That is something very bad that I used to be good at

May 4, 2018 7:54 PM

We started in high school. We started in our twenties. We started and stopped, started and stopped. Things that made it start again: Getting stalked. Getting rejected. Getting inordinately rewarded. Being humiliated. Being venerated. Being controlled. Being disregarded. Getting mad. Being disbelieved. Failing. Being unwanted. Being wanted too much. Taking medication. Getting off medication. Remembering the wrong thing at the wrong time. Forgetting the right thing. Being alone too much. Being surrounded. Someone leaving. Someone dying. When it was about to start again, it felt like a solemn steeling of the self, a giant breath taken in advance of total submersion: Time for this again. Then going under, and staying.
There Are People Starving, and essay on our shared history of disordered eating.
CONTENT WARNING EATING DISORDERS
posted by Grandysaur (3 comments total)

THE MOST IMMEDIATE AND ACCESSIBLE LOSS — beyond the books we could’ve written and didn’t; beyond the pictures we could’ve painted; beyond the kids we could’ve had; beyond the people we could’ve loved — levels us on a regular basis, like a punch to the gut... We don’t know what we look like anymore.

This hurt. I appreciate the way the essay was about a lot more than the disordered behaviors themselves (which shades into inadvertent romanticization). EDs swallow your life - as Knapp says somewhere - make you forget all the needs you're too scared to acknowledge, all the desires you can't reach - and get entangled with depression and trauma and a life that you have to rebuild in an aftermath - knowing that you could always go back.
posted by ahundredjarsofsky at 8:08 PM on May 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

I'm not sure what I think about this piece after I've been in recovery for (10 years). To me in lots of ways it reads like what eating disorders feel like when one is starving, the fuzzy impressions of a malnourished brain.

I understand what it was trying to capture. I don't know if it really captured what my case was like, but that's not really the point.

I think that now, this piece doesn't speak to me in a way that more academic writing and analysis does, though I'm sure at some point this piece would have resonated in a very different way.
posted by AlexiaSky at 9:25 PM on May 4, 2018

This needs more content warnings, methinks. Including physical abuse & rape.

Point is, it's a very potent piece.
posted by chavenet at 1:07 AM on May 5, 2018