Unpacking the Spoons

Most of you have already heard the spoon metaphor by now. It was originally coined to describe what it’s like to have a chronic illness, although since then it has been used to describe mental illness as well. It’s an incredibly helpful tool, but I’d like to take a minute to expand on why those of us who have illness of one kind or another use up our spoons so quickly. There is an invisible aspect to illness that most of us don’t talk about. It’s oddly taboo, particularly for mental illness. Let’s shed some light on it shall we (I’m going to confine this discussion to my particular mental illness because that’s what I have experience with, but I know that this type of thing is applicable to all sorts of different illnesses).

When you’re mentally ill you have to think about more things. Let’s look at some examples of things that I have to think about on a regular basis that most people are blissfully unaware of: (trigger warnings for ED and self harm)

1.Are my hands shaking? Will someone notice? How will I explain it if they do?

2.Will the clothes that I’m wearing expose any of my scars or current cuts? Am I going to be somewhere that I care?

3.Will someone use the word “purge” today? How will I deal with this trigger if it comes up?

4.Will someone talk about my body or eating habits today and how will I quickly escape the situation if that happens?

5.If I eat something, will my stomach be able to keep it down or will it get uppity because it’s not very good at digesting anymore?

6.Will it look suspicious to my family or friends if I go to the bathroom immediately after a meal?

7.If I stay at someone’s house, do I have my meds? I cannot stay at someone’s house unless I have my meds.

8.If others want to do a physical activity, will I be able to keep up? Will I start feeling faint?

9.Did I bleed on my sheets or my pajamas after I cut last night? Can I get that stain out? Did it get on my computer, and will other people notice if I bring my computer out? Also gross.

10.Can I leave the house today without overwhelming self-hatred based on how I look in these clothes?

11.How distracted will I be today by my body? If my thighs rub together while walking, will I still be able to keep it together, or will I start having some really bad thoughts?

12.Will there be calorie counts listed somewhere that I go today?

13.How do I get all my hours in at work and get to 5-10 hours of therapy a week? How do I explain to my boss and coworkers that I’m not lazy it’s just really hard to find good times for appointments?

14.I usually get tired at around 9:00 (probably from nutritional deprivation among other things). Can I go out and socialize tonight? How can I see my friends when I have a full time job and I can’t stay awake past 11?

15.Was that slight chest pain just some anxiety or other minor something, or am I finally getting the irregular heartbeat that is supposed to come with my eating habits?

16.What do I say if people bring up food habits? Fasting? (yes this has happened, e.g. how long have you gone without food). How do I keep myself from blurting out “yeah, I ate once a week for a couple months once”?

17.How much do I tell people?

18.If someone hugs me, will they be able to feel my fat? Will I be ok with it, or will I want to pull away (most of the time it’s pull away. Then I have to be polite)?

19.If I purge, will I smell like puke? Will I be able to get those nasty stains out of my clothes (yes, it gets everywhere. yes it is gross)? What happens if my boyfriend tries to kiss me?

20.How much of my day will I waste thinking about food and debating whether or not to eat and how much to eat? This varies from about 1 hour to my whole day, depending.

21.Sometimes I even waste my brain space wondering if what I expel from my body is the same as what I put into it (yes I am talking about poo).

22.How many layers should I wear? I’m always cold, but I can’t regulate my body temperature at all so I swing to really hot if I’m under blankets or layers.

23.Can I handle looking at myself in the mirror today? Will I look like a complete idiot if I get dressed and leave the house without a quick mirror check?

24.Will someone notice if I start poking at my wrists or my hips to feel the bones? Can I feel my bones? Am I too fat if I can’t feel my bones?

25.Have a fasted/restricted today? How long has it been since I last ate? How much did I eat? If someone tries to give me breakfast, how can I say no?

This was just a list I came up with off the top of my head. Imagine trying to get out of bed while thinking about all these things, plan your day while thinking about all these things, accomplish work while thinking about all these things. THIS is where the spoons go. The reason that doing simple tasks requires so much more energy and effort is not just the physiological difficulties of depression or illness (and yeah, those things often do come with some serious fatigue or pain), but also the fact that everything is inherently more complicated. You are constantly trying to protect yourself from whatever threat your illness brings. You have to plan ahead like nobody’s business. You have to be assessing what’s going on around you and what’s going on internally to make sure you’ll be ok.

With mental illness, many of these thoughts are intrusive, paranoid, and irrational. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean you can turn them off and that doesn’t mean that you’re expending less emotional energy by having them. These thoughts are intrusive, distracting, and oftentimes pervasive, which means you’re taking a lot of your executive function to refocus your brain on the task at hand. All the time. Over and over.

For many of us who are dealing with a low spoon count, we don’t even realize that this is where the spoons are going: all we know is that things feel hard. They feel exhausting. We’re more worn out than other people even when we’re doing what appears to be less. Again, the key appears to be patience with yourself and with others, as well as clear communication about what you’re feeling. Many of us don’t want to speak up about the things that are hard for us, whether because we don’t want to appear weak or because there is a strong taboo against them (most of the things listed above fall into this second category). If we can get better at telling others what we’re really feeling, maybe this whole spoons thing will start making more sense to everyone.

