Normal eating is a strange creature. It does not stay the same from one day to the next. It fluctuates, moves, changes with the environment, perking its ears to the sounds of breezes through trees, mind examining and calculating the possible dangers, the pitfalls, the way to move fluidly through the forest without stumbling and breaking a bone. Its keenest instinct is for survival. It knows that the method to do this is... well, not any one method at all. General guidelines, which can change when the guidelines prove useless or dangerous.

Normal eating, though, is not self-starvation. It is not the wild creature laying down, wrapping its tail around its body, occasionally getting up to lap from a pool of water and otherwise resting, languid, slowly but surely making its way to blending with the earth, no more indistinguishable than the patch of dirt upon which it rests.

Normal eating is also not bulimia. It is not the lion cub, tearing at a bloody carcass savagely, devouring as much of the raw fuel as it can fit inside its belly, and then running, growling, paws pounding hard over rough stones and blistering, scorching savanna for hours and days, frantic and stuffed and never fulfilled all at once.

Normal eating is the hummingbird, its beak poised inside a brightly-colored blossom, intaking the sweet essences contained in the flower's heart. It is a tree, its roots planted firmly in the ground, its branches outstretched, the sunlight warm and caressing on its full green leaves. It is, too, the stray dog begging for every scrap of food a human hand is willing to toss down to it; it is the seagull tearing apart garbage, scavenging for all the crumbs it can find in a greasy paper bag, a plastic toxic concoction of half-eaten oils and starches. But it is also the hawk soaring over water, catching a fish in its talons, soaring even with the heavy weight dragging it down -- finding the shore, finding life -- triumphing in the end as it rejoices in its hard-earned prize.


I want to be the hawk.

I am not going to purge this binge I engaged in at the movies tonight. I am also not going to eat yet again more, so I can purge my stomach completely empty afterwards and feel somehow better about myself.

Tonight I am going to sit with it. I am going to live with the consequences of my actions. I am not going to take the cop-out way of sticking two fingers down my throat, leaning over a toilet bowl, feeling that familiar and easy release. I am not going to fucking do it.

I'm tired of living my life worried about food. My aim is for three fairly balanced, fairly healthy meals a day, plus snacks whenever I need them. An evening one will probably be necessary. Essentially, I am trying to put myself back on the Homewood meal plan again, only minus some of the food bulk and probably some of the calories. The Homewood meal plan was 2000 cals easy, though, so I don't feel guilty about cutting out a few hundred. I can easily maintain my weight on something like 1800, and hopefully feel satiated as well.

I know that this whole normal eating thing is going to take quite a bit of time. There are days when I'll possibly not eat certain meals, or put off certain meals; there are certainly going to be days when I overeat, by accident or just because I can or in spite of the fact that I know I'll probably feel like shit afterwards. Thing is, it is very hard for me to actually, TRULY learn if, every time I make an overeating mistake, I simply purge it out and forget about it. That's not how normal human beings learn to eat less. Rather, they eat too much, get sick and full and feel gross, and the next time they want to eat the same things in the same quantities they remember how it felt before, then choose to do it or not, as the case may be.

I need... to do something about all this ED shit. Because I'm sick of relying on it as that cop-out thing I do, and I'm sick of obsessing about food, and I'm sick of that same old bullshit story that I HAVE to be thin to acceptable, that only thin people ARE acceptable, and that being thin is not only preferable to being overweight, but preferable to being a normal weight as well. It's all fucking SHIT, and I'm SICK of it!! It is NOT normal to diet yourself beyond your set point, any more than it is normal to binge or compulsively overeat yourself beyond it. It is not normal to be a weight that is abnormal on your frame. The weight on your frame doesn't even mean anything about the real fucking you... rather, it is a visible, pointed statement about your food habits up until this very moment in your life. I don't know who decided that your previous eating habits were complete indicators about your various personality traits, but it's a load of crap, and I can't believe people buy into this shit so often. Including me. Maybe especially me.

I want to be healthier. I want to have more emotions. I want to live, instead of just pretending -- going through the motions with a happy fucking smile even when I'm not happy. So maybe there are days when I won't be happy! So what??? People aren't supposed to be happy and placid all the time! That's not even the way human nature works!

I am so sick of society's bullshit. So fucking sick of it. And I am, one way or another, going to remove myself from all of this before it is too late, and it takes away significant chunks of my soul as well as my body and mind.

I WILL NOT. FUCKING. HAVE IT.

Two words patter over and over in my head like the soft footsteps of a child:

Weight-loss-weight-loss-weight-loss-weight-loss

It is soft and breathy and full of seductive undertones. It pulls me under, a hypnotist, eyes black as starless night, and I am powerless to defend myself against it.

