medicinal marzipan

In perusing the internet this afternoon while eating wheat-free pancakes after my hoop lesson, I came across an interesting post on breakingthemirror.com, entitled The Straight-A Anorexic.  In the post, author Angelique recalls what she terms her “perfect candidacy” for anorexia, being a over-achieving perfectionist who succeeded so well scholastically that her parents didn’t question how strange her behavior or eating habits had become. She concluded her post in stating:

I guess it was because I was a straight A-er.  I mean, who would think that a top-of-her-class gal would be spending all her time alone hating and starving her body?  Nobody.  Because, let’s face it, she’s too smart to fall for all that.

And now I’m stuck thinking about this, remembering my own childhood, back to a time where I too was a straight A-er, and I too spent most of my time hating my body.  I didn’t starve it, often, or purge it, often, but I remember wanting to so badly.  I remember tracking down every single book/essay/website about eating disorders and gleaning insight, tips, and wondering all the while how one had the willpower to follow through with it all.  I remember finding the mental process so fascinating, how people can look in the mirror and not really see what was there.  I also remember thinking that maybe I worked in reverse, because when I looked in the mirror I couldn’t quite bring myself to understand what all fuss was about my body.  When I looked in the mirror, a body reflected back at me, similar to many of the other bodies I had seen, and I didn’t understand quite why it was so reviled or why it too so much fabric to cover it.  

But I learned quickly to hate it. I learned that the reflection didn’t matter, because the images of myself that I saw reflected in the eyes of strangers and my peers told me what I really was.  It’s funny because as much as I hated my body and as much as I wanted to desperately to starve it away, run it away, scrape it away, it followed me everywhere. Nothing worked. I wasn’t able to keep it up.  I hated feeling weak and tired all the time.  It took so much out of me, the hating, that I couldn’t think about much else.  And yet, it followed me.  

Its funny, what Angelique says here, about the Straight A-er being too smart for all that, and I felt that way too. I was an intelligent feminist, well versed in body politics, and the media misrepresentation of women, etc. etc. etc. That almost made it worse, because not only did I spent most of my days hating my body and obsessing over how other saw me, the rest of the time I had to spend guilty and hating myself for being so obnoxiously and irrationally self-loathing, thereby having to slosh through my every waking moment immersed in some sort of complicated double-shame-body-drama from which I had no escape. 

Nor do I think that any of this mental anguish was kept secret.  When I look at pictures from this large chunk of my life, I look miserable. I was perpetually slutty, an easy target for boys who wanted to get off and didn’t want to have to work very hard.  But it’s interesting because I did really have to develop some sense of self during this time and after.  And what began as sort of an overcompensation for my imperfect body, a perfect dose of charm and wit that I strategically designed with the intent to distract and endear, eventually turned me into a real person. And there came a point where I had to decide that this wasn’t the right way to live a life. 

I remember sitting at the table thanksgiving of my freshman year of college interviewing my great Aunt Lynne about her experiences of motherhood, and somehow the conversation had shifted to her talking about her weight and her body through out her life.  She told me then that she had been on a diet every single day since she was thirteen, and for a woman in her seventies, this represented a considerable amount of time. And I was horrified, absolutely horrified, about the idea of being seventy-some-odd someday and looking back on my life thinking that I had wasted so much time hating the body that I was in.  Because the truth is that it is the hating that is toxic and not the body, it is the mental process of feeling shame and guilt and fear about not being accepted or loved for how you are and not what you could become maybe, possibly after implementing a workout routine, diet, or going under the knife.  Because thin people hate their bodies too, and even though they are thin and do not face the same detrimental worldly interactions, the hatred is just as toxic. 

Just in case you needed another reason to remember to love your body on october 15th…

a kait-crumb-heart-present.