 

Eating Disorder Pet Peeves

I’m not feeling very well today. I think I’m sick and I’ve just had a fairly emotional week thus far. Because of that, and because this is my blog and I do what I want, I’m going to write about being cranky. Specifically I’m going to talk about those things that drive me and my eating disorder CRAZY. I assume they drive other people with eating disorders crazy too, but I’m not really sure. So here they are, my eating disorder pet peeves, aka things not to do around someone with an eating disorder:

1. When I say that I ate something, this is not an invitation to comment on my weight.
I mean really actually nothing is an invitation to comment on my weight unless I actively invite you to comment on my weight or unless you’re my doctor or dietician. Otherwise you can piss the fuck off because when you ask me how I’m “so skinny when I eat ice cream” I feel both like a fraud, and like I’m completely crazy. I also want to yell at you “BECAUSE I NEVER EAT”, so please just don’t do it.

2.Don’t talk about how many calories are in things or how bad they are for you or how sugary or fatty things are.
Again, just WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS? I’ve had a near stranger come up and comment on how many calories are in my food. Why? All you’re doing is making people feel guilty and drawing attention to something unnecessary. Counting calories is a really unhealthy way of controlling your diet, it’s incredibly triggering, and it’s really just not helpful to anyone to talk about calories. If you’re a calorie counter, then count your calories! Hooray! Just don’t tell me about it.

3.I don’t need to know about your workouts. I really, really don’t. I am competitive and exercise is a trigger. Please just don’t tell me. I come up with enough overzealous workouts all on my own.

4.Don’t give me that special look. You know the one. The one that says “is she going to blow up today?” or “did I break her?”. I’m not a doll, I’m not fragile, I’m not on the edge. You can talk to me. Use your words if you think I’m having a bad day, don’t just give me the concerned face. Don’t tiptoe around. You can say words to me.

5.If you expect me to take care of myself, I sure as hell expect you to take care of yourself. Don’t act all worried and terrified if I don’t eat and then turn around and skip meals. In particular, your workaholic nature and your negative self-comments affect me.  They normalize treating myself like crap. It’s important that you understand this.

6.DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT use the words “depression” or “anorexic” in casual conversation as vague descriptors of things. It trivializes hell to me. Just don’t.

7.Pretty please ask before physical contact. You don’t necessarily have to use your words but like…instead of a sudden glomp you can open your arms and wait for reciprocation. That’s cool. I am a tad sensitive about my body and sudden contact freaks me the heck out.

8.Please don’t make fun of me for being physically incapable of things that seem easy to you. These include things like running a mile, staying awake for more than about 15 hours at a time, or having enough energy to go out and socialize. My body is tired. Respect that. If you can be aware of it, that helps oodles too. I will push myself to keep up with others, and if someone doesn’t notice that I can’t keep up it’s fairly miserable.

Most of these things seem self-explanatory to me. Generally avoiding topics like weight, appearance, and exercise are a good idea because those are stressful and triggering to me. In general, those are also things that you have no business butting into other people’s lives about, so overall I don’t know why we have to have this conversation. Just don’t do it.

Fat Stigma: Change of Perspective

Hello all! Today’s post is going to be short and sweet because it’s my birthday and I said so. This week is fat stigma awareness week, and so I wanted to talk a bit about my own experience of fat stigma through the lens of something that happened to me this morning. I am well aware that I have internalized a lot of fatphobia and it’s something that I fight against as often as possible.

This morning while I was on the bus, someone who was overweight and using a walker got on. I noticed that I instantly questioned why she needed the walker: whether it was just because she was overweight, or did she have “actual” health problems. Particularly because she left it at her seat and went back to pay the bus driver, I was judgmental. I noticed this and told my brain to shut the fuck up because it was none of my damn business and I didn’t need to police anyone, but I knew that I was still judging her.

This woman was sitting next to me, and as the bus went around a corner her purse fell off the walker and onto the floor in front of me. I bent down to pick it up, and as I did her wallet fell out and some business cards spilled onto the floor. I apologized profusely and picked them up for her, and as I was doing so I noticed that one of them was for The Emily Program, the same place that I get my eating disorder treatment. Instantly any judgment I had for this woman was gone and all I wanted to do was hug her and punch her eating disorder in the face. I wondered what else her eating disorder had taken away from her besides her mobility and I wished I could help. It was amazing how having one thing in common with this woman suddenly humanized her. It was a major lesson for me. Despite how hard I had told myself to judge her not before, it was only once I had the tiniest glimmer of understanding that she struggled that I could have real empathy. And that’s a problem.

From now on, I’m going to imagine that every person I come across who is different from me has something written on a card that tells a bit of their story. I’m going to imagine seeing it fall to ground and imagine how it would change my perspective and give me sympathy for them. EVERYONE has those things. We need to learn how to see them.

Food: I Love It

The following blog post is a personal challenge for me inspired by the following quote: ‘‘I love to cook so much . . . food represents to me something truly positive, fun and liberated, and sensual and loving . . . it feels to me like being in control, not in the . . .bad and neutralizing sense, but in the sense that I do not let external forces control me and tell me that I cannot eat.’’ In the spirit of this quote, I want to tell you what I love about food, and why I view eating as a radical feminist act.

