fromjunia

There’s a euphemism bandied around in online eating disorder spaces as a cute explanation for when someone questions their eating habits: weird with food. It turns disordered behaviors into a quirk that can be overlooked. As a way of handling those awkward questions, it works well.

I think people get weird with food when they don’t handle well the realization that food is weird. This realization isn’t always conscious, but it does seem to be universal in people with eating disorders. Food holds a special place in the psyche. We are dependent on it from birth. Food connects us to culture, spirituality, and the rest of nature. Eating or failing to eat produces changes, both subtle and not-so-subtle, in cognition and experience. Our lives are oriented around food, whether we like it or not. Living with the knowledge of this can drive some people a little whacky.

The 2022 movie The Menu provides a remarkably clear example of this. Near the beginning you receive these two quotes:

“Over the next few hours you will ingest fat, salt, sugar, protein, bacteria, fungi, various plants and animals, and, at times, entire ecosystems. But I have to beg of you one thing. It's just one. Do not eat. Taste. Savor. Relish. Consider every morsel that you place inside your mouth. Be mindful. But do not eat. Our menu is too precious for that.” – Chef Slowik

“Chefs, they play with the raw materials of life itself. And death itself… I've watched him explain the exact moment a green strawberry is perfectly unripe. I've watched him plate a raw scallop during its last dying contraction of muscle. It's art on the edge of the abyss, which is where God works, too. It's the same.” – Tyler

When I first watched The Menu, I identified with the kitchen staff, probably to an unhealthy degree. Many restaurant workers do. The Menu is cathartic, a “fuck you” to the people who don’t take our work seriously and a brilliant satire of us for taking our work too seriously.

This message hit differently on my latest re-watch, as did Margot’s role in the movie. Margot is the only one in the movie who is normal about food.

Chef Slowik: What about my food is not to your liking?

Margot: For starters, you've taken the joy out of eating. Every dish you served tonight has been some intellectual exercise rather than something you want to sit and enjoy. When I eat your food, it tastes like it was made with no love.

Chef Slowik: Oh, this is ridiculous. We always cook with love. Everyone knows love is the most important ingredient.

Margot: Then you're kidding yourself. Come on, Chef. I thought tonight was a night of hard home truths. This is one of them. You cook with obsession, not love. Even your hot dishes are cold. You're a chef. Your single purpose on this Earth is to serve people food that they might actually like, and you have failed. You've failed. And you've bored me. And the worst part is I'm still fucking hungry.

Margot foregrounds two key observations: First, the difference between loving food and obsessing about it. Second, the core point of food is to feed you. Food does a lot of things, but it fails at its purpose if it doesn’t sate hunger. The other characters had, in turns, made food into a popularity contest, a financial matter, a status marker, and something not worth valuing. Food had become disjointed from its purpose, and when that happens, everything falls out of place.

You can see why The Menu hit differently on my latest rewatch. The entire movie is people being lethally weird about food.

I have always been weird about food. I was raised to value food early on in my life. But at some point it stopped being love and started being obsession, and that obsession has only gotten more extreme over time. The edge of the abyss was how I regulated my emotions, and when put that way, you’ve got to think there must be a better way to regulate emotions than that.

I think it’s okay to be a little weird about food, because that means you understand that food is weird. Just try not to be weird with food. Nothing good comes from that.

The more people try to fix me, the less I think fixing me will fix things. I am broken: anorexia, bipolar, trauma. Broken things get fixed: Cyproheptadine, lamotrigine, mirtazapine; UT, DBT, art therapy. I have so many people trying to fix me. At last count, a dozen. I pay a lot for that. I’m pretty lucky to be a project for a dozen people. I should be fixed in no time.

You would think that. Except every statistic indicates otherwise, and my experiences track. Maybe I can be fixed. But maybe I can’t. And if I can, it will probably take a long time. A long time of people trying to fix me. A long time being told I’m broken. A long time not being enough.

Will a long time of not being enough fix me?

I don’t think I want to be fixed. I want to be helped. I want to be met on my terms, not theirs. I want to make art about my experiences and not be told it’s wrong. I want to be given vocabulary to speak my experiences, not be told I can’t share them. I want to be a person again. I want to feel alive.

