I feel like my life would be easier if I didn’t inhabit a body. If I just floated from place to place like a gust of air. I’d be able to pour myself into the Dolce and Gabbana jeans I’ve had sitting by my bed for a year, waiting for the day where my ass spontaneously reduces and I’m svelte enough to zip them all the way up. I never really thought about my butt until other people started looking at it, I pretend I like that part of my body. Eventually I come to at least respect it, but I’m not happy about it.
I keep two sets of weights underneath my nightstand, resting on “The Queer Art of Failure” and a self help book called “Women Who Love Too Much”. I lift them while I’m in bed, I am always trying to maximize, become more efficient, do more, want less. A pin-up poster of Britney Spears, washboard abs in a blue leather outfit mocks me while I do this. I don’t think I have an eating disorder anymore, at least not the way I used to have one. When I was 16 and 17 and 18 I’d take Ritalin and starve myself all day on pickles and Diet Coke and destroy my mother’s bare kitchen at midnight, eating dark chocolate and protein bars and seeded crackers and blocks of cheese, good, whole foods. I’d throw them up under cover of running water. That was so fucking embarrassing but eating disorders are by nature, a humiliation ritual. I’m reminding myself of what I never want to be again.
I want to be a strong, self possessed woman. I don’t want to be possessed by a desire to be less, be smaller. I tell everyone I want to look like Madonna. Sometimes, in bed at night I search pictures of her with gristly, muscled arms that look like an anatomical model in a museum of science. Oftentimes I ask myself what she would do, she’d probably hate me. I know she’s secretly as crazy as I am. I take pictures of myself and scrutinize them. I ask the doctor not to tell me how much I weigh. I don’t want to know how many calories are on the menu. I want to be perfect by accident, not some obsessive freak. I know that’s impossible
I tell myself often how happy I am to feel normal about my body now, to not throw up food and count calories and drink a bathtub’s worth of Diet Coke a week. I don’t think I have an addictive personality, I could never make myself get addicted to nicotine or amphetamines the right way. The thing that I’m really addicted to is people telling me, you are beautiful, you are good, I wish I had your discipline. Everything I’ve tried was just a means to end up being told that. No matter how much I tell myself, “this is just for me”, I’m still doing a lot for the voyeur. The workout instructor tells us to work on our “superficial abs” and I think about how we’re here to work on looking hot on the beach, rather than being able to lift ourselves up.
Afterwards, I punch myself in the stomach to feel the wall of muscle I’ve built up. I tense up when I’m being touched by someone else, it’s reflexive. I give up on complex feelings, I stop dating, I stop writing, I shut myself off so I don’t have to look inside and see what’s going on. I don’t even listen to sad music anymore, why should I force myself to do something like that. The only thing I let hurt is my body, I fall asleep watching TV so my brain can’t wander as I drift away. I have nightmares anyways. My mother says I have too much anger inside and it’s not healthy. I go to a doctor who puts headphones on my body to unblock the tensions. I cry a lot. I’m not writing this because I want you to feel bad for me. I want to be stronger, unswayed by others. I find myself folding inward with the wind. I work on the deeper muscle, forget the superficial abs. I sit in my bedroom and I write and delete it and I think about who I am and who I want to be to myself and others. It feels more difficult than anything else and it exhausts me. Stillness is the most difficult, to unravel myself from the fear inside of me. I worry I wasn’t funny enough writing this, that people won’t like me when I’m just being honest. I’m done apologizing.
<33 not to feed the little attention addict in u but this is so well written
this is too good whew!!