 

Food is comforting. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but when you get home from a long day, all you want is something warm to put in your mouth. The sensation of chewing something with a good texture, of letting the flavors sink into your tongue, of feeling yourself heat up from the inside, is reaffirming: I am here. I am alive. I deserve this good thing. I can feel myself regaining strength when I eat food. I can feel my mood brightening. Food gives me life. It affirms to me that I should be in this world, not in a far-off intellectual space with no body. When I eat I feel solid.

And food. Food tastes AMAZING. A piece of really good chocolate, fruit, or ice cream? I could eat them all day, letting them melt on my tongue and sink into my consciousness, sweetening up my day. Or the deep, delicious savoriness of a pizza, which you can’t quite replicate anywhere else. Or simply the taste of MEAT. I’m sorry, but as a recovering anorexic, I cannot explain to you how perfect a hamburger is. And salt. Salt and vinegar potato chips, hash browns, FRIED FOOD. These things are delicious. I love the experience of eating them, of tasting them, of gobbling them down. And textures are stellar too. I had some pasta last week that was the perfect kind of chewy, and I just wanted to keep eating it forever so that I could have that texture in my mouth indefinitely. It makes my teeth almost hurt just thinking about it. Or ice cream on a sore throat. Food makes you feel good.

Food can completely change your experience of a day or a temperature. A hot drink on a cold day leaves you shivering as you feel the warmth reach out into your belly. Cold ice cream on a hot day makes everything suddenly ok. Food can define experiences.

Food is a mental game. You wait for it. You get excited while you cook. You see it and smell it before you can taste it and taste it before it’s really yours and in your belly. You can savor every little bit of it. You can build it up and appreciate the excitement of it all day. Cooking is an art and baking is a science and you can create and play and explore the world around you by changing it into something it wasn’t a few hours ago. It’s fairly amazing, and it reminds you how powerful we are. We can change our world in order to make it taste better. It’s a powerful form of creating culture by changing the natural materials we’re given. It makes us more human.

Food is an experience that is hard to replicate. Each meal is the coalescence of a place and people and culture and history, all come together to create what is now. Your food means different things at different times and in different places. It comes together through your culture, mediated by cultural symbols. Your food represents where you are coming from, but by definition it is where you are going because it is the sheer fuel that allows you to go there. Food is time, because what else is growth and maturation and ripeness and cooking and every other process by which our food becomes appropriate for us to eat? Food is all these connections. Perhaps the most beautiful of them is the community. Sitting down to a good meal with a pile of friends is one of the best experiences in life. Everything becomes a bit warmer, everyone a bit more vivacious, more talkative. We move closer to share, to ask about each other’s food. Sharing food is a sign of trust, of care, of closeness.

And food tells us what we deserve. It is something we take for ourselves, something we should never question whether we deserve or not because it is the most basic thing that everyone deserves. It tells us that we have the right to take up physical space, to interact with things and people, to speak, to be in space. Food is our right to a body, and tells us we have the right to exist in the same space as others.

Perhaps my favorite part of food is the memories that it creates. Whenever I want to imagine my childhood and the things that made me happy about it, I imagine eating spaghetti. When I think of my current relationship, I see it in the story of meals that we’ve eaten together. Certain people I remember in the scent of food. Certain foods can reduce me to tears or laughter with their memories. I love how human food is for this reason. I love remembering.

I love food for these reasons. It is hard for me to say that I love food, but I love the experiences of food. Food is not something you’re supposed to love. You’re supposed to eat it for sustenance and health, but not for your soul. Well I call bullshit on that. Food is intimate: it is one of so very few things we put into our bodies, and we are certainly discriminatory about our sexual partners: why shouldn’t we give the same care and attention to our food? I love my food because it represents so much of the beauty of being human, so many of the deeper experiences, because there is so much to question, explore, and learn about how we come to have the food that we do.

I tell myself this over and over because women who love food are Bad. They are out of control. They are self-centered. I tell myself this because I have made myself an imperative. Taking care of myself against the messages that I have gotten that others are more important, that work is more important, that accomplishing is more important, that I can rest when I’m dead, that my happiness is secondary to what I create and accomplish has become my revolution. I am my oppressed minority, and eating is our protests, eating is our bombs, eating is our artwork and songs and stories and essays. “Eating is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of radical “ Audre Lorde. This quote is our mantra. Every beautiful thing I recognize about food as I put it in my mouth is another blow to every message that says “be less”. When men tell women that they exist as objects, I choose to eat something and TAKE ANOTHER BEING into myself. Objectify that. When people call me crazy and say that psychos are just making it all up, I eat my dinner and reflect again on how impossible that was a year ago and know I am stronger than anyone who has never thought twice about their dinner.

My very existence as someone who is mentally ill and female is a struggle to claim as my own. My food is the last symbol that I can choose what to do with my life and my body. When I stop choosing purposively to eat, how to eat, what to eat, and when to eat, I give up the most basic level of control and self-assertion I have. Food is my revolution when I allow myself to take up space, when I refuse to give up on my potential, when I connect myself to my family, to my memories, to my stories, when I write my own narratives, when I deeply experience the world. Food makes me more human. It forces me to recognize my humanity, on par with anyone else’s, no better and no worse. I don’t believe in God, but I believe in the power of food to connect people to each other. I believe in how fantastic food is.

