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Thirty million people in the U.S. have disordered eating, and of those compulsive over eating was more common than anorexia or bulimia. How, then have I never heard of this before? Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness at one death per hour.
I guess even bad childhoods have nice smells.
“Azure, it’s important for you to know this—never let a man treat you this way. Kill him first.”
In this house love was only expressed in the dark, in secret, in fearful moments where he couldn’t hear and when the air was thick with the possibility that he would really do something crazy.
Of all of the living things around our house including the deer, raccoons, and birds that frequented our property, my favorite were the oak trees. The more deformed they were, the more beautiful they were. It was as if they reflected our pain in the angst-filled positions of their limbs.
how our homes reflect us.
To me He was a blend of a deity, animal and human, something like Calibos in the old school claymation Clash of the Titans we watched on VHS, dangerous like a snarling animal, powerful as a god and well camouflaged to those outside our family in the body of a human.
He favored his version of the golden rule: “the man with the gold makes all the rules.” He was ruler and we were his subjects and there were only two ways out: death or escape.
when you have trauma, it’s like swallowing a whole steak and it just sits there inside you, unable to digest. With therapy, what we do is take that steak back out and cut it up into small, bite-sized pieces that you can digest.”
But perhaps my biggest annoyance had been the homework assignment I was given every week—to do everything lovingly. When she followed up with me the following session, I laughed, embarrassed. “I am not even sure what that means.” She repeated to do everything lovingly and I took this to mean I was supposed to figure this out for myself, just like everything else in my life.
The answer was clear: he hated me for being his walking before picture, so much so that he tasked me with overcoming my genetics, being an alchemist of sorts, reinventing my biology into something different.
“But it’s not fair!” I exclaimed. “Life isn’t always fair,” she told me.
Why was I so foolish to think that motivation is treatment for a legitimate eating disorder?
“I know we all go into milestone events and have an idea of what our life will be like, and reality rarely measures up to fantasy. But you did something that shows your healing even then, before we even started our work—you were able to lower your expectations to meet your dad where he was. That’s big!”
Why is home and everyday life so much harder for us? I felt like the answer was right in front of me, and should have been obvious, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, see it.
Sean and I were doing well in these moments when the playful, childlike parts of us came out. In fact, it was as if our damaged, addicted inner teenagers completely and totally got each other, him imbibing and me noshing. And it felt like when we were both our adult selves, we were a dynamic duo, like business partners brainstorming career strategy in a conference room. The problem was when we were out of synch, which was often, when one of us was in adult mode and the other in teenager. In these circumstances, we found each other annoying, irresponsible and impossible to deal with.
“Remember what we learned about emotions—they want to surface, be fully experienced, and only then dissipate. Otherwise they calcify inside just like that steak we talked about at the beginning.”
What am I supposed to say, that if I were loved, that would make my entire life bearable? Not even bearable, but validate my very existence on the planet. That I am fucking angry at… the world, at God for doing this to me? For birthing me to my parents? For making me look the way I look? For no one ever helping me, ever? For living in a world where my real life is a secret, for being told that the part of me that is visible is too visible? That I am so sick of hearing people say what I am or am not? And yet simultaneously wanting everyone, to tell me what they want me to be so I can just be
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I wish I could go all the way back and learn how to eat like a healthy, normal person. And if that’s too much to ask, I wish I could go back to one of the countless times I’ve lost weight and just realize I was there, at the finish line, instead of always thinking I was still ten to fifteen pounds away.
I knew even then that the opinion that mattered most was my own because being abused is a bit like a paranormal experience—someone who has truly gone through it says, “I don’t care whether you believe me or not, I know what I experienced.”
How can I be the same person and not be deserving of love in one body configuration or another?
When you have disordered eating, it’s a disease of extremes, being ravenousness or busting at the seams, being completely numb to feelings or drowning in them? But see, the gradations in between have in fact been there all along, you were just not used to registering them because being numb to emotion was part of the life-saving response you had to your trauma. Being able to identify them now, and more importantly feeling them now, is evidence of your progress! It’s wonderful, actually!”
There then comes a point called confluence where individual colonies are no longer distinguishable from one another and there is instead an entire moss of bacteria that has taken over the plate. This is what loneliness is like. It starts as a small thing, a spore, but grows and grows until it has completely taken over your life confluently.
Haven’t I been in enough prisons in my life?
Is the opposite of addiction absolute abstinence?
Does anyone want a life of Melba toast and raw kale? Doesn’t it all boil down to the Finnish proverb “happiness is a place between too much and too little?”
I did have a tendency to turn everything light into something dark, because what was light and easy felt like a facade I wore and the dark, depressed interior felt like the real me.
Despite our differences, Sean and I did have the most important thing in common for this endeavor: a dogged determination to do whatever it took to do things differently than our own upbringings so that our baby would have the very best chance of being emotionally healthy and not falling into the trap of the addictive process.
As she slept so peacefully it struck me—the difference between us. She looked like me, but knew nothing but love. Would she be who I might have been without the pain, the consumption by pain, the addictive behavior to stave off pain?
And even though I was so glad to give Aveline this endless love, there was a tiny part of me that was a little sad to no longer be ignorant to it, knowing that I had never and will never receive that kind of love myself.
It was official—my dad would never become my other dad or any iteration between who he was and the man he could have been. It was the death of both of them. We’d never have Paris. Sometimes stories don’t have happy endings. I lamented, aching for the man I wished he was, the person I had always felt he had the potential to become, the version of him that had belonged to me entirely, and whose love was entirely mine.
Well grooved addictive thought patterns remain there like freeways offering the shortest and least conscious route to the destination of comfort.
The scenic route may not be direct or easy and it might even feel like you’re heading the opposite direction from comfort but you are going where you need to go, and more importantly you are actually present for the journey.
Change isn’t just possible, we are biologically wired to do so.
They say time heals all wounds but it takes more than time, just as gathering of ingredients and passing of time does not magically cook food. Only deliberate actions alchemize ingredients into something else, something better.
Parenting a child has a tendency to illuminate any feelings of inequity.
