the food issue

Trigger warning, ya'll: This is NOT a thinspiration post, this is NOT a pro-ana post. If you have issues with food, this might fuck you up. Read on at your own risk. 


For a while now I haven't been eating right. It started a long time ago, in December, maybe. Sleeping too much/not enough, at weird hours, in weird places. Falling asleep on the bus, at work,  reading, at the movies. During that time, I also started feeling less and less hungry, filling up faster, feeling full all the time. I had blood work done to see if I had something like mono or a... face parasite, I don't know. Nope, I was fine. In fact, my blood values showed no signs of me being malnourished. o.O

Anyway, things got worse, and it got to a point where I am now actually disgusted by food. I don't want to weigh myself because I look scary. I have no idea what my BMI is, but I know it has to be lower than 15 (normal is 19 to 25). 


The food issue passed through a stage where this shit was actually suicidal. I thought, even consciously, well, I can't kill myself any other way, maybe if I starve myself I'll die and it won't be my fault. I'm pretty over that now, but food, and depriving myself of food became a kind of punishment/reward thing. I love to punish myself for things when I'm depressed and this was one of the ways. I would go hungry on purpose, until food became gross to me. I would be hungry and eating, and at the same time, trying not to puke from the horrible nausea the feeling of food in my mouth gave me. 

I overcame (somewhat) my depression, but the food thing persists. Because I made my body turn into survival mode, living off the bare minimum. Hence, I shut down all the time, and sleep. Forever. You burn less calories when you're dead asleep. 


I went to the doctor yesterday, it became too much, to stand up from my chair and grabbing on to the walls so as to not faint. Every time. I am now eating those things babies and old people eat so they won't die (yet, can I tell you a secret? It is now 6:37 PM and I've only eaten some pasta and a small salad). 

I am sure this food thing is directly responsible for my weird sleeping patterns and my fucked up skin lately. It's incredible, huh? Eating is the easiest thing in the world, right? I used to LOVE eating. Now, it's a paralyzing, incredibly difficult guilt-struggle with a piece of lettuce. Nevermind the carbs. How could I train my body to do this to me? Or my brain, I'm not sure which. And what's worse, the way I look makes me super self-conscious, and I just keep feeling worse. I can't eat, I can't gain weight, I'm ugly. My face looks hollow, my legs like twigs, and my breasts are non-existent. 

At the same time, this is just the way my body looks now. A lot of body-positive sites and people make sure to only affirm those fuller bodies. What about me? I feel like the pale man in Pan's Labyrinth. I feel so ugly and hated and judged at the same time. A lot of people would kill to have this problem. A lot of people DO kill themselves to have this problem. A lot of people die to look like this bullshit: 

:(

Shit's sad, we're all crazy.

PICA

Pica ( /ˈpaɪkə/ py-kə) is characterized by an appetite for substances largely non-nutritive (such as clay or chalk).^[1] For these actions to be considered pica, they must persist for more than one month at an age where eating such objects is considered developmentally inappropriate. There are different variations of pica, as it can be from a cultural tradition, acquired taste or a neurological mechanism such as an iron deficiency, or chemical imbalance. (source: wiki)

pica

A light lunch, a salad of mixed Swedish words,

blue paper chunks, peppered with tobacco.

Glossy nail polish juice, garnished

with a thousand fine pieces of hot pink glitter.

A fresh palette cleanser, flower petal

and grey wool ice cream, ideal even in winter.

The kisses of blue-eyed young girls,

dialogue from TV shows dealing with the supernatural,

and transfeminist post-pornographic blog posts,

-the slam poetry of NYC kids pretending to be Egon Schiele-

wash it down with sweet blackberry fountain pen ink.

The crusty mustard pages of old books and black leather jackets.

For dinner, the memories of rough pillows melting in your mouth,

literal finger-licking goodness late-night snack. 

This is the poem I had been working on. I wrote it on paper, which I rarely do. I am much much better now. But for a while there, it was like involuntary anorexia nervosa, man. Ta.