Post Round Up

Hello all! You might have noticed that this blog has not been quite as active lately as it has been in the past. I’ve started a new job and I’m BUSY. I won’t neglect you all though, I promise. The other reason I haven’t been posting here quite as much is because I’ve also been busy across other parts of the internet. So here’s an update of what else I’ve been up to and where else you can read my work.

I’m really excited about a post I’ve got up over at Mental Health Talk right now. It’s about the experience of being in the middle of treatment for an eating disorder. It’s pretty personal and in-depth about the ups and downs of life while fighting a disorder.

A while ago I also wrote about porn over at The Quail Pipe. Yes I watch porn. Yes I’m going to tell you about it. Why? Because I’m sick of the idea that only men are sexual beings who get sexy.

You should also probably check out what will likely be my last post at Teen Skepchick, about the relationship between feminism and atheism for me. The reason it’s my last post is because I’m moving over to plain ol’ Skepchick! I couldn’t be more excited!!!!

And last but not least, my birthday is coming up real soon. Now usually I’m the queen of asking for EVERYTHING on my birthday, but not this year. This year I want one thing: I’m asking for donations to The Emily Program Foundation. The Emily Program is the place where I receive my eating disorder treatment, and overall I’ve had a pretty stellar experience there (as stellar as it can be to have all your coping mechanisms and safety blankets challenged). I love my providers and they treat me like a for reals human being instead of a problem. The Foundation does a lot of great stuff including scholarships for treatment, education, and Recovery Night. If you’re interested in donating, I’ve set up a fundraising page over at GiveMN (which is where I work now!). Consider sending something their way if you like my writing, because I would not be capable of all this if it weren’t for them.

That’s all for now kids!

Losing Reality

I haven’t spent much time on this blog, or really much of anywhere talking about body image. Obviously I think about it: I don’t like my body and I never have. I have issues with my body that I take out on it through violence and starvation. But body image is simply not one of the aspects of my eating disorder that I find fruitful to write about, and generally when I bring it up in person I just get frustration and straight out disagreement from my audience. While I understand the impulse to tell me “YOU’RE WRONG” when I call myself ugly, there are times when I want to be able to express and explore my feelings about my body without being immediately shut down. This is one of those times. This exploration may not have a clear point, but I think it’s important to give voice to the thoughts and feelings that are a part of the disorder.

 

Lately my bad body image has been acting up quite badly. I’ve increased my food intake and put on a bit of weight. This means discomfort in my clothes, discomfort in the mirror, discomfort when I eat. But the worst part of it is that when I worry about my body image, I often find that I cannot accurately identify reality.

 

No, this does not mean that I hallucinate. I don’t see my body growing larger before my eyes, I can tell that I’m smaller than many people. However despite all this, I cannot understand what the truth is about my body: is it acceptable or not? Is it too skinny or not skinny enough? Is it healthy, or do I need to lose weight or gain weight? Now most people would find it fairly easy to figure out the answers to these questions by consulting a doctor, by looking at their weight in numbers, by assessing their current diet and activity level, and generally thinking about how they feel in their skin. However when I do these things I am left with strong evidence for mutually contradictory things. The scale tells me that my BMI is a certain number. That number is within the healthy range. Certain magazines tell me that the number is unacceptably high. My dietician tells me it’s acceptable but that I’m still not getting enough calories and need to increase my intake. My eyes and emotions tell me that my body is hideous and fat and horrible. My mind flicks between sources, trying to decide who is the most right, who I should believe, what combination of sources are right, where reality is.

 

It’s enough to leave anyone feeling as if they’ve completely lost their grip on reality. When that happens, all I can do is meltdown. When you don’t know what reality is, you don’t know how to proceed. You are left with no appropriate steps. When faced with a meal in this state, every choice feels wrong and every choice feels right. It leads me to a deep feeling of self-hatred that I cannot figure out even the most basic question of whether or not to put food in my mouth. The reason my body image drives me up the wall is not just because it’s bad. It’s easy when it’s just bad. What’s hard is when it disconnects me from any sort of rational thinking. For someone who prides themself on intelligence, skepticism, and clear-headedness, it destroys my concept of self.

 

It leaves me feeling like my concept of myself is a battleground between different messages of what’s appropriate and what’s not. I don’t want to live in a battleground. I don’t want to live in this body.

Fiction Round Up

It’s been a while since I’ve graced you all with anything other than essays (I sound so full of myself don’t I? Don’t worry, it’s all an act to hide the insecurities I feel about my writing), and so I figured that today would be a good day to put up the bits and pieces I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. Some are drabbles, some are poems, some are…God knows what, but here they are for your amusement.

 

Solstice

Midsummer in the North is surreal. I watch the sky like I’d eye a Dali painting, wondering if something will melt under the impossible sun. I came here to escape. I came here for dark and silence, for the endless cold stretching out before me as if I could see it. I came here because at night I forget. But today there is no night, only days and days contained in 24 hours. It is incomprehensible, this solstice of the pole. It is maddening. I look up at the heavens and yell curses at the sun that refuses to set.

 

 

Pain

They asked her how bad the pain was on a scale of 1-10. She replied that it was an 8. Physical pain or emotional pain they wanted to know. They seemed very serious, as if the answer would change everything.

Without warning, she burst out laughing, and they looked at each other to silently say “72 hour hold”. There was no mind left to this one.

