I’ve written a good deal about my history of disordered eating both here on the blog and elsewhere — so much so that it sometimes feels like it’s all I write about anymore.
But there’s a reason. There are a couple of reasons, actually, but the one I’m thinking about today is the fact that ED affects so much more than the amount of food you put into your system.
Eating disorders are generally seen as a specialist’s issue — and unless you’re emaciated, they’re rarely seen as issues at all. I went for three years without having a period on my own, often running so dry I couldn’t even have one after a course of progesterone. But I was never “underweight” (and, in fact, barely dipped low enough to fit into the “normal” BMI category), so my doctors just shrugged and sent me on my way. The problem couldn’t possibly be that I wasn’t eating enough.
Because as someone who was born into, and will always naturally live in, a fat body, my weight loss was seen as the opposite of a problem. My weight loss was an unquestionably positive thing — the most positive thing I’d ever done for myself. I thought so, too. And that’s because the project of shrinking myself was also the project of making myself fit better into what society expected of me: a picture of beauty and of good behavior as well as a what we (problematically) take to be a picture of health.
When you’re so bent on people-pleasing you’re willing to forego one of your basic animal needs, it’s that much harder — if not completely impossible — to self-actualize on higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy, particularly if authentic self-actualization includes further societal infractions.
My eating disorder denied me so many things — connecting with loved ones and trying foods in new countries and spending a decade of mornings doing anything other than sweating for two fraught hours. But perhaps the worst thing my self-starvation denied me was my own personality and agency. It kept me from acknowleding and embracing critical parts of my psyche for a long goddamn time, and from fully understanding and embracing the queer identity I’d been flirting with for my entire adult life.
But now, I’m doing that work. And writing about it. And I’m writing this blog post to invite you to go read that writing, which has been picked up by Human Parts on Medium.
I should probably also say that this essay is fairly graphic and TMI-y, but if you’ve been following me for a while, you know that’s pretty standard. (And also: this particular matrix of realizations and movements has unlocked some magic in my life I didn’t really know was possible… but I think that might be the subject of another, much gooier, blog post.)
On that note: Happy Valentine’s Day!