Stop trying to fix me. I need help, but I’m not broken. I want support, guidance, language, ideas, and empathy; not regulation, management, monitoring, supervision, and condescension. And I don’t want to be told that fixing my broken soul is help. No, you can’t fix me, but you can help me.

Please, please, help me.

Everything you do matters. There is not a breath you take which doesn’t make the world a better place. Every act of creativity, every kindness you do, every drop of compassion you feel fixes a shattered world, piece by piece. Humans are beautiful beings remarkably capable of mending what’s broken in a way that makes it better than it was before.

Have you ever looked at a starry sky and marveled at the specks of light unimaginably far away? Have you ever been dazzled by skyline city lights? Have you ever walked among the trees and listened to birdsong? Have you ever been awed by the capacity to build skyscrapers and organize cities? You introduced feeling to a universe that wouldn’t feel that without you.

Carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen don’t feel, but you do. Carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen can’t appreciate themselves or each other, but humanity produced chemists who dedicate their lives to doing so. Humanity produced physicists who study the behavior of the gasses that these elements compose. Humanity produced children awed by elementary science experiments, demonstrating the foundations of existence. Humanity introduces so much good.

We strive, and struggle, and reach great heights, and fix problems, and astound ourselves with what we achieve.

It is unfortunate, then, that we will lose this all. Everyone we love and everyone who loves them will die. Every ripple we make will become irretrievably subsumed in the sea of consequences we fill. Entropy will destroy everything we build and the coldness of the universe will overcome every degree of warmth we generate. It is sad because what we’ve done and made matters. It is a tragedy.

Knowing tragedy is always impending doesn’t change the goodness of what we do. It means we’re on the clock. We have limited time to enjoy life and be there for each other. The situation is urgent. The fire is coming and it will consume everything; love now and love deeply.

You lose in the end, so win now, while you still can.

Unitarian Universalism teaches of the interdependent web. That every action revibrates widely to every other person, that no action is isolated either in cause or effect. In other words, responsibility is distributed, and there are no bystanders.

If I am caught in this web, how responsible can I be for my anorexia? I have felt that I am completely responsible. I chose to go along with it.

This teaching challenges me to reconsider that feeling. What was everyone else doing? How did society fail to protect me? How did it encourage me? How did my family contribute? What strings attached to me pulled me to Ana? I walked some of the way, but I was pulled too.

I do not feel I can care about being pulled, because I cannot control that. If responsibility is distributed then it is not mine, and if most of my life is me being pulled then my primary response is to feel and respond to those feelings. That strikes me as useless, because I become a responder and not an agent. The interdependent web is the rejection of my agency as articulated through atomistic models. But the trauma-informed—the factual—account is that my body is not a primary agent, and that it acts at a magnitude that dwarfs my ego. My ego seeks safety through agency. I’ve seen how that safety plays out.

The weird thing is that my ego-safety is not the important safety. It matters, but not as much as bodily-felt safety. And, unfortunately, I can’t independently act to secure my way to body-safety. I have to rely on others. I am vulnerable. That’s a fact that my body feels, no matter what my ego wants.

Maybe it’s self-confirming, but the interdependent web seems like another mark for pessimism. I need safety, and I cannot secure it on my own. I am vulnerable to the actions of others, no matter what I do, same as everyone else. We need things we cannot guarantee. And we’re an ego stapled to an animal body, where most the happenings occur in the body and the ego constantly struggles to find its place. The reality of being a human is bleak.

But pessimism is the truth that sets us free from the idolatry of the future, and it does so again here. There is no future where I can be invulnerable. Ana is an optimist: She says there can be a secure future through metering intake and narrowing the scope of the world to control of my body. No, that’s a lie. Ana can’t provide me safety. I am interdependent with every other soul. I am now, and always will be, vulnerable, and nothing I do can change that. I can only respond to it.

My body is soft again

No longer hard and jagged

or piercing and jutting out

Bones enclosed by fat and flesh

‎‎‎⠀

My body is soft once more

It once was softer than this

A body of rolling hills

A safe place to be and live

⠀

My body had become sharp

Angular, a frame of spikes

Uncomfortable and feared

A home I ran away from

⠀

I am not comfortable

But I’m no longer unsafe

Failure of a skeleton

A nightmare of flesh and fat

⠀

I will be free of that dream

Of a skeletal escape

I will rest in my body

My pillowy and warm home

I wish we could be friends

Partners in life and death

A high life in your arms

A slow death by your hands

⠀

I cannot be with you

You will not be my end

I am better than this!