When she caught her breath there were small tears seeping from the edges of her eyes. Her face caught some of their seriousness and they looked at her expectantly.

“You think there’s a difference?”

 

There’s a loneliness to it that you can’t understand until you’ve stood before someone

Claiming they love you

And asking you to climb Everest on a broken leg.

There’s a distance placed between you

That is uncrossable until you’ve gotten the passport stamp of depression.

I try to yell across to you

And give you the details of the landscape

But all you get are echoed words, bits and pieces of a painting

That will never be whole.

The space distorts words.

There may be others with me, but we have no time for each other

Each too busy yelling across the void to someone or other

Wishing they could go home.

Someday I will make a camp here

And forget the other side.

Inviting each new person inside to warm themselves at my fire

And we’ll be together

Alone.

 

The following is a set of drabbles entitled “Food”:

First Day of Treatment

The bowl of pasta was large. It seemed to grow as she looked at it, drowning in alfredo sauce. Reluctantly, she picked up her fork and began to twirl the strands around it. It was a painstakingly slow process. Fork to bowl. Turn. Pick up noodles. Mouth. Chew. Swallow. By the time she was halfway through it was cold, the sauce congealed. How would she finish? She felt eyes heavy on her as she took yet another bite, her stomach already churning. But she couldn’t stop: they were watching. But she knew how to fix it: fingers down the throat.

Love

When he speaks about food, he is intense. She rarely sees him like this otherwise, leaning forward, eyes sparkling, hands gesturing madly. She understands his passion; food can turn her into a different person too, but it’s the love affair with it that makes no sense. It excites her though. She finds herself making up excuses to eat with him, to spend money she doesn’t have on beautiful dinners. She listens with unblinking eyes when he talks, trying to capture the essence of his speech. But every night after they eat together, she goes home to pinch at imagined fat.

Binging

She’s hungry. So often she forgets to feel hungry, or convinces herself it’s something else, but today she feels empty and it is undeniable. There is a gnawing, pulling, dark sensation at the very bottom of her, telling her that nothing will satisfy. She searches for the cure: meat and potatoes, ice cream, comfort food, fascinating flavors, good company. No matter what goes in she remains hungry, until the desperation and calories blend into a shocking kind of nausea, but always an emptiness. Nothing will fill her, so she picks up her phone, hoping his voice will do the trick.

Life

He tells her stories of food. Aztec is his favorite. He tells her how bodies became food and food became bodies and the earth regrew itself out of the gods. Food and memory and existence wrapped together. Her favorite is when he teaches her words. Poutine. Macerate. Cassoulet. Her world expands. Some days he shows her how he likes to cook, dousing everything liberally with truffle salt. When they go to restaurants, he waxes rhapsodic about the foods he loves: oysters, pate, and wine. She tastes his words and his food and begins to eat life for the first time.

Empty Plate

Rule: never eat in the morning. It was 10:30 AM. They ordered a waffle to share. She took a few moments to try to observe it. There was fruit topping it, fresh and plump, but her eyes were drawn immediately to the sizeable heaping of whipped cream. The smell was forceful and immediate, sweet and full, almost golden. She breathed deeply, closing her eyes to take in only the scent. It smelled good. She reminded herself that it would taste good, she liked waffles. Five minutes later, there wasn’t a bite left. It was more than an hour before noon.

Victory

He pushes the plate towards me. I feel a flutter of uncertainty. Rabbit. I’ve never eaten rabbit before. He’s taken a bite of it, and his face tells me that he just ate a bit of rabbit-flavored heaven. Something in me snaps and I grin, pulling the plate closer. A deep desire to be here in this moment, tasting the food before me, sharing the conversation around me, has left no space for anxiety. The rabbit looks juicy and tender, covered in some deliciously unknown sauce. One bite tells me it’s complex, balanced, intriguing. A smile flutters across my face.

 

 

I’m sitting and waiting. I don’t know what I’m waiting for, but I hope that someone will tell me soon. I don’t like to wait. My muscles clench and unclench. My jaw grinds away at itself. My eyes fall out of focus.

But boredom is the kiss of death. My mind has nowhere to go. It runs and grabs and discards ideas at spitfire speed. I begin a thought and it falls away as it’s devoured by something new. What where how do I think? My mind eats itself, a dog chasing its tail, Ouroboros.

I am no phoenix to grow again when I’ve fallen, and I wait. I rip open my fingers, biting at the skin. I chew on my lips. I crack my knuckles. Nothing ends and so nothing may begin.

Where is the exit?

My legs will not stand because I know the rules and someone will tell me what I’m waiting for.

I will not look away. I am eternal and eternally incomplete.

I am a constant reminder of loss.

Why is there no exit?

The Disgust of Dirty Food

Note: this post has a lot of thoughts packed together that have not been clearly pulled apart. I’m really intending to write more about this, and a lot of these thoughts are preliminary attempts to work through some ideas that I think are extremely important. Any insights are welcome.

