Nobody knew I was sick.
Trigger warning: eating disorder recovery issues ahoy. Also, see disclaimer below.
I looked fine. At five-one and a hundred and forty pounds, I was not thin, but nor was I a size that aroused disgust or concern for my health. In fact, the extra squeezy bits were really effective camouflage for what was wrong, which is that I exercised for hours and hours every day even though I hated every second of it, and thought eating over a thousand calories in one day was a disaster.
Nobody caught it. Nobody knew. I was never formally diagnosed with anything. Officially, I never had an eating disorder.
People with eating disorders are super-skinny, right? Because they never eat, right? Or they're hugely fat, because their problem is that they can't stop eating. So just look for the chick who'd disappear into a dish towel, and the three-seater with the bucket of KFC, and you'll be able to tell who has an eating disorder, right? (Also, dudes don't get eating disorders.)
Yeah, no. That isn't how it works.
The fact that it isn't like that is a kind of proof that the less food = weight loss / more food = weight gain equation is seriously flawed. There are fat anorexics. Far more of them than anyone has ever bothered to count. I could probably have starved or exercised myself to death without ever getting under a hundred pounds . . . which is about where most folks seem to think a five-foot chick should be. My body is not meant to weigh that little.
There's this idea that if someone is truly sick, they will look sick, and this applies to eating disorders in a particularly awful way. It's not considered an illness until you get too thin. Until then, it's considered the least fatties can do.
The real sickness you can't see. It's the self-hate, the tightly-wound fear, and the anxiety and urgency to control something, anything, that propel eating disorders. And that can manifest at any size. Being fat doesn't make starving yourself okay, because it doesn't make hating yourself okay.
Before all of that, when I was what pretty much everyone would agree is "fat" (which I am again), I had people express concern for my health. Not because I looked sickly, or because I seemed to eat too much, or because I huffed and puffed and couldn't climb a single flight of stairs. Those things weren't true. Not even because I was mentally ill and was showing signs of it as early as twelve or thirteen years old, and was in obvious trouble by the time I was in my early twenties. Because I was fat. Only that. Only because of the size of my body. No other reason.
When I was at my thinnest, nobody expressed concern for my health based on my body size. I was also very, very sick.
Which tells you that assuming someone's unhealthy because they're fat is bullshit, and that assuming someone's healthy because they're thin is bullshit too, so clearly the idea of equating body size with health is pretty stupid.
To get back around to my point, nobody could see how much pain I was in. How anxious. How afraid.
What drove it, ultimately? Fear of being invisible, useless, undesirable. A desire to prove that everything I'd been told as a kid about how once you're fat, you're fat forever was wrong (which it was, not on its own merit, but because terrorizing a child with that is wrong).
But the whip I used to drive myself along, my justification for the way I was treating my body, was that fat was deadly, and every day that I didn't starve myself or exercise until I wanted to cry from boredom and hate and hunger, I was killing myself a little more. And every day I was "good," I was just a little bit immortal. Health. Because I believed the lies.
When I finally did the research and found out how wrong I was, when I finally was able to see what I'd become, it was agony. I wasn't just trying to recover from a grueling physical ordeal, I was trying to cope with the sudden awareness that I had been lied to by pretty much the whole world, and almost everyone who loved me, since I was a child. And I had to deal with the fact that I had become something I never thought myself capable of being.
Eating disorders? I never thought it could happen to me. I used to laugh at anorexic folks. That was a problem for rich white girls who had nothing else going for them and nothing better to do with their time. Seriously, how stupid do you have to be not to eat? Not very, apparently. Because that's not how it works. Nothing is that simple.
If someone had known, they might have been able to talk to me about it when it was early enough for me to shake it off or get help. Or it might not have done any good, because this sort of thing is intractable like that. Nobody is as good at not listening, at justifying, as someone in the depths of that hell. I think the only person I would have listened to is someone who had been through what I had been through, and at the time, I didn't know anyone.
So I want to say something to everybody who ever reads this. Even if you think you don't need to hear it. Even if you aren't ready to hear it. Even if you are never ready to hear it. Even if you agree but aren't ready to act on it yet. Even if you don't believe me. Even if you already know.
What value you have derives from you. Not from the shape or size of your body.
Your value as a human being does not increase the closer to the cultural ideal you are, or decrease the further from it you get. It is important that you know this, even though it's something you've probably been told countless times. It is always worth saying again.
