Mouth full and crumbling bones

I think of myself as an intelligent woman, a person of character, a woman of depth and understanding. Pry my mind open, and you will find it stuffed to the brim with my favorite books, books that garner controversial opinions because of dark and gruesome subject matter or an insufferable main character. You will find that these books lie on a soft spot in my brain, something in me that marvels at horror, at depravity, at conversations unspoken and unspoken rules broken. If you keep digging, you will find half-finished movies and TV shows, some simply put on hold due to lack of time, others because though I can binge a couple hundred pages in a day, the penultimate season of a show can put me to sleep. Do not ask me why, I do not know either. Peer into the crevasses of my mind, you will find French music on loop, and ever since I discovered La Femme, their songs have been rewinded and fast-forwarded and paused and played but never skipped, and even though my French is elementary at best, I find myself humming along to Dans la nuit froide je pleure des larmes de glace… 

Take your hands and sift through my memories. Feel the laughter in the palm of your hands, the tears staining underneath your fingernails. In between the French lyrics and my favorite copy of Milan Kundera, you will find arguments with my parents, drunken college nights with my best friends, jagged fragments of a broken heart that has been collecting dust after a couple of years, handfuls of to-do lists, birthday dates, vacations, mathematical equations, passwords, and where I left my keys after coming home late last night.  If you stick only a finger into the depths of my mind, many, many thoughts and things will reach you. And though your finger may not be able to touch everything that exists in the ether of my consciousness, there are specific thoughts and emotions that lurk around every corner of my memories, that caress my favorite books, my songs on repeat, that brush up against the boxes of my checklist and snake in between the breath of every laughter and every sob. Everything I have experienced, everything I remember co-exists with a certain plague of thoughts that I can not seem to rid, and though I have tried many times to exterminate it, the more I resist, the more it draws attention to itself, the brighter a light it shines upon itself, the stronger of a chokehold it forces on my happy recollections, demanding to be addressed. 

Behind every date night, underneath every work meeting, in between the spaces of my weekends, I can not stop thinking about food, about the way I feel in my body, about exercise. Every Friday is bookended by the anxieties of fitting in a run or a workout on my Saturday mornings. I turn away late-night social gatherings in fear of not getting enough sleep because I have to wake up at a certain hour to cram in my long run before the day even starts. I spend my Sundays guilt-ridden every time I have a meal, with every snack break, because despite my growling stomach, Sundays are my rest days, and though deep down I know that rest is productive and beneficial for my well-being, I can’t help but feel as if I do not get to, deserve to eat because I did not move my body. My days are dictated by the quality of my exercise every morning, and God forbid I skip a day, I can forget about even feeling confident and comfortable in my own skin. Cleaning my plates after breakfast, I am thinking about what I should make for lunch, what I need to thaw for dinner, and what I should be eating for the rest of the week. I fret the nights I don’t spend at home, making my boyfriend now share the burden of my eating habits, and now the guilt is even heavier than before. 

I have come a long way since before, when my best friend after a meal was my knees on the bathroom floor and the toilet bowl. I do not hate myself anymore, and if you could believe it, I am quite proud of how I look physically. I feel stronger than I have ever before, and I feel faster than I have ever been. And though I hate to admit it, this is due in part to my obsessive behavior over nutrition and exercise, and knowing this, knowing that my habits and discipline and fanaticism actually pay off, it is hard to break away from that mentality. But my God, I am exhausted. I am tired of every other thought being about food, about micromanaging every morsel I put in my mouth, the devil on my shoulder berating me for not getting enough steps, for not burning enough calories. I’m fatigued from always feeling pressured to choose the healthiest option on the menu at a restaurant, for worrying about protein intake and the ingredients label on any packaged good, for already knowing the exact number of Goldfish in a serving size and the number of calories in each. Somehow, I know too much and too little at the same goddamn time. 

Some people may view my extremism as applaudable self-discipline, that prioritizing health and exercise is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s a desirable trait, something that all of us should strive for. And in many ways, I do my best to play it off in that way, a nonchalance that disguises my panic and dread whenever I’m served a meal that goes against my perceived notion of what healthy is. Though I’ve learned not to restrict, not to undereat or binge, to stop calorie counting, the extent of my intuition stops there. I can easily have a slice of cake for dessert, but the minute my plate is clean, it’s like I can feel the grains of sugar rotting my teeth, a layer of fat slowly growing over the muscle in my legs I worked so hard for, the feeling of the waistband of my pants suddenly cinched too tight. I can eat with ease, but it’s the aftermath, the casualties and destruction after the fact that I can not seem to cope with. It is always followed by guilt, by regret, and by disappointment.

I wish I could let go. I wish I could learn to live in this body, be around food and alcohol, without being constantly haunted by calculations and negative thoughts. I wish I had a solution, a clear path of what to do and what not to do, but I know it is not that easy. I know it is not something my friends can truly help me with, nor my boyfriend, nor my parents, and despite the amazing support system I have in each one of them, it is a mental hurdle I must learn to overcome. I know the cliches: food is not my enemy, it’s fuel. Being able to move my body is a privilege. No one cares about you or what you look like as much as you do. I repeat these affirmations in my head like a mantra, a chant, a prayer, desperately hoping one of them will stick, somehow rewire my way of thinking. Most days, I feel like I’m shit out of luck. It’s a long road ahead, I know this. And I can try to suppress everything with my French lyrics and my Bret Easton Ellis books, but I know they will always be lurking, in the folds of my mind, in the holes in my consciousness.