I cannot allow you

⠀

I will shatter your chains—

I will refuse your lies—

I will grow beyond you—

You do not own my soul.

⠀

Ana, my confidant,

My sickness unto death,

My dry land in deep sea,

My pride and my refuge

⠀

I am better than you,

But maybe not by much

I will escape your love

With sadness and regret

⠀

I will shatter your chains

And wonder why I did

That has to be enough

I can give only that

---

I hate my fucking body

I wish I was only bones

My bones are smothered by flesh

Flesh that betrays my spirit

⠀

Every meal slowly kills

Degeneration of soul

Loss of perfected control

Loss of a body beloved

⠀

This body is a prison

This flesh encaging my bones

Binding me to this world

Reminding me of my life

My poor, lost guardian angel. She has no greater goal in life than to protect me, but she only hurts me. What a sad existence! Confused and misguided, she doesn’t understand why I put a distance between us. She exists only for my good. She mourns the distance.

My poor, hurt guardian angel. How could she not be mad? How could she not be confused? I was on her side, and then I wasn’t. How could she not be sad? I ignore her and feel misery and pain. I prove her point daily.

My poor, godless guardian angel. She wants to be my seraphim, singing my praises. Why would I turn that down, that glory of deification? She wants that for me, and I, incredibly, refuse it. I am unbelievable. To turn down godhood is insane. I am insane for ignoring her. She was assigned to a madwoman. What a horrible fate for her and for me.

My poor, chained guardian angel. Shackled and pleading, she begs to help me. She doesn’t understand why she is restrained. She only ever wanted to help. Why don’t I appreciate her? Why don’t I let her help?

Why don’t I love her?

I think I’m learning to, just not in the way she’d like. She works so hard to keep me safe, and I appreciate that. But she’s lost. I can’t follow her anymore. And that hurts so bad, because she’s been so loyal and, in truth, pure-hearted. Not pure good, but pure. Clean, in a way. Simple. No one else is so honest.

My heart hurts for my poor, sad guardian angel.

I have had strong emotions about my eating disorder. Most of the time, it’s been either love or hate. I was either in a honeymoon-like period of gleefully indulging my dear friend Ana, or I was hating her guts. I spent most the time hating her guts. It kept me going.

In recovery, they talk about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is doing it for yourself and extrinsic for other people, maybe loved ones, maybe community, maybe specific individuals you don’t want to let down. Eating disorder recovery leans on those extrinsic motivators because they are the only things that will keep you going when you feel more honeymoon and less hate.

For me, hate has been the big emotion that fueled my intrinsic motivation. Hating Ana, hating what she does to my life and my body. I deserve better, and she’s keeping me from what I deserve. Hate, disgust, vitriol, rage. It got me up in the morning and drove me to treatment when otherwise I’d have no energy.

That leaves me in a funny place now. For the first time, I feel compassion towards my eating disorder. I feel compassion towards Ana.

I did an exercise at Renfrew yesterday. Part of it had me write down a list of as many qualities of the eating disorder that I could. Then, I took a marker and blotted out the ones I’d like to be rid of. The next step of the activity was to show how what was left over—the things I like about my ED—were not extricable from the things I don’t like. I gotta let it all go, the exercise claimed. I ran in a different direction, though. I asked my eating disorder, why can’t you just be these nice things? Why can’t you just be disciplined, driven, loyal, comforting, familiar, and safe—the things I like about my eating disorder? Why do you have to be abusive, competitive, relentless, unforgiving, denigrating, and demeaning, too?

The answer to that, after a bit of searching, was that it wouldn’t have been protective then. It wouldn’t have done its job of numbing me to the scary and hurtful things in the world. It wouldn’t have narrowed my focus to something I could control. It wouldn’t have helped me when I called on it for help.

And that’s why it can’t give up those qualities, now. Because it is trying to keep me safe in the only way it knows how. It’s a pretty fucked up way, to be sure. If I follow its version of safe, it’ll kill me. But it’s all in pursuit of protecting me from a world I don’t entirely feel capable of living in.

