BODY DYSMORPHIA: I'M MESSED UP. Are you? Let's discuss.

I just read this beautiful, haunting, honest, and hilarious piece by a writer who recovered from anorexia. It came in the middle of an internet rabbit hole I fell into, one of the negative-body-image-fierce-lady-writer variety.  As usual, I emerge from the reading binge, bleary-eyed in my underwear, wondering what it all means for me: as a writer, a woman, a daughter, a friend, a teacher of adolescents, and a lifelong disordered eater.

Confession time: My weight never dipped below 100 pounds. 

Here's the thing: not all anorexics and bulimics are thin. Many of us look quite normal. At my smallest, I looked a bit bony, arms and legs dangling off a normal-looking, even slightly soft midsection. Both times... At 16, eating 300 calories a day, downing half a dozen horse-sized diet pills, and running track... At 26, eating 890 calories a day, working out endlessly and never leaving the house... I looked good. 

I was never hospitalized. I came close once, after going four days without eating and passing out during a final exam, but never quite made it there (thankfully). 

No one ever staged an intervention. There were no doctors, nurses, treatment centers, support groups, or anything of the sort. Only crash diets, gym memberships, vomiting halfway through a 10 mile run on an empty stretch of highway, and years of feeling unhappy and uncomfortable in my own skin. 

At my thinnest in recent years, I was 127 pounds, and looking back I'd sacrifice a few relatives to get back to that weight, but at the time I felt pudgy. I remember vividly how, even with so little fat on me, when I laid down to tan in my bikini the skin on my hips fell out of my bikini at an unattractive angle. It's gotten to the point where I don't know what I look like at all. I can't tell. Nothing fits. My body appears stretched out, loose, misshapen, and weird. My face looks good, not fat like before when I was crash dieting, but my body... I guess you can only bounce back from so much. 

I go through positive phases. I'll see myself naked in a mirror, lift my arms above my head, and think, "You know what? I'm actually pretty hot." Looking at my stretch marks, I'll think, "Damn... those are awesome stretch marks. They're badges of honor, battle scars to be worn with pride... They are marks of survival, not failure..." 

Then I remember that nothing fits, and I want to cry again, I want to give up, I want to crack down and get back in shape I can be proud of, I want to lie down and do nothing at all... 

AND IT'S JUST A BODY. Before you even think about saying it, realize that I've said it to myself a million times, and I'm saying it right now as I write this: What the hell is wrong with me? Why do I let this take over? Am I that vain and self-absorbed? Is there nothing else that matters to me? What does it say about me that I'm so obsessed with how messed up my relationship with my body is? I hate it. I hate it. I wish I could stop it. Part of me hates you for judging me, but part of me is right there with you, making a face at myself. 

I don't know what to do next. The whole thing makes me extremely uncomfortable. But I have to find some meaning in all of this madness, or else what will it have all been for? There's no way I can just wake up one day and not agonize over my body, right? That ship sailed in elementary school. I was never going to be normal. Maybe I should set my standards lower and learn to cope. 

CONFESSION TIME: I hate myself. Not who I am, but my physical self. I think it has always been this way, and the periods in my life when I thought I was coping were actually denial. I don't know if I know how to NOT hate myself. 

RELEVANT EXAMPLE: My legs look great still, but all I see when I look at them is how much nicer they would be if I hadn't tortured them with years of yo-yo dieting. All I see when I look at them is the fact that they don't fit into my pants and I refuse to buy new ones because new ones are failure. All I see when I look at them is that they are 3.5 inches greater in circumference than they were 1 year ago and I HATE that I know that, I HATE that I have the measurements of my thighs logged from this week last year. I HATE THAT I'M THE KIND OF PERSON WHO MEASURES MY THIGHS, LET ALONE WRITES THOSE MEASUREMENTS DOWN WITH DATES. 

Part of the problem is the fact that I'm afraid to talk about it. I feel self-absorbed, selfish, superficial, obnoxious, and like a total jerk because there are people everywhere that have real problems bigger than being 20 pounds heavier than they should be and not feeling confident naked. People everywhere yo-yo diet, cry in fitting rooms, and count calories, and we shouldn't talk about it because people are in real pain out there and every time we talk about our self-indulgent self-proclaimed self-hate, we're marginalizing the real problems and wasting time that might otherwise be spent solving them, or making our lives better and more fulfilling so we aren't self-indulgent assholes who worry about ourselves all the time. 

Today I'm going to take a stand in the opposite direction: I am genuinely unhappy in my own skin. Regardless of what that says about me as a person, it's the truth, and it's awful. I know the vast majority of the problems in this world are far worse, and that millions of people would love to have this be the worst problem they deal with. But to me this is a big problem, and for myself, I won't let it be marginalized. 

