I Can't Eat My Feelings. I Have Too Many.

I am going to start all of my entries with triumphs, no matter how small. This morning's triumph, after dropping off the kids I nanny at camp, was making breakfast as soon as I got home instead of crawling back into bed like I wanted to. A couple of fried eggs over avocado, tomatoes, and onions kept me from spending all my free time today curled up in bed, overthinking, and playing Two Dots.

When I do that, it also means I forget to eat until late afternoon, if I remember at all. So now that I've had this triumph, my intention is to make it part of my daily routine. Got that, Autumn? First tangible goal: eat a healthy breakfast every day.

I am going to write a full post on body image and all of the issues that spin off of that, but for now I'll just write a bit about my troubles with eating. I have a pretty fucked up history with food, going back to childhood. We had a lot of rules and admonitions about food in our house, but nobody was modeling healthy habits. Our mother had struggled with weight and body image her entire life, and as it so often happens, she handed down her insecurities to my sisters and me. Her fear that her daughters would be fat virtually guaranteed we would be. I love my mom and miss her dearly, and I will write later about her too, but she was not kind to us about how we looked. One of the most damaging things she ever did wasn't even directed at me, but I definitely still carry the shrapnel that ricocheted in my direction.

On Easter one year when we were young teens, one of my sisters picked up a jellybean from a candy dish. One jellybean, from a candy dish in our house, on Easter. As my young sister raised it to her mouth, our mother spat "If you eat that you'll never have a boyfriend."

Talk about a sentence that stops you in your tracks. We were babies then, but that sentence still stops me cold more than two decades later. Sometimes I binge and eat everything in sight. Other times I just look at food and play those words in my head and fully, deeply believe them. I know they aren't true. I've had boyfriends. These days I am more interested in having a girlfriend, and somehow those words hit me even harder now. I can feel that piece of shrapnel move, stabbing me with what has come to be the certainty that my mother was right. Sometimes it leads me to go a day without eating. Sometimes more. One time, which I will expand on in another post, I didn't eat for three weeks.

There are a lot of spokes on the wheel that is my fucked up body image, but this is the hub that connects them all. This is the seed that planted them. I have tried both fighting and indulging it, but I'm just too tired to keep doing it. If I keep eating my feelings, one way or another I'll starve to death.

#bodyimage #eatingdisorders #foodissues #breakfast #triumph