I feel like I am living in a poisoned kaleidoscope. I am having a Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Body Image Day (gold star for anyone to identify that literary allusion). How can I feel so huge when over the past two weeks I have actually lost about 1/3 of the weight I’ve gained since I started seen H. ten months ago? Why is my mind such a perpetual see-saw? Everything is scrambled, and it just plain wears me out.
I hate the way my flesh moves, I hate the way fabric clings to my skin. I can’t stand the feeling of being in this form. Sometimes, though, when I catch glimpses of myself in the mirror I can see the bones, the hollows, the veins, etc, and I know it’s not attractive, healthy, or desireable. Then the next time I pass a mirror all I can see is a ridiculously round belly and chipmunk cheeks. What is reality, anyway, and how can I find it?
I can tell myself that normal grown women do not wear the same jeans they wore in the 7th grade, but when I am too stressed/busy to eat I still get twisted comfort from hypoglycemia highs.
My stomach twists in dread at all the horror stories about stress fractures and joint degeneration, but I don’t even consider cutting back on workouts to be an option.
I just finished the book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters by Courtenay Martin, which is possibly the best, most inspiring, most insightful and thought-provoking ED book I’ve ever read (please, please do yourself a favor and read it. Read it, highlight in it, write down passages on post-its and stick them to your mirror, I can’t overemphasize how great it is). After absorbing Martin’s 350 pages of practical perspective and empowering insights, I want more than anything to step out of this box forever. Then again I read every word of it while pedaling away on the exercise bike.
I like having coffee with my breakfast instead of having coffee for breakfast, but I am still disturbed and frustrated with the fact that it kick starts my system and makes me even more ravenous later in the morning than I would have been if I’d just abstained.
I am hungry for knowledge, almost overwhelmingly so, resulting in this semester's crazed schedule. I want to know. I want to discuss, I want to hear and share and make ideas, I want to build connections and create patterns. I crave the world and all of its intricate, fascinating parts. I am almost depressed by the sheer volume of things that are out there to learn in the limited amount of time that we exist in this world. I am in awe of the world, but I keep myself walled off from it, a spectator rather than a participant. I feel like my appetite for information and experience can never be satisfied, and I vent the frustration from that disappointment through tyrannical control of more concrete appetites.
I am scrambled, spinning, struggling for a grip. Why is it so hard to just be human?
4 comments:
I hear you on the desire for knowledge for all there is in this world, but yet keeping yourself as a full participant. It's a shame that we get to this point when there is so much potential in each of us. I wish we could all answer the question just to let ourselves be human and feel satisfied with that.
I'm glad you got a chance to read Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters. I think I've sent you the one quote that sticks out for ME the most in the book, but there are a lot of good passages. And by the end of the book, there was a sense of wanting to really recover.
Alexand only had no good very bad days. I think he was okay, body-wise, though that kid had some hair.
Last week I woke my roommate up with excessive opening and closing of my dresser drawers. I'd just done laundry, and still I couldn't find anything that didn't make hyper-aware of every new bulge and wiggle. It IS a poisoned kaleidescope - it's the very ugly nature of the beast we've been trying to keep as a pet (whew mixed metaphor).
Distracting myself from these feelings - a technique from my OCD treatment - helps somewhat, but it's hard to find a powerful enough distraction. If you need to, let yourself feel this way - but know that it's temporary, that with more help and work it will get better. I think I can do it, Cammy, and I think you can too.
I don't know what reality is. Funny, I just posted a body-dysmorphia type sentiment myself. I don't understand.
I can relate.
Your words struck so close to home for me. And my mirrors are somehow stagnant and fluid / poisoned as well - in the moment in addition to my ankle injury -> less movement -> feeling lazy and huge. I could prosper of this time without sport and absorb more informations (which i love as well), but am too nervous and unconcentrated..
And i will try and find this book you are writing about, but i don´t think it is possible in my country. But i am seeker! Hence soul searching.. thank you again for your introspections, they are such contemplation inductive...
m.
Post a Comment