Here's something that you might not have been told. If you are a sick person, sick like I was, the hate and pain and doubt you feel won't go away once you're thin. All of that anger and loathing and stubbornness you use to drive yourself to do just a little more, to eat just a little less, to wait just a little longer, to hold out, to overcome, to rise above and transcend something so basic and pervasive as hunger and tiredness and pain, it will not magically go away once you step on the scale for the thousand thousandth time and see that you are finally at your goal weight. It will remain there, grinding away inside you. There may come a time when you do not think you feel it, or a time when it is lying quiet, but it is still there.
You will never be able to sit back and say "I'm done, this is good enough." Because you can't. That is a part of what drives you to do what you do, it is why you are able to do extraordinary but awful things like starve yourself. Believe me. I know. If you get thin enough to not actively hate yourself, that truce is conditional. That hate is still there. If you get fat again, you'll hate yourself again.
Is love that is conditional really love? Would you accept that from another person? I'll love you unless you cut your hair. I'll love you until you start getting saggy boobs. I'll love you until you don't look twenty anymore.
I'll love you until you break a hundred and fifty pounds.
Is that love? Or is that just another lash to flog yourself with, another threat?
When I was at my worst, I used to say, I used to write in my bedside journal, "I will die before I let myself get that fat again."
I meant it at the time. I wanted it to be true. I would have preferred to die. I thought I would deserve it for allowing myself to be that weak, to get that disgusting again.
Over four years later, I am still in the process of coming out of that. It's not over yet. A part of me still crouches in the corner, hateful, resentful, stubbornly insisting that at least being dead would mean that the fat was dead, too. That I wouldn't have to look like this person who isn't me anymore. That I wouldn't have to feel a body that isn't mine all around me. And even if that part of me eventually withers up and goes away, I will always know that it was there, that I wished myself dead for something over which I have limited control at best. It's an awful thing, to know that it is possible to hate yourself that deeply. The only remedy for the awfulness is to struggle every day to forgive. And maybe, if I forgive enough, I will learn to love.
It's not easy. It is hard. Some days -- and there have been more of them as time passes -- it's only hard like ignoring something mean someone said about you back in third grade is hard. It's not that bad. But sometimes it is harder than walking twenty miles in Oklahoma August. Sometimes it is harder than saying "no" to food when at no time during the last week have you eaten more than half of what is required to keep a human being running. Sometimes, it isn't possible. Sometimes I fail, and I hate.
I am sitting here right now hating the way I look and feel, embarrassed simply because I exist, and I know that I could turn off that hate tomorrow, like flicking off a light, if I just went back to starving myself and walking twelve miles a day. It would buy me respite from the pain for as long as I was making progress. Sure, once I stalled out it would start hurting again, and sure, I'd have another breakdown once I realized -- again -- that in order to maintain even a modest weight loss, I have to exercise so much and eat so little that it actually endangers my health. But for that little time, I would not feel this sort of pain.
There are times when it seems worth it, just because the hate and the loathing and the pain are still there, and still rear up once in a while to trip me. I just have to stand firm and remind myself that this hate that comes over me, this loathing, wouldn't stop if I were a size ten, because it's not hate based on my actual size, my actual body, but based on how I feel about myself, the things I feel that I should be and am not, and cannot be.
You can't improve yourself by hating yourself. It just can't be done. I've got to remind myself of that as often as necessary, probably until the end of my life. And if I am reminding myself of it tonight, I might as well remind you, too.
Disclaimer: I'm not dissing exercise, which is wonderful if you can stomach it, nor am I saying that everyone who diets is ill. I am not up for a debate about the merits of weight-loss dieting, nor am I up for a debate about whether or not fat is inherently unhealthy, nor am I particularly interested in arguing with anyone over what they, personally, should or should not be doing, or why it's okay or not okay. The constant "But don't you realize. . . ." and "It's fine for other people, but. . . ." and "I'm not saying that. . . ." is part of what makes recovering from this shit so goddamn hard. "Well, you have to admit that there's a level of fat that is just not okay!" is actually more destructive than the stuff asshole trolls say. (That link will blow your Sanity Watcher's points, so don't click if you're not feeling up to reading some really nasty shit in addition to lolarious stupidity.) So, not having those debates here.
