift away uncorrupted by physical stain, untouched my material ruin!

That’s my unrealistic hope, anyway. One may consider, though, the possibility that sin originates, if not exclusively in the soul, more in the soul than anywhere else. Consciousness is a phenomenon difficult to describe in any perfect scientific manner, but it’s the one thing which we are all capable of comprehending easily and completely. We understand that we are, simply and unarguably, alive. And in the same way, we understand that we have control over our bodies. That axiom necessitates two further truths: 1) that we are somehow inextricably separate from our bodies, and 2) that our bodies cannot sin alone, without influence by the mind (or, dependent upon one’s perspective, the soul).

Therefore, we cannot blame the existence of our mouths for the acts we commit in privacy–cannot blame innate ability for exercise of that ability–cannot blame our bodies for our actions. We must take responsibility, in fact, for the latter, which entails taking responsibility of our bodies entirely and primarily. This begs a certain unavoidable question: would we be much different without those things that allow us so easily to sin (“If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off”–Mark 9:43)?

If yes, then how so?

I dare to imagine that we as humans, greedy, filthy, curious, loving, filled with emotions good and bad, would find another way. Without mouths, we as a species might only communicate our hatred more creatively–more violently. And I can only imagine how lust, greed, pride, and envy would overtake the heart with no physical outlet (“He who conceals his hatred has lying lips”–Proverbs 10:18).

In hating my mouth, I find myself ultimately more grateful for it. I hope earnestly that one day I will have greater control over the orifice, the tool, the symbol–even if I must die a thousand times by it first. Such a victory would be worthwhile.

My mouth is more than an orifice. And I am more than my mouth. Such implications lie in that understanding!

On Emetophobia

In quality, the room was gray; in color, likely white or blue (I can’t honestly remember). I was in so young a stage of youth that I can’t quite recall to my current mind my own age, and in such discomfort that I was curled over the fat, rolling arm of the sofa in the living room. The position in which I lay slightly numbed a certain, too-familiar churning of the stomach which had overridden my physical control several times a year for the previous five-or-so years of my frustrated life, and, considering the horror of vomiting and how much of my time and breath it had wasted, I vowed, in such a way only a child can vow, never to vomit again!

I have remained true to my vow–my willpower is inhuman (superhuman, I’d venture to say) and sometimes as inhumanly depressing. These days, I lay embedded in a pattern of particularly unhealthy eating due largely in part to the fear described above: I eat strictly, almost exclusively, when I do not feel hungry. Hunger is nausea, and once it has overwhelmed me, food–that substance which could at any time secretly harbor the power to exacerbate my condition–looks not like life-support, but like death at worst and unhelpful grime at best (though my desire for it increases monstrously with my hunger, regardless–or perhaps because–of logic).

At some point in time, the hunger becomes bored and inevitably passes. Now is my chance! If I do not eat something–just some small thing–I’ll become nauseous again, throat burning with acid and stomach turning with nothing at all. I cannot let that happen–cannot puke today, no, not today…

Tomorrow comes, as it always does, and in my guilt I resolve not to eat again until I “absolutely must.” But when ever must I, truly? When I’m hungry or when I am not? Seldom, often?–or never? I push all food-thoughts to the bottom of the well of my mind and pretend that food itself does not exist; therefore, neither exist hunger nor nausea–nor, for those matters, the concept of relinquishing one’s innards to any porcelain creation.

Inevitably, it comes again. Again, I begin the weak and weary wait for temporary peace of gut and salvation of energy.

A Brief Introduction

I live with disordered eating which may or may not be an eating disorder (most possibly–based on DSM criteria review, the informed and suffering friends whom I have acquired, and the fact that I’m a fairly intelligent individual–Anorexia Nervosa). I experience periods of mild remission during which a strong will to recover begins to emerge, after each of which I promptly and abruptly fall back into the great, black, sentient hole that is She.

Welcome to my thoughts.