first chill, then stupor, then rage black-outs.

The structure of an eating disorder, and then recovery, usually goes something like this:

...and the soul is just a word for something about the body.

-------Get thin. Decide you like it, for a variety of personal reasons. Be tired all the time. Grow fur (lanugo, if we're going to be medical about it). Craft elaborate little rituals, devotionals really, every time you eat your noodles (which takes exactly two hours, thankyouverymuch). Realize that once you start on this fucked up carnival ride, you'll have to stay on it. Forever. Or risk injury when you fling yourself off. Get pissed because nothing is going to tell you what to do, forever, oh no. You want off. Now.------------


This is the Hour of Lead -
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow -
First–Chill–then Stupor–then the letting go


------relapse, get better, relapse again, relapse harder, get a little bit better, get a lot better, relapse again, realize the pattern and start to heal for good, relapse, heal-----heal, heal-------heal.

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

------keep getting better, help others get better, ???-----------

This is the hardest part, the ???. Because I spent so much time as an adolescent shaping my brain and knowledge and skill set to reflect my obsession with food and my body (wrongly believing that I had a body, when in fact I am a body), but once I decided for good that obsession was no longer serving me....what then? What now? There is a vast expanse of my mind that could know how to paint, or play the guitar, or make chainsaw art, or solve proofs, or bind books. But instead, it is filled with dead knowledge about the energy content of every shitty cereal bar on the market. Instead of knowing how to tie sailing knots, I know that laxatives are stupid because you only lose water weight, which isn't REAL weight anyway. At night, after everyone has gone to bed, instead of reading my laundry list of philosophy texts, instead of dreaming up spells, I still watch hours of cooking shows until I pass out, even though I'm not starving anymore (watching cooking shows pathologically is a common practice among anorexics, an attempt to feed the body through the eyes).

I know all of the reasons why I became anorexic. It took years of researching the feminist-sociological-familial-psychological reasons behind eating disorders to come up with a satisfactory explanation for myself, an answer to the breast-beating snarl of "WHY?" But now that I know the why, and the how...what is there to take up my time? How do I fill that hole, that I once filled with an obsession (with the negation of food)? What now? What now? What now?

What now?

I let go (completely), I dove through the wreck (and figured out why), but now what? This is without a doubt, the most difficult part of recovery so far. The most existentially barren, difficult, maddening riddle of a part. I don't have any answers yet but hell if I'm not going to find some.

ways of healing: a chronological photo essay

get a spirit haus
get angry
get metal
get witchy
get drunk
get a role model
get tender 

what a terrible boy I would be

At some age I can't remember, my post-shower ritual included scrunching gel into my long, wavy hair and throwing it up in an old beach towel. Without visible head hair, one of the only signifiers of girliness on my relatively unadorned pre-teen bod, I would stare at my face in the huge rectangular mirror and think,

"What a terrible boy I would be! Such a heart-shaped, girly face."

 Instead of thinking "what a nice-looking girl I am!" I thought "What a terrible boy I would be."

This is not-insignificant. At whatever age that was,  I was already beginning to recognize that

a) being a teen girl is really fucking difficult and affords you very little respect (social capital, yes, because VIRGIN TEEN GIRLS ARE HOT WET HOLES JUST WAITING TO BE FUCKED!-- respect, no.)
b) and that maybe being a teen boy is hard but ultimately lends you more power in whatever sad parade it is we have which constitutes a human community, so perhaps I would like that better?
c) I was not ready for either and would maybe like to be a koala bear instead, or a book or a honeybee

What a terrible boy I would be!
What a terrible boy I would be!  
What a terrible boy I would be.

The only realistic option for me would be to make do with my body (the hand grenade). Before I was naive enough to think I could (or wanted to) bend "it" to my will, I tried not to think about "it" ("it" being my body, which I incorrectly understood to be a separate thing from me, m-e).

What a terrible boy I would be!
What a terrible boy I would be!  
What a terrible boy I would be! 

 

predatory lending praxis

It takes a while to not want all of the aesthetics that are lent to you by x,y,z boring old-hat kultural institutions. 

I was lent this one at age 12.



I thought I wanted to have mermaid hair until I was 23 (I didn't, all I wanted was a babybulldyke pillowprincess bratty blonde crop that is impossible to run your fingers through-- all the better of a base for long candy-colored Cher wigs)

I thought I wanted an arsenal of facepaint for DL drag-queening.

I thought I wanted to have dark, mysterious aesthetic vibes (I didn't, I wanted to be a sunny, short-haired, short-tempered Manic Pixie Dykemare Girl)

I thought I wanted sweat-free, hair-free, musk-free armpits (I didn't, I just wanted everyone to leave me alone)

You think you want all of these things, until one day you find yourself sitting in a seminar called "Perversion" on the 7th floor of a building in Manhattan, reading a short story about a girl who kills rabbits with her father and then wears the skins around.

Then you read some Irigaray.

Then you read some Freud.

Then you read more Freud.

Then you make friends with artists who don't even call themselves that, they just are because if they didn't make things they wouldn't know what to do and would probably die (alive to their banks but dead to the world)

Then you make friends with a fat Canadian genius-babe who is quite obviously a high priestess/radiant ball of healing blue light/angel from another plane of existence, and she teaches you that being fierce and being tender are not mutually exclusive

Then a thought slowly starts to slug into your head:

I don't want any of the aesthetic ideas that have been lent to me. But where from here?

Now the fun part begins!