|
sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
|
The Demon of Inappropriate Desires
I should just stick this in as an update to the last entry, but I'm too lazy to deal with the HTML crap. So, I'm still stressing the food. And I'm going to write about it now, so run and play if you're sick of listening to another woman whine online about food, okay? The food. Last night's sushi fest really got me going on how much I need to focus on eating correctly. I mean, I really pig out on sushi nights, and whatever, but I need, the rest of the week then to limit myself and focus my energy on eating correctly and within my range. I didn't feel last night as though I were going to puke (or going to have to make myself puke), so yeah, I suppose that's good. And I only had to listen to Mayflower whine about her body and food for a little bit. (This as she was downing two rum and cokes and then sushi and then ice cream.) And I don't care. I don't care what she eats, really. Really. But I don't want to listen to women's negative comments about their bodies or about their food choices. And I don't want to hear them make comments about my body, or my food choices. I had a hard time training Max on this one. He would make comments about how little I was eating, and I had to (as calmly as I could, which was often not very calmly) remind him that any comment about my eating habits were out of line. Period. That to me, his commenting that I was eating too little was as rude as if he commented that I was eating too much. It's just fucking rude as far as I'm concerned to comment on what people are or are not eating. So I wouldn't sit down for a meal with someone and say, as Mayflower might, "Oh, you're being so good, having a salad!" And I wouldn't sit down with someone at a meal and look disapprovingly (or approvingly) at their plate and say, "Oh, is that all you're having?" I have issues to work out with food at this point. And they're not all physical. Some of them are emotional. Some of them are related to the weight I am now as well as to why I began to overeat in the first place. I began to overeat when I was about this weight so that I could protect myself. Part of it was that I was ten, and men were paying too much attention to my developing body. There were too many comments from strangers, too many comments from men who were not strangers and who therefore should not have been making comments in the first place. There were too many close and uncomfortable hugs, too much teasing about sex that wasn't really teasing. Too many jokes about what I was going to be like when I was--what?--mature "enough." And I hated it. And I didn't want to be the blank wall that these men painted their fantasies on. I was ten, for fuck's sake. And none of them realized the inappropriateness of their actions. None of them stopped to think that maybe their comments about what I should be like when I was mature enough were making me hate myself, were making me try to find a way out, were making me desperate enough to take any exit. And what exit was open to me? I knew from listening and from watching that fat women were/are inherently undesirable. I mean, there weren't fat chicks in those magazines stuffed in my father's closet. There weren't fat chicks giving blow jobs and fucking the men in the movies that he watched on cable. What was my exit? I ate. I ate and ate and ate and got fatter and fatter. I ate and ate and ate and got fatter. I got huge. And I still attracted attention. I weighed about 240 pounds when I began to date Max. I weighed 265 when Chris came along. I continued to attract the attention of men (which, as I grew older, I craved because I thought it could validate something in me at twenty that I certainly hadn't wanted validated at ten). At 300 pounds, men were still commenting. The comments grew less friendly often, but they still saw me as a sexual being. So the ten year old in me kept eating. And still wants to eat. I was finally able to stop eating at 370 pounds, when the looks were all looks of disgust. When no man would think about touching me in any sexual way. When I finally hit the point when their desires were dead. But what about my own desires? When I think about sex, about exposing myself, about men's desires, now, at 185 pounds, I can't help but awaken the ten year old that wants to eat, that has to eat and stay fat so that she can protect herself from the inappropriate desires of men. I think about exposing the body I have now and I am ashamed. I think about all the years of covering up--covering it all up, all the emotions, all the feelings, all the desires that I might have had--I think about spending years buried, burying myself, feeling like hell, still drawing attention and hating and loving it both and I get scared. I want to run away. I want to eat. So, yeah. Someone commenting about what I do and don't eat seems like something small. It seems like, eh, she's strong, she'll deal with it. But what people who comment don't see is that there are good reasons for my wrestling with food, with eating. It's not like I have some kind of iron will that I am using to make them feel guilty. No. I have this ten year old inside me that is scared of drawing attention and I have to nurture her with something other than food and I'm not sure how to do that. I have to convince her that what she did was okay, but that we can stop now. That we can take care of ourselves without having to eat and eat. That we have other strategies. And when I say that I have to convince her, I mean it. I mean, she needs to feel safe enough to let go of food, to let go of the strategy that made sense to her. And other people's comments--however well-meant, however humorous--drown out my efforts. They keep me from being able to listen to her, they keep her from being able to listen to me. They reflect the inappropriate desires of others, something that I have to struggle against now--something that I had to struggle against then. So stop fucking commenting on what I eat, okay? If you love me and care about me, then just keep it to yourself. Because I can only take so much. And I will only take so much. Because she means much more to me than you ever will.
More lies:
|
|||||