X-posted from Dreamwidth. Comment count:
I looked fine. At five-one and a hundred and forty pounds, I was not thin, but nor was I a size that aroused disgust or concern for my health. In fact, the extra squeezy bits were really effective camouflage for what was wrong, which is that I exercised for hours and hours every day even though I hated every second of it, and thought eating over a thousand calories in one day was a disaster.
Nobody caught it. Nobody knew. I was never formally diagnosed with anything. Officially, I never had an eating disorder.
People with eating disorders are super-skinny, right? Because they never eat, right? Or they're hugely fat, because their problem is that they can't stop eating. So just look for the chick who'd disappear into a dish towel, and the three-seater with the bucket of KFC, and you'll be able to tell who has an eating disorder, right? (Also, dudes don't get eating disorders.)
Yeah, no. That isn't how it works.
The fact that it isn't like that is a kind of proof that the less food = weight loss / more food = weight gain equation is seriously flawed. There are fat anorexics. Far more of them than anyone has ever bothered to count. I could probably have starved or exercised myself to death without ever getting under a hundred pounds . . . which is about where most folks seem to think a five-foot chick should be. My body is not meant to weigh that little.
There's this idea that if someone is truly sick, they will look sick, and this applies to eating disorders in a particularly awful way. It's not considered an illness until you get too thin. Until then, it's considered the least fatties can do.
The real sickness you can't see. It's the self-hate, the tightly-wound fear, and the anxiety and urgency to control something, anything, that propel eating disorders. And that can manifest at any size. Being fat doesn't make starving yourself okay, because it doesn't make hating yourself okay.
Before all of that, when I was what pretty much everyone would agree is "fat" (which I am again), I had people express concern for my health. Not because I looked sickly, or because I seemed to eat too much, or because I huffed and puffed and couldn't climb a single flight of stairs. Those things weren't true. Not even because I was mentally ill and was showing signs of it as early as twelve or thirteen years old, and was in obvious trouble by the time I was in my early twenties. Because I was fat. Only that. Only because of the size of my body. No other reason.
When I was at my thinnest, nobody expressed concern for my health based on my body size. I was also very, very sick.
Which tells you that assuming someone's unhealthy because they're fat is bullshit, and that assuming someone's healthy because they're thin is bullshit too, so clearly the idea of equating body size with health is pretty stupid.
To get back around to my point, nobody could see how much pain I was in. How anxious. How afraid.
What drove it, ultimately? Fear of being invisible, useless, undesirable. A desire to prove that everything I'd been told as a kid about how once you're fat, you're fat forever was wrong (which it was, not on its own merit, but because terrorizing a child with that is wrong).
But the whip I used to drive myself along, my justification for the way I was treating my body, was that fat was deadly, and every day that I didn't starve myself or exercise until I wanted to cry from boredom and hate and hunger, I was killing myself a little more. And every day I was "good," I was just a little bit immortal. Health. Because I believed the lies.
When I finally did the research and found out how wrong I was, when I finally was able to see what I'd become, it was agony. I wasn't just trying to recover from a grueling physical ordeal, I was trying to cope with the sudden awareness that I had been lied to by pretty much the whole world, and almost everyone who loved me, since I was a child. And I had to deal with the fact that I had become something I never thought myself capable of being.
Eating disorders? I never thought it could happen to me. I used to laugh at anorexic folks. That was a problem for rich white girls who had nothing else going for them and nothing better to do with their time. Seriously, how stupid do you have to be not to eat? Not very, apparently. Because that's not how it works. Nothing is that simple.
If someone had known, they might have been able to talk to me about it when it was early enough for me to shake it off or get help. Or it might not have done any good, because this sort of thing is intractable like that. Nobody is as good at not listening, at justifying, as someone in the depths of that hell. I think the only person I would have listened to is someone who had been through what I had been through, and at the time, I didn't know anyone.
So I want to say something to everybody who ever reads this. Even if you think you don't need to hear it. Even if you aren't ready to hear it. Even if you are never ready to hear it. Even if you agree but aren't ready to act on it yet. Even if you don't believe me. Even if you already know.
What value you have derives from you. Not from the shape or size of your body.
Your value as a human being does not increase the closer to the cultural ideal you are, or decrease the further from it you get. It is important that you know this, even though it's something you've probably been told countless times. It is always worth saying again.