 

In my DBT group we’ve been talking a lot about emotions recently: how to identify them, what they do for us, how to regulate them, etc. One of the emotions that we went over which was a little surprising to me was disgust. I suppose that somewhere in my mind I knew that disgust is an emotion, and actually a fairly common one, but as I looked at the prompting events of disgust, the physical symptoms of disgust, and the interpretations of disgust, I realized that disgust is a hugely important element of eating disorders, and that there is a wide body of literature that discusses some of the roots and backgrounds of disgust that never gets touched on in eating disorder treatment. It’s pretty clear that people with eating disorders often feel disgust towards themselves or disgust towards food, but what is disgust? Where does it come from? What purpose does it serve? And what can this tell us about eating disorders?

 

So what is disgust at its most basic? In general, disgust is the feeling we have towards things that might contaminate or poison us. Likely we evolved this feeling for a really good reason: to avoid things that would kill us if we ate or touched them. In many ways, disgust has to do with bodily boundaries. You want to keep the good things on the inside and make sure that the bad things remain on the outside. We are disgusted by things that break down our boundaries: things that can come in through our mouths or ears, things that come through our sexual organs, things that break our skin and leave us without a boundary, or things that can get inside our body through our skin in some fashion or other. The purpose of disgust is therefore beneficial: it can keep us safe from potential pathogens, from sexual fluids, or from things that may invade our bodies. We want to remain pure, because purity will keep us safe and keep our boundaries intact.

 

However disgust has expanded from these origins into moral and religious contexts. Particularly in the Abrahamic religions, this moral tint to disgust came from Judaic purity laws, which mixed together the disgust emotions of purity with other moral issues in order to strengthen both. Judaism extended conceptions of purity and boundaries from literal filth into things that they believed would keep them spiritually pure, as well as keep their society as a whole safe from contaminants. Holiness was equated with purity, because purity is health and safety. If you look at Leviticus or other law books in the Old Testament, most if not all the laws are about keeping different things from mixing together, or from keeping impure and bad things out. A clear example of this is that a woman on her period is expected to remain separate from the community, and anyone who touches her must ritually cleanse himself (Leviticus 5:19-20). In general, blood is considered a pathogen. It’s not something you want to touch. However in order to enforce that boundary, religious law was invoked to create an ethical and moral consequence to becoming impure.

 

So early religions often had purity concerns as a way to enforce this sense of disgust and keep individuals safe. However these purity concerns grew into much more than that, and they took the sense of disgust and expanded it to apply to anything that was considered unethical. Again however we see a lot of questions about purity. When someone lies, you are not likely to feel a whole lot of disgust (even if it’s about something pretty horrible). When someone is raped, or brutally murdered and mutilated, or even humiliated, we feel a great deal of disgust for the perpetrator. These are instances in which someone’s boundaries are violated, either literally with rape, or their body’s boundaries are destroyed in the case of mutilation, or their boundaries of self-respect and self-identity are violated in the case of humiliation. This might be part of the reason we find sexualized immorality more disturbing and disgusting than other sorts of violence or crime: because sexuality is nearly always associated with penetration of some sort.

 

So we have these conceptions of boundaries, and this idea that we need to keep certain things in and other things out, and when things get inside our boundaries or threaten our boundaries we feel disgust. What does this have to do with the disgust of an eating disorder? In my opinion, everything. Eating disorders are all wrapped up in the concept of disgust. If you’ve heard someone with an eating disorder talking about food or about how they feel after they eat, they tend to use words like sick, gross, icky, nasty. They are words that connote disgust. Many eating disorder patients act as if food is unsafe or will hurt them in some manner. These together seem to indicate that people who are avoiding food they deem disgusting to keep themselves safe are concerned with keeping their bodies pure.

 

Food is one of the few things in our lives that we have to put into our bodies. We feel disgust towards eating things that might be a danger to us, and many religions have put purity taboos on certain foods. Food is all wrapped up in questions of boundaries and what is acceptable to put into our bodies. Particularly in modern America, there is a narrative about good food/bad food, which paints certain foods as toxic. These could be foods with chemicals or foods with fats or foods with sugars, but the language around them generally labels them as poisonous. In conjunction with this, there exists the idea that women in general need to be pure. They need to be saintly. They must be morally good, sexually good, and they absolutely can’t let bad things into their system because it could ruin their beauty and worth. If you look at the sheer number of cleaning commercials aimed at women, you might have some indication of how cleanliness is apparently the basis of our self-worth.

 

For many people with eating disorders, the food becomes a question of worth, of morality, and of saintliness. The less you eat, the better you are as a person. The more saintly you are. The more pure you are. This rhetoric makes perfect sense in the context of disgust: we feel disgust at things that come inside us, at things that are foreign in our bodies. If you begin to identify food as something foreign that you can choose to let into your body or as something that you can keep out, you begin to think that you can keep yourself safe, just as religions with certain food rules do, by keeping the bad things outside of your body and by being in control of the boundaries of your body. That sense of bodily integrity is one of the most important feelings of control that we get as human beings. The most important thing we can control is how our body interacts with the world around us: what we put in it, how we keep others out. These are the most important for our safety, as well as for our sense of individual identity. When these things are violated, of course we feel disgust. And when you’re barraged with the idea that the world outside of you is dangerous, dirty, and bad, and that you need to be clean, this feeling of disgust can get out of control.

