Sunday my sponsor qualified at the meeting I co-chaired for the past three months. When my sponsor qualifies, it always puts me in mind of exactly why I asked him to sponsor me… because he has been where I've been, and he has what I want.
He talked Sunday about the haze. Anyone who has a restrictive-type eating disorder knows the haze. It's that fog that comes over you when you starve yourself. That floating woozy not-quite-there feeling. It does different things for different people. For my sponsor, it was about consistency. It didn't feel good, but at least he knew what it felt like, and he could control it… he didn't have to feel anything else.
For me, it was penance. I remember skipping breakfast, not bothering with or "forgetting" to eat lunch, and this on top of depression, I always felt like shit. I fell asleep in my classes. I never had energy, except the occasional manic burst that sometimes comes with starvation. I always tell people that the bulimia started my freshman year of college, because that was the first time I purged… but it started long before that. For years before that, maybe since the age of 12 or 13, I'd starved myself at school, only to lose control and binge when I got home.
But the starving, as much as it sucked, it sucked for a purpose. I was fasting. Every day I was fasting, repenting, punishing myself. Every day was Yom Kippur because every day I required absolution for some inexplicable evil that was within me. It had to be… I tried so so hard to be good. I cannot say this emphatically enough to adequately express just how desperately I wanted to be and tried to be good. I tried to be the most *good* person I knew… but I was always in trouble. My grades were never good enough. I kept saying the wrong thing without understanding why it was wrong, why it merited punishment. And I was always being interrogated, yelled at, and hit at home. I couldn't seem ever to be good enough.
And so I didn't eat. Because I was bad. Because I didn't deserve food. Because I was fat. Because I already took up too much room in the world. But when the food was there in front of me, I couldn't stop myself. I'd have a cracker with cheddar cheese after school, reasoning, I'd eaten nothing all day, surely it couldn't hurt to have a small snack. And before I realized it, the whole block of cheddar and a whole sleeve of crackers was gone. There was no such thing as one cookie. No such thing as one pretzel. And I'd get in trouble for eating all of the cheese and all of the crackers. I'd get yelled at, sometimes hit. If I didn't finish my dinner when I was little I'd routinely get hit, and by the time I was 12 I couldn't help taking seconds and thirds at dinner when the food was all there arrayed in front of me, everyone eating so much so fast, terrified that, once I started eating, that the ravenous hunger that was triggered by that first bite, would never be sated. And it never was, until long after dinner was over, and the food had a chance to settle. And then I was full to the point of discomfort, and deeply deeply ashamed.
My weight fluctuated throughout junior high and high school, but I was always fat. Looking back, I wasn't. Not at all. I was maybe somewhat over the standard idea of "ideal weight" for a 5'4" woman, but I was nowhere near obese. Still, I was never one of the skinny girls, and the skinny girls, it seemed, were the "normal-looking" girls… certainly all of the "pretty girls" were skinny at the very least. They actually looked cute in their gym shorts and tee shirts. I was mortified having to wear shorts in front of these classmates I barely knew and was convinced hated me anyway. All of my friends dressed in black and were older than I was and rejected societal standards of beauty as far as we were concerned, but still openly lusted after the skinny girls. We girls in the group… we weren't girls. We were people. Girls were for lusting. We were for friendship. We were real… girls were not real, but still worthy of that different type of attention that had nothing to do with intelligence or common interest.
But when I starved myself… well, I got a little bit of attention. Oh, I didn't advertise it. It would have been foolish to do so… after all, I was still fat. People who starve themselves aren't fat. But if anyone said something about breakfast or lunch, I wasn't above mentioning casually that I'd not bothered. Or say something about how long it had been since the last time I ate. Once my family began to fall apart in earnest and the family meal was no longer an inevitability in the evening, I was able to go longer and longer stretches without food. And sometimes, every once in a while, someone would pay attention to that, and say something that made me feel acknowledged. Someone was noticing that I was accomplishing something difficult, that I was enduring something painful, even if they didn't understand why… even if I didn't understand why. It didn't matter. I was strong. I was tough. But in that fragile, injured bird sort of way that made the goths sexy, or at least attention-worthy to one another.
Sunday night, I thought about how angry I've been over the past few weeks. I've recently been reminded just how much the gender shit at the bulimia are related… how I'd always felt that being girly or feminine was a weakness, a liability, made me less human, and how I wished I could have a body that would allow me to pass as a boy, or at least allow me to wear boys clothes without looking like a fat girl trying to look ugly. Girls who are boys are sexy. Fat girls who dress in men's clothes are just ugly fat girls who don't know how to dress. My grandmother asked me last week at Aunt Marion's funeral if I'd lost weight. I took a breath and neutrally told her "I don't know… I don't weigh myself," hoping against hope that she'd take the hint. Of course she didn't. "Well, you certainly look like it. You look positively skinny, which is always a good thing to hear." I took a breath and smiled. I could not, I would not say "Thank you." Not out of resentment mind you, but because I know that I cannot fall into the trap of rewarding myself for weight loss by accepting "compliments" on it. To do so is dangerous to me, and my abstinence and my health, physical and mental, have to always be my top priorities. And while it probably shouldn't, while I should be trying to let it slide, and not let it get to me, such comments release this flood of anger in me… anger not at the person making the comment, but at the entire societal paradigm that lies under and behind the comment… not only in terms of weight obsession, but all of the gender and sexuality stuff that is behind it. All of the confusion about whether or not I was supposed to be a girl, and if I was, was it a bad thing… did I want to be a girl, and if I didn't was it because of a genderqueer nature I possess, or is it internalized misogyny? About my value as a woman being tied to how I looked, and my value as a person being tied to how little I acted or looked like a girl, how weight loss for me, though typically a womanly obsession, actually denotes more of an ability to present as masculine…
And ultimately, anger at the fact that I could not SAY any of these things. I had to just smile and let it go, let it lie, let the lies continue to live.
I'm so much more AWAKE now. I can no longer tolerate missing meals. I can no longer escape into that haze. Now that I've seen what it means to have a brain that works, if I start to feel it shutting down, feel my body and brain losing steam from hunger, I freak a bit. I know I need to eat something. And that is a good thing. And the anger? Well… it's not perfect… but it comes of, and fuels, wakefulness. It may ultimately be that it is something I will need to get past. But for the meantime, I see it as evidence of recovery.