Here's something that you might not have been told. If you are a sick person, sick like I was, the hate and pain and doubt you feel won't go away once you're thin. All of that anger and loathing and stubbornness you use to drive yourself to do just a little more, to eat just a little less, to wait just a little longer, to hold out, to overcome, to rise above and transcend something so basic and pervasive as hunger and tiredness and pain, it will not magically go away once you step on the scale for the thousand thousandth time and see that you are finally at your goal weight. It will remain there, grinding away inside you. There may come a time when you do not think you feel it, or a time when it is lying quiet, but it is still there.
You will never be able to sit back and say "I'm done, this is good enough." Because you can't. That is a part of what drives you to do what you do, it is why you are able to do extraordinary but awful things like starve yourself. Believe me. I know. If you get thin enough to not actively hate yourself, that truce is conditional. That hate is still there. If you get fat again, you'll hate yourself again.
Is love that is conditional really love? Would you accept that from another person? I'll love you unless you cut your hair. I'll love you until you start getting saggy boobs. I'll love you until you don't look twenty anymore.
I'll love you until you break a hundred and fifty pounds.
Is that love? Or is that just another lash to flog yourself with, another threat?
When I was at my worst, I used to say, I used to write in my bedside journal, "I will die before I let myself get that fat again."
I meant it at the time. I wanted it to be true. I would have preferred to die. I thought I would deserve it for allowing myself to be that weak, to get that disgusting again.
Over four years later, I am still in the process of coming out of that. It's not over yet. A part of me still crouches in the corner, hateful, resentful, stubbornly insisting that at least being dead would mean that the fat was dead, too. That I wouldn't have to look like this person who isn't me anymore. That I wouldn't have to feel a body that isn't mine all around me. And even if that part of me eventually withers up and goes away, I will always know that it was there, that I wished myself dead for something over which I have limited control at best. It's an awful thing, to know that it is possible to hate yourself that deeply. The only remedy for the awfulness is to struggle every day to forgive. And maybe, if I forgive enough, I will learn to love.
It's not easy. It is hard. Some days -- and there have been more of them as time passes -- it's only hard like ignoring something mean someone said about you back in third grade is hard. It's not that bad. But sometimes it is harder than walking twenty miles in Oklahoma August. Sometimes it is harder than saying "no" to food when at no time during the last week have you eaten more than half of what is required to keep a human being running. Sometimes, it isn't possible. Sometimes I fail, and I hate.
I am sitting here right now hating the way I look and feel, embarrassed simply because I exist, and I know that I could turn off that hate tomorrow, like flicking off a light, if I just went back to starving myself and walking twelve miles a day. It would buy me respite from the pain for as long as I was making progress. Sure, once I stalled out it would start hurting again, and sure, I'd have another breakdown once I realized -- again -- that in order to maintain even a modest weight loss, I have to exercise so much and eat so little that it actually endangers my health. But for that little time, I would not feel this sort of pain.
There are times when it seems worth it, just because the hate and the loathing and the pain are still there, and still rear up once in a while to trip me. I just have to stand firm and remind myself that this hate that comes over me, this loathing, wouldn't stop if I were a size ten, because it's not hate based on my actual size, my actual body, but based on how I feel about myself, the things I feel that I should be and am not, and cannot be.
You can't improve yourself by hating yourself. It just can't be done. I've got to remind myself of that as often as necessary, probably until the end of my life. And if I am reminding myself of it tonight, I might as well remind you, too.
Disclaimer: I'm not dissing exercise, which is wonderful if you can stomach it, nor am I saying that everyone who diets is ill. I am not up for a debate about the merits of weight-loss dieting, nor am I up for a debate about whether or not fat is inherently unhealthy, nor am I particularly interested in arguing with anyone over what they, personally, should or should not be doing, or why it's okay or not okay. The constant "But don't you realize. . . ." and "It's fine for other people, but. . . ." and "I'm not saying that. . . ." is part of what makes recovering from this shit so goddamn hard. "Well, you have to admit that there's a level of fat that is just not okay!" is actually more destructive than the stuff asshole trolls say. (That link will blow your Sanity Watcher's points, so don't click if you're not feeling up to reading some really nasty shit in addition to lolarious stupidity.) So, not having those debates here.
X-posted from Dreamwidth. Comment count: