Another blogger (Ana's Girl, ""Accepting Ana") recently wrote a post about why she feels she has an eating disorder. It was written largely in response to a passage from Marya Horbacher's Wasted.
Jo (her first name) got a sense of control from rejecting food. When she was younger, her parents made all of her decisions and she felt she had no power. What she did or did not put into her mouth was something she did have power over. Now that she lives semi-autonomously with her fiance and his family, the thoughts and behaviors that she began several years ago have become habitual and provide a drug-like high. (Jo, please, feel free to respond in the comments if you feel I've gotten this wrong. I do not want to mis-quote you).
That's great. I totally understand. It is soul-satisfying to go to bed hungry, knowing I've stayed with my plan for the day. It makes my day to be at my hateful, awful job that I am absolutely stuck at until I finish college, politely turning down nasty cupcakes someone brought in while my boss licks crisco-rich frosting off the top of one. I can't be the person I always thought I would be, I am stuck in this stultifying, awful life, but at least I'm not eating the damned crappy cupcakes.
What Jo did not touch on, but Marya did, is the loss of control the disease brings. Really, being out of control, or unable to control one's self, is the central theme of Marya's book. I think about food all the time. What am I eating? What did I eat last? What will I eat next? I buy food. It takes me at least two hours and up to three grocery stores. My husband doesn't understand what is going on and he laughs when he watches me pick up something in the frozen section, put it back, pick it up again, examine the label, find something else, and put the original back again. Sometimes I am almost literally spinning in circles. If I am not thinking about consuming food, I am thinking about getting rid of it. I need to exercise, I need to purge. After two hours at the gym, I certainly haven't exercised enough, but I have to stop so I can go to work. I need to hide the wrappers from the things I binged on so that my husband doesn't worry, doesn't know what a disgusting pig I am.
I am not criticizing Jo's post. What I got from it was that she had a bit of an epiphany brought on by reading her feelings put into words by someone else. What I wanted to do was illustrate the part that gets a little lost in these blogs sometimes, that despite all of the "staying strong", this disease has the upper hand. I want there to be more to me than obsessing about food. I want to have more to offer than an encyclopedic knowledge of caloric contents. Yes, this started for me as a response to my chaotic relationships with my parents, but it has become something overwhelming.
Most of the time I feel like I am swimming just underneath the surface of a frozen lake. I pop my head out through a hole to breath for a month or two, and then I am trapped back under the ice. What happens if I run out of air?
You perfectly understood what i was saying... you also understand the part that i was too proud (or perhaps afraid because i know it's too true) to write about.
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