 

If an individual is feeling as though their boundaries are violated often, or they feel as if they have no control over the safety of themselves as an identity or as an individual, they may take radical action to make themselves feel safe by keeping out the bad. This can take the form of an eating disorder. And the feedback loop on it is strong: you feel disgust towards something, you don’t eat it, and you feel safe and secure because you didn’t die. This is also given a moral element by stories of asceticism. Keeping the whole world out of your body has come to be equated with spirituality, with purity, and with saintliness. It apparently makes you better than other people if you keep your body clean from anything associated with the world (because the world is dirty). Restricting taps into this cultural conception, and allows you to feel morally superior for every time you skip a meal. It also tells you that you’re protecting yourself from anything that is unclean or dirty.

 

We don’t often think of America as having a strong purity culture, and our purity rules are not clear: we have a variety of different rules that are not always consistent. It’s no surprise that many people feel confused about what is appropriate with food and purity. It’s no surprise that with all the shaming that happens around food, some people feel that the only way to be safe is to cut food out entirely.

 

I believe that there are important insights to be gained from the disgust towards our own bodies as well, and that these might have ties to sexuality, sexual morality, boundaries, and the world as dirty. I’m hoping to do two follow up posts to this one, on identity and purity, and on sexuality and purity.

The Meditation of Dance

This weekend I will be dancing. A lot. You probably won’t hear from me, and I may have to miss my Monday posts as well because I’ll be really tired. I am VERY EXCITED. Last night was the beginning of my magical dance weekend, and it was composed of three hours on a paddle boat on the Mississippi, dancing to live music. Mm mm good. But beyond just waxing rhapsodic about swing dancing (which I can do if anyone wants me to. Anyone?), I do actually have some thoughts about dancing, mindfulness, mental health, and eating disorders.

 

I’ve mentioned before that I’m in DBT therapy, and one of the elements of this therapy is mindfulness. We’re working on this piece right now in class, and so I’ve been practicing the skills of mindfulness: these are observing, describing, and participating. This may seem easy, but it’s not. First, observing is about noticing, about not missing what’s going on around you. Describing is about adding words to it, and simply saying what’s going on. Participating is the most difficult, because it’s about working yourself in to a situation without forcing it, without overthinking it. It’s the point in dancing where you are dancing without worrying or self-judging or analyzing, but simply dancing. Each of these three skills should be carried out non-judgmentally, one-mindfully, and effectively. This is about being fully present in the moment, about looking at facts rather than judgments, and about doing what you need to do in order to achieve your goals.

 

Last night I did a lot of practicing of these skills. In one dance in particular, later in the evening when I was getting tired, I high-school styled it up with my boyfriend (aaaaw yeah slow-dancing). I let the sounds around me happen without engaging with them. I let myself trust my body and his body, and let myself feel all of the movements he was making, and feel where my own weight was completely. I observed all of the sensations, and yet was entirely present and participating. Throughout the night, I found myself having to purposefully work to be non-judgmental as well as effective. The space was cramped (we were on a boat) and there was carpet, not a dance floor, so I absolutely was not dancing my best. But at some point in the night I made my peace with that, and I found myself much happier for it. I stopped judging whether I was following well, whether I was making a good impression on the out of towners, whether I was having awkward or awesome dances. Instead, I tried to figure out how to achieve my goal: have fun and relax. I did that by simply being where I was and doing what I was doing.

 

Dancing to me is the essence of mindfulness. You cannot dance properly without the right balance of observing and participating. There is always some element of your brain that’s going, making sure your body is listening, making sure you’re aware of those around you, however you always have to be fully present, participating, and one-mindful. You can only be doing one thing while you dance and that’s dancing. The moment your mind starts to wander you’re screwed. And yet you’re always aware of how to make your movements more effective. You’re always striving to get better and reach some goal. The balance of this is that you have to remain non-judgmental, both towards yourself and your partner. When the voice in your brain starts telling you that you’ve screwed up or starts making nasty comments about your partner, all your effectiveness, one-mindfulness, ability to participate, dancing ability, and joy in dancing dissipate. I mean IMMEDIATELY.

 

Because of this ability of dance to promote mindfulness, I think it’s a good practice for everyone to try at least a few times. It’s one of the few things that really forces you to be mindful (even without your consent sometimes). But there’s another element of this mindfulness of dancing that has struck me lately, particularly this morning when I ran across this article.  It describes a study in which anorexia patients were treated with dance therapy. Now I’m most familiar with eating disorders and the symptoms and problems of eating disorders, however I suspect that anorexia patients are not the only people in our society who have some difficulties connecting with their bodies, feeling comfortable using their whole bodies, touching others and being touched, trusting someone else with their body, accepting the weight and size and reality of their body, or moving sensually. Because of these things, this kind of treatment could be extremely beneficial for all sorts of people, but again, I’ll be focusing on eating disorders because it’s what I’m familiar with.

 

Overall the study wasn’t horribly conclusive (it was small), but it did suggest that over time the patients became more comfortable with their bodies. Now I can speak from experience and say with absolute certainty that if it weren’t for dancing I would have nowhere near the awareness of my body that I do, the sense of identity with my body that I do, the ability to try new movements with my body, or the comfort that I’m gaining with trusting others while I dance. I still have a long ways to go in terms of these things, but every time I dance, and particularly every time I dance mindfully, I can feel myself gaining these skills.