I'm hoping that if more of us talk about disordered eating and unhealthy body image, we'll start to feel better. It doesn't need to be sensational to hurt. Every time I walk down the street behind a thinner woman and find myself searching for a physical flaw on her, just one thing I can claim to "beat" her at, it hurts. She's probably a lovely girl who has important things that matter and she's not preoccupied with the fact that maybe her legs could be slightly more muscular because she's a good person who has better more meaningful things to fill her time with. She doesn't deserve my critique, silent or not. Every time I think back to this mythical time when I was thin with despair -- which is even stupider because I know that at that time I was just as unhappy as I was now, despite being much lighter and fitter -- it hurts. Every time I see someone eat just one portion of something indulgent and I remember gorging myself on Doritos in second grade because even then I couldn't moderate ANYTHING -- it hurts. It hurts to realize you've spent your whole life failing at something. It hurts to admit all of this. It may not be poverty, hunger or abuse, but it hurts, and it's real, and you can judge me all you want for writing about it in such excessive detail, but I need to do something. 

I have battled eating disorders, body dysmorphia, negative body image for most of my life and it feels as if it's eating me alive. I need help. And I'm going to talk about it. 

What about you? 

Why I spend hours reading what other people write about their eating disorders

I make no secret of the fact that I have a messed up relationship with food. Everyone in my life knows of my twisted body image. It’s pretty hard not to. All you have to do is watch me interact with food, talk about food, abstain from food, exercise compulsively, refuse to leave the house for 3 months until I’ve lost weight, or talk about how much I wish I could just eat a bagel without feeling guilty for at least 72 hours afterwards. I’m a writer, a talker, a storyteller, and a world-class yo-yo dieter. I also have no filter. So my dirty laundry is always on display.

The first official diet I went on was Atkins at age 17, but I might even go back further, to sophomore year. My school picture was heinous, and my retake was beautiful. The difference between the two: a season of varsity cross-country. In sixth grade I ran one mile a day after school every day for a month until my brown baggy pants from Express (the ones with white contrast stitching that Rose also had) were baggy and I rejoiced in the mirror. In first grade I started complaining about how my thighs spread out against the leather car seat. Even before that, I switched to skim milk and insisted on only eating bread if it was toasted, because the texture of mushy bread reminded me of the texture of my mushy tummy, and that made me feel like invisible mosquitoes were biting me all over. I can remember tons of bits and pieces like this, disjointed memories forming a strange constellation I’m still trying to make sense of.

I’ve come to realize that when it comes to disordered eating, there is no past tense. There is no end, all better, wrapped up in a Lifetime movie bow as the credits roll and the people embrace. It’s always a part of you, it always will be, and if you really think back, you’ll probably realize that it was a part of you long before you knew it. I know I did.

Which is why I submerge myself in eating disorder writing. I keep thinking if I read enough of other people’s problems, my own will start to make more sense, or at least not be so stifling. Being at war inside your own skin is tough. I have so many years of resentment for my body built up that sometimes it feels like sitting in my living room. all the windows opened, on a pollen-heavy spring day, when my roommates and I have forgotten to clean, the cats have been wrestling, and I have a bad cold: SO MANY ALLERGENS FLOATING AROUND THAT I CAN’T BREATHE AND WANT TO INJECT BENADRYL INTO MY VEINS AND EYEBALLS AND FINGERNAILS BUT NOTHING WORKS.

This is one of the aforementioned cats. He has a lot of fur. Lots of allergens. YAY  METAPHORS! 

I find it helps me to read about eating disorders because it’s a combination of escaping my problems and dealing with them. I’m immersed in the content of my problems, but not directly dealing with my own. It’s an indirect therapy, like when the detectives on SVU ask a young sex crime victim to draw pictures of her life, and the pictures help them solve the crime and help the little girl deal without an intense, dimly-lit, Detective-Stabler-flying-off-the-handle interrogation. (Sidente: This scene DID happen in the episode. It was just later).

But what does it all mean? I just ate healthily for most of the day before eating a slew of random items that had too much combined fat. I spent half the day complimenting myself on stopping when I was full only to spend the rest of the day eating past the point of being full and reminiscing about how wonderful it felt to be kind of empty in the morning, a messed-up bliss that only comes at midnight after eating a tablespoon of almond meal for no apparent reason. Then I read. I read and read and read. And here’s what I’ve come up with:

It has to mean something, all these hours spent reading about all these struggles. I’m not sure what it means, but I’m going to figure it out. And I’m going to write about it. Obviously. Get ready.