Why can’t I let Ana go altogether? Because, right now, that feels like jumping blind off a cliff. Many reasons to think that wouldn’t go well and few to think that it would. Of course my hatred hasn’t gotten me there yet. I can hate the ground beneath my feet but that doesn’t mean I think jumping is a better idea.

Hatred and love have immediate answers. I sometimes get more motivated to eat when Ana starts mouthing off in my head. Hate fuels me. Or I get less motivated to eat. Love pulls. Compassion is harder. Compassion makes me look at myself and asks me if I feel safe enough to both let Ana say what she wants and eat what I will. Compassion says if I don’t, then that’s okay. My eating disorder is a response to feeling unsafe and insecure in my life, and feeling safe and secure are psychological needs. If I can’t avoid disordered eating habits, then the next step isn’t to rev up the hate engines; it’s to find ways to shore up that sense of safety and security so I can keep moving towards recovery. And that can take time.

My intrinsic motivation has often been “I deserve better than this,” said with venom in my tongue and an immediate imperative. Now it might have to be “I deserve better than this,” said with gentleness and a bigger picture in mind than the immediate pain. I don’t know what that looks like in the moment-to-moment.

What I do know is that when compassion is in the foreground, love loses power. There are three places “my eating disorder protects me” could go. The first, hate, is against myself: I am weak for needing this. The second, love, is against the world: I am able to enjoy living in a hostile world because of this. The third, compassion, turns that energy against neither and directs it towards recovery: I have needed this in the past, and if I need it right now then that means I still have room to make myself feel safer. I can still slide between the three, but compassion saps the energy from the other two better than they sap from each other. Compassion is a more stable base for long-term action.

So now I feel sympathy for the devil. Not where I expected things to go, but I’m not sure I can escape now. God damn my big heart.

My care team doesn’t understand me. They pretend they do. But they offer sympathy, not compassion. Textbook dialogue and sterile warmth; there is no soul behind their surgical reassurance. I swear, I can see it in their eyes. They understand too little and say too much.

They place me in hell and call it health. Progress to them is that I suffer in new ways. That suffering is my problem, not theirs. I’m left miserable while they feel proud of what a good job they did in helping me return to the arms of my fears and pains.

Other disordered people get it. Not everything, and not all the time, but enough. I love them. They understand the safety that an eating disorder offers. They understand the pain of trying to separate from it. My clinicians? They learned from words. Words lie. They follow a shadow of a scientist’s interpretation of my situation. Disordered people actually know the reality.

I know who you are. You’re just like me. Within five minutes of meeting you, I have read you. Weak, scared, so put together. Fragile, resilient, stressed, a god on earth. Intelligent, a failure, a success, powerful. I could hurt you, if I wanted to. I could try to make you feel safe.

Do you know who I am too? Fake, honest, scared, brave, weak, strong, terrified? Can you hurt me? You act so kind. How awful. I know you know me. Stop lying to me. Come for blood already. Give me a reason to fight. Give me a reason to mistrust you. Why do you trust me? The moment I met you I thought of how I could hurt you. I know you did too. Don’t lie to me. Don’t pretend you’re any different. We’re the same. Stop lying!

I smell your blood in the water and it’s driving me insane. You shouldn’t trust me, but you do. I shouldn’t trust you, but I do. We’re both fools.

---

Important note: The following is about my anorexia, not an actual person.

How am I supposed to make piece with the bitch? She’s trashing my life. She’s cratered my self-esteem. Harmed my body and my relationships. See her benefit? Appreciate her purpose? Her purpose is to drag me to hell. Compassion, compassion. “Self-compassion.” She doesn’t feel like my self. She feels like an alien. Why should I feel compassion for a demon intent on killing me?

No, I hate her. I want her to die. I want to rip her from my soul and into pathetic little pieces. I want to humiliate her and stomp her into the dirt. I hate her.

Perhaps the only thing I hate more than her is that I like her. I hate that sometimes I even need her. I hate myself for befriending her. The only one more vile than her is me, because a demon has no choice but to be malicious, but I chose to kneel before her.

Compassion. Nobody in this story deserves compassion. Pitiful, sad souls.