 

There is an element of contradiction in having an eating disorder, which is that the only connection with your body that you’ve allowed yourself is exercise, however you have to learn how to connect to your body again and one of the best ways to do that is movement. That movement has the potential to lead back into exercise and the disease, or it has the potential to help improve your life. The difference is the mindfulness. The difference is whether you allow yourself to observe what your body is doing, how it’s moving, and to simply participate in it. When we dance, if we resist what is happening, we are resisting our own bodies, our own momentum. If we trust what is happening, we learn that our body can be trusted.

 

Another interesting element of dancing is that it can allow you to be sensual and connected with your body without being sexual. For many people sexuality is scary. It is not the best place to start with trusting your body and becoming comfortable in your body. It’s more vulnerable than we’re comfortable with. However our society is not very good at non-sexual touching, or trusting someone with your body in a non-sexual manner. Again, this is all about mindfulness. It’s about participating without judgment. When you judge something, you are taking the facts and adding something to them: either good or bad, some sort of conclusion. A touch is just a touch. Someone’s hand on your back is just someone’s hand on your back. In the context of larger society, touch means a lot more. In dance-land, that’s all it has to mean. You are allowed to safely be non-judgmental.

 

All of this comes with the caveat of dancing in a safe space. Some places are not safe. Some places have creepers, people who will cop a feel, people who will dance forcefully and painfully with you. But when you dance in a place with people you trust to treat your body respectfully, you can gain a great deal of self-knowledge, particularly about how your body moves, how you relate to your body, and how your body relates to others. From personal experience, this can be integral to reconnecting with your body and moving forward in treatment. But it can also be beneficial for anyone who wants to learn how to be more present in each moment, who wants to be less judgmental, and who wants to practice being mindful in context. It’s a wonderful way to practice letting thoughts go and refocusing your mind on the task at hand so as to be able to participate.

How Do We Talk About Eating Disorders?

I’m currently working on a post for Teen Skepchick about eating disorders in a cross cultural perspective. At the moment, I’m just in the research stage of this post, so I’m reading a lot about the research that’s been done about cross cultural eating disorders and about the differences in symptoms, causes, and etiology of eating disorders in different cultures.

And I have to say that I am deeply upset by the way we talk about eating disorders. I am particularly upset because I’ve been reading academic articles, pieces by graduate students studying psychology, and other articles that are surveys of the literature on eating disorders. These should be held to the best standards we have. Unfortunately, no matter where I look (except for in very particular blogs written by people with eating disorders, particularly Science of Eating Disorders), I hear the same things over and over and over again:

“When we expose our girls to thin models and beauty ideals they develop eating disorders”

“Girls of African American descent aren’t likely to get an eating disorder because their culture values voluptuous bodies”

“Eating disorders only crop up in other countries as they become infiltrated by Western beauty ideals”

I am SO sick of the conversation around eating disorders being dominated by conversations about models and images of women in the media and the desire to be thinner. It cannot be that difficult for people to understand this, but I’ll say it again: an eating disorder is a mental illness. It is not a diet. It is not even an extreme diet. It is not a desire to lose weight. It is a coping mechanism to deal with difficult things in your life that you can’t cope with otherwise.

There is VERY little evidence that eating disorders are caused by skinny models. What there IS evidence of is that eating disorders are caused by low self-esteem, family disruption, trauma, other mental illnesses (depression, anxiety, OCD, BPD, bipolar, and addiction are common), abuse, or other difficult situations that you need a way out of. It is such a cliche by now that eating disorders aren’t about food, but I cannot stress it enough: eating disorders aren’t about food! They aren’t about looking pretty or beautiful. I have YET to meet someone with an eating disorder who says they just want to be pretty. I hear them say that they’re depressed, that they can’t cope, that they’re lonely, that they don’t feel acceptable when they’ve eaten, that they feel out of control around food, or that they use food to numb out emotions and manage other parts of their lives.

It is not helpful to keep refocusing the conversation on how someone’s body looks and the beauty ideals. This continues to reinforce them as what’s important, and it focuses the issues on the body again, instead of addressing whatever mental stress has occurred. It simplifies the matter to a point that is unhelpful, and makes treatment and self-understanding very difficult because it doesn’t allow us to reach the real etiology of the disease. It even reinforces those negative suggestions that a woman’s worth is in the beauty standards she does or does not strive to live up to.

Instead of these things, it would be far more helpful to talk about the sexism that makes women feel inadequate no matter what they do, or the bad family systems that don’t allow for good communication or healthy emotions, or the abusive relationships that many women are in, or the trauma and depression of daily life, or the failure of our mental health system to provide us with good coping techniques for when we do start to feel over our heads. If we want to talk about cross cultural eating disorders, maybe we should talk about the different family roles that exist, the different expectations of women in different cultures, the common mental illnesses in those cultures, the differences in guilt and shame in different culture (these feelings are huge in eating disorders), and the relationship that these cultures have to food as symbolic, relational, or positive.

Eating disorders are mental illnesses. They are not an attempt to be skinny. They are not a reaction to the media. They are not the desire to look like a model. They are serious. They are life-threatening. They are painful. They come with depression, constant mental stress, trauma, self-hatred, difficulty with relationships, isolation, loneliness, feelings of guilt and inadequacy, and all sorts of things that ARE NOT simply reactions to the media, but are about how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to others. Can we please start talking about them in terms of the mental situation of the individual suffering, because that is what makes something a mental illness?