Notes On An Eating Disorder.
1. It is not rational. It sits inside my body like a worm. It wraps around the edge of my vision and colors everything I touch. All day long I think about it and it thinks about me. I am 16. I am 17. I am 21. It is a worm that does not leave, but makes a home for itself high inside my chest.
2. I am not rational. I stand in front of the mirror and watch myself eating frozen green grapes until I feel sick. I am 18. I have known for some time that this has been inside me but lately it has manifested in behaviors I can name and I have both self-diagnosed and feared a diagnosis. I will never tell a doctor about this. I have read the diet blogs of young women who post litanies of their scary goal weights like lucky numbers and I have seen myself in them and I have seen a fear in me that I dread becoming.
After too much wine at a party one night my sophomore year, the boy I’m seeing is sick. He kneels over the toilet in his dorm, trying to throw up. “Punch me in the stomach,” he says. I look at him incredulously. I’m rubbing his back, trying to make him feel better.
“I don’t want to hit you,” I tell him. “Put two fingers in your mouth andtouch the back of your throat, and then you’ll puke.”
Groggy with drink, he looks over at me. “You would know how to do that, wouldn’t you,” he says sharply, and I reel away from him, as though I’m the one who’s been punched. We have argued about food many times before, but never has he said something like this.
It is not really about the way I look. Sometimes I am preoccupied with weight, with size and with numbers, but if I had my way I wouldn’t have a body. As it is I don’t know what to do with mine, so it becomes an instrument, an exercise in restraint. I find new words for hunger, for appetite, in order to deny it. I find new methods of control. If anything the worm has always been about control, the control I exert over my body when no control is left.
3. What do I want? I don’t even know. I want everything. I want nothing. I have been allowed nothing. I feel like the master of my own giddy fate, the lens directing the sun into a narrow point of light. I am also the paper, which is on fire. In my head I describe the feeling as a wave, the scouring emptiness, like a shell that has been washed entirely clean of its old mucous self and exists only as an outline of its contents. Eventually even that feeling recedes into a sea of other feelings. Eventually I feel nothing except for myself burning and burning away.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/larissapham/notes-on-an-eating-disorder