++++++++++

She said, "I don't know if I've ever been good enough
I'm a little bit rusty
And I think my head is cavin' in"

RIP, Polly Williams.

Polly Williams, one of the main characters in the documentary "Thin" by Lauren Greenfield, has passed away.

Her obituary can be found here.


This makes me so, so sad. :'(

Self-harm triggers

Tore my arm up a bit with a fresh razorblade tonight. Blood was running down my arm in several places, dripping pleasantly on the hardwood floor. More droplets than I think I've ever dripped there before. I did a whole bunch of cuts, very quick slices with some pressure, enough to make the seams come open and really bleed. That's what I wanted -- needed. Wanted to see proof that I am, for now, truly harming myself enough.

I pulled back on the bulimia enough to try and have a semi-clear head for my psych test; but I haven't got a really important test for a good while, so I don't fucking care right now. I b/ped once earlier tonight, and then -- funny enough -- went to a screening of a film for eating disorders awareness week, with a discussion panel of eating disorder experts afterwards. I was hungry when I was there, and sort of hungry when I got home, but I am not putting even MORE unnecessary food into this stupid body.

Odd, isn't it, that all the ED awareness week stuff has just served to motivate me even further to self-destruct? Maybe because they only take you seriously if you're actually doing serious, deliberate, cruel damage to yourself. Maybe because I still really, truly believe I deserve every bit of it. I take a sadistic pleasure in it (and I do mean sadistic, not masochistic). Maybe I can bring myself to semi enjoy the pain, but I much more enjoy being the inflictor of it. Only upon myself, of course; but that lessens none of the pleasure.

I am totally, hideously fucked up. I know. You really don't have to tell me.

Binged. Purged. Took six diuretics -- four Pamabrom and two Aldactone. Feel fat as hell. It sounds stupid, but I take diuretics basically because they make me feel thinner... that, and I know they're probably at least somewhat fucking up my electrolytes and throwing my body's natural balance out of whack, which is also something I want, for whatever reason. I hold my breath when I take them, because they taste really really bad, and I drink them with the smallest amount of liquid I can get away with, because otherwise I feel like the liquid will take up all the space that the diuretics just drained, and the thought of it makes me crazy.

Lately all I want is pills pills pills. These herbal diuretics I see everywhere (who knows if they actually work or not, but I'd try them anyway). Maybe some more laxatives (I only have three left, which is no good for anything). More water pills. Diet pills, maybe. I haven't had the courage to buy diet pills or laxatives, but I'm getting there, I think. Eventually I'm sure I'll want them so badly that I'll say "fuck it" and just BUY them. Have considered things like green tea pills, herbal supplements of various sorts, mixes of this and that extract which supposedly stimulate the metabolism or suppress the appetite or generally make you lose weight. I don't know why I want weight loss pills, really, because I'm not all that willing to modify my diet such that I actually would lose weight. I guess maybe I just want assurances that I'm not going to gain a zillion pounds. And, of course, there's also my constant conviction that I'm more or less a beached Beluga whale -- white and grotesquely rotund and unfit to be gazed upon by the human race.


And the beat goes on

What do you do when you think you're standing at the precipice of a long, narrow valley named "breakdown"?

I am tired of caring. I am tired of things being vital. So tired, I think, that my mind shut them all out; and now they are no longer vital. Now I don't have to worry about things. I don't have to care if I study properly for this test, or complete that assignment, because they don't matter to me. I don't have to care if I do really well at work on any given day, because I don't care whether people get mad at me or even if I get fired. I just don't fucking care about any of it.

As long as I can self-destruct, I think, I will always survive. Because nothing else matters, so I don't have to be ridiculously anxious about it, or completely broken up if it doesn't work out... which means I can focus on what my mind really wants to focus on in the first place, which is destroying myself. I don't really understand why my brain desires self-destruction so much, but it does -- and resisting the urges, and dealing with the feelings that brings up, on top of all the other stressors and depressors and irritations and anger-provoking things in my life, is just too fucking much. So I self-destruct, and I coast through life without having to deal. Without having to feel all these things which cause my moods to fluctuate so wildly and unpredictably, and which consequently cause me to feel insane.

Plus... I am alone, and not cared about by anyone. And a girl who isn't loved doesn't deserve to be nice to herself, or gentle or compassionate towards herself. No; a girl who is not loved, whom nobody even wants to be intimate with, deserves nothing less than self-destruction -- deserves nothing less than pain and dizziness and mental disorientation and dissociation. Because when a girl is not loved, doing harmful things to herself is the only way she can get by. Anything less just hurts too fucking much to handle. Self-destruction really is less painful than the things that lie beneath.