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.