dialogue

“You ought to just buy yourself some cigarettes. They’re better for you, probably.”

“I disagree. I can’t get pneumonia again… Anyway. This way I can just die of diabetes.”

“Ah.”

"Crushing."

“Shut the fuck up and buy your pastries.”

do it for you

Today I hung out with my grandma who is doing Weight Watchers. She’s in good shape, but just wants to maintain her health. She talked to me about it and I decided I wanted to do it. Kinda. 

We went to BJ’s and got Boca burgers and yogurts and Nutragrain waffles for waffle-turkey sausage breakfast sandwiches (4 points). When she went to the bathroom in the store, I stood nearby, looking at the fridge case of decorated cakes and reflecting that $20.95 wasn’t all that much for a buttercream marble sheetcake and I could probably buy it and eat the whole thing myself. The craving passed in about as much time as it takes a cigarette craving—10-15 minutes. I had forgotten about it, but for 3 minutes the pull was incredible. Just because I knew that I wasn’t supposed to have it.

Grandma says I should do it for me, but I disagree. Sriracha-slathered Boca burgers on wheat sandwich thins and 0 points for all fruits and vegetables is not something I would pick. That sounds like a prescription. That sounds like treatment. Treat maybe being the key word there. 

I eat quite healthfully. Brown rice that takes 50 minutes to cook, kale, chard, lentils, stir fry, skinless chicken breast… I know fiber, soluble fiber, carbs, glycemic index, types of fat, quality of protein… I eat like a hippie. I eat like a fucking yogi half the time.

But then, I also binge. I binge on Honey Buns from the dollar store (tons of saturated fat and palm oil, but no trans fats), Aldi German/Swiss chocolate, broken Panera cookies rejected by the Food Pantry and set in a bowl in my agency (I ziplock bag ‘em and take them home), obscure clearance dark chocolate Italian wafers. My binges are garbage. 

I remember this short-lived show on FX about an eating support group. The facilitator said something to the effect of “You ate donuts out of the garbage? If my dog did that I would kick him in the face.” I must have been in Jr High or something, but that has always stuck with me. I would never condone kicking a dog in the face, but it touched me the way a painting does in a store or gallery, when you see it once and keep wandering back. It took me somewhere. Maybe it had me looking into the future. 

I don’t know what kind of choices I would have made in the midst of my grave mental illness of youth, presented with a graphic picture of who I am now… trying to defend it. “Well, she’s got wise-woman social capital from mentors out the yin yang. But she doesn’t really have many friends, or like many people, or really think she ever wants to stop binge-eating. In fact, I think all she wants is food. But did I mention the degree and high regard she carries in her field?”

The point of these anecdotes being that I don’t think I would do much for myself, “do it for you” is like a different language. I’ll do it for you, but me? Pff.

have you over

A friend at work has kind of adopted me into her family. I think she sees me as a peer, like taking a peer under their week. I have always been a peer to adults, and I feel like I’m just a kid and adults should have “professional boundaries” around me. I mean, I’m in my 20s, but I feel like a kid. Maybe it’s a self-consciousness/confidence thing, key word being just a kid. When I was in 9^th grade, my English teacher invited me to Starbucks and the City University because she felt like I was talented and underappreciated. Something. It was very kind of her, truly, but I have always felt a sense of unreality with that type of situation.

Is this really happening, us, right now, directed at me, significant, genuine, now? Me?

S invites me for dinner. She has a daughter a few years younger than me and a son in his teens. They say the F-word in front of each other, they aren’t religious, they have a “family”-voice rather than a “family-member-specific”-voice. And they are so, so functional and happy together. S makes pretty cool Pampered Chef and budget gourmet dinners. I didn’t feel like I needed to binge eat at all. I felt like my needs were being met and it wasn’t even my family.

Weird.

Also, it occurred to me yesterday that I didn’t know anyone when I moved out here.

My supervisor smirked at me and said, “That was fairly brave.”

I guess I didn’t know that ‘til now.

The Beginning

Some really gross marble birthday cake with strawberry filling. Blegh.

I suppose I should hop right in. If you want to know me more as a whole, read my other blog. If you want to give me diet advice, please don't. If you want to play voyeur or observe my journey to the center of my binge eating--welcome.

So, my name is Ardilla. I have binge eaten since I was 11 or so. I have not always been fat, but food has always been a pathological thing for me. I can control it. With food, I am self-sufficient and need no one. The one problem with "getting better" (I might as well call it that, since that's what I called my recovery from extreme depression in my teens) is that I really  like being self-sufficient. I don't need you. As John Lennon said, I don't believe in the Beatles, I just believe in Me. Also, I'm in Social Work, so forgive me for analyzing myself and referring to weird concepts and theories and people.

It occurred to me the other day that this hole in my heart used to be filled with me, and in the not-very distant past... Do you ever have sense memories? A taste of the past that completely fills your heart and reminds you, spiritually, of something lost? Maybe something calling out? I saw a summer full of innocence and sunshine, despite the extreme trauma and separateness I had crawled out of less than a year before. There was just me. Me being okay, me happy, me and learning to be okay with being alive.

Have I been re-traumatized since the Big Traumas of my childhood? Probably...Women die a thousand deaths in their lives. I am not the Super Paragon Ardilla that I want to be.

Part of me really believes I could be.
Part of me wants none of you, or me either. Just food, and to be a book-reading, writing, asexually producing, pot-smoking chunk of a person.

I'm not unhappy, but I'm not happy. I'm not suppressed, but I am understimulated. I'm not diabetic, but I'm probably pre-diabetic. My ankles hurt in the morning. My heart grieves at night.

Here I go.