Turning twenty was supposed to be especially important because 7 years ago, I thought I’d be dead before I hit two-oh.
There was a time in my life when I thought that I would kill myself before I’d live two decades. That life, at age twelve, had already proved itself not worth living.
My first memory of the thought: I was eight. I had snuck into the kitchen and stared at the knives, already wondering if living was worth it.
I’m not sure how to put into words exactly why. When you’re young and you feel the rest of the world is just so damn antagonistic, what can you do? Of course, I had actual reasons, but their meaning in my life has drifted away, sand on leaves.
So it’s pretty damn amazing to realize that, in the course of little over a one year or so, I’ve moved forward so far. It was March of last year. I had reached the end of a line and knew I had to change or die. To go from a self-hating-bulimic-anorexic-bingeing-self-harming-depressed-and-once-upon-a-time-suicidal ball of self-destruction to happy, content, full of confidence and love and unconditional acceptance for myself… what can I say? In the past I couldn’t have even dreamt such blessings and joy.
Still, I’m not there yet. I’ll never really be there, and to me, that’s what makes life worth living. Always moving forward, because there is no end. No end to this growing, this living, this loving.
I can always stand to love myself a little more each day. We all can.
“To be honest” is, if not my favorite, then my most overused way to start a sentence. I feel compelled to announce when I’m being “especially” honest. It’s my ironically boring way of making “confessions” with a sprinkle of spice.
To be honest, I’m absolutely terrified of talking on the phone. I’ve been working on this for what seems like forever. In high school, I would lie and say I lost my phone.. underneath my bed.. for several days. I prefer anything to communicating telephonically. I actually prefer talking to someone in person (most of the time) to any other way.
To be honest, I have no idea what I’m going to do, you know, for a living, for an extended period of time. And that uneasiness of where I’m headed is clouding my mind, my actions. I don’t know what to do now because I’m not sure what I’m even aiming for. What am I supposed to do in a situation like that? I live in the present, but the present determines the future, and I don’t know what future I want. I want to be … better. That’s it. Smarter. More responsible. Wiser. More clear-headed. Healthier. I should focus on that one first.
To be honest…
This story is unfinished. It always has been. And I’ve been feeling like maybe it’s almost even a little false at this point, because somewhere along the way, I did start binging again. And I did start feeling.. utterly confused as to why. And problems have come back.
I’ve been trying to avoid it, and I think that’s the problem. Clarity comes back to me when I feel like I’m really experiencing life, even if I’m just seeking inspiration in beauty of words and images and life as depicted by others. But lately, very recently, and for several months before that, I’ve been eating mindlessly. Truthfully, weight gain is the least of my concerns. I’m more upset about how helpless, hopeless, and nauseous I’ve ended up making myself feel day after day. I’m more concerned with the fact that I don’t seem to even know why I started, let alone how to stop.
I feel as if I haven’t walked in days, let alone climbed and hiked and enjoyed moving my body. I’ve felt sedentary and sick.
Also, painfully, I’ve realized I have a small appetite and a not-too-swift metabolism. No matter how much I want to, I can’t eat very much. I used to be self-conscious of this. And I used to eat more, a lot more than my stomach could even handle, in company just because I felt others projecting their own insecurities onto me when they saw how little I eat. Ironic that when I was anorexic and hungry, for the sake of achieving an impossible body type I wouldn’t eat at mealtimes even when I was starving. And ironic later that I began to eat more for the sake of making others more comfortable with themselves. That’s not my job. Don’t pressure me.
It’s been hard for me to accept that my metabolism isn’t lightning speed, that my stomach can only fit a little food at a time. I’ve forced my poor stomach to take in much more than it needs for a week… all at once, in a day. I’m getting better, though. Or, I was, until recently I started not even eating healthy food. (Not that just because it’s healthy means you should binge on it, et cetera…)
But I have to accept it. I can’t change it. I have to love that part of myself, too. I have to stop wishing I had a faster metabolism so I could eat more, more frequently. When I eat what my body needs when I’m hungry… I don’t eat much. I CAN’T eat that much. That’s one confession.
(Another thing I have to accept: Depression is a big part of my past life. Just because I’m unbelievably happy now doesn’t mean I can ever ignore that and, especially, not be mindful when it flickers in my life again, warning me to pay attention and stop taking myself and my life for granted.)
I brought my old journal back from the dead so I could read some of my past scattered writings (and retrieve old content for the Never Give Up kit, of course). One particular impetus was to find again this quote, since I left my books on emotional eating somewhere else because I thought (yet again) “I’m ‘recovered’ completely, hurrah!”:
My students often say, “I want to be done with this thing with food once and for all.” But there is no place to get to, no such thing as arriving and never having to leave. If you take a big view and understand that eating, or thinking about eating, will probably always be the way you alert yourself to changes in your inner world, you can relax. You can use turning to food as a method of exploring the corners of your soul; you can think about emotional eating as a gift rather than a curse.
Geneen Roth, from When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull Up a Chair
It’s my gift, then, right? The problem is that I’m not using it to my advantage… why, why have I started this terrible cycle again? A few days I’m healthy… a few days later, I’m caving at the first twitch of stress. Why why why. (I’m figuring it out… slow and steady wins the race.)
I know I started this journal for you, but I started it for me, too. And my constant occassional “I’ll be honest” writings are my steps in becoming more open, more vulnerable. I want to tell you everything now, without all these censors I put on myself. I want to share. (And if what I write might move you, amuse you, or even somehow help you, that’s more than enough for me.)
About why my childhood and, more severely, middle school years were terrible enough for me to want to die. (Well, maybe not… that might just be yet another sob story. Maybe.)
About how I was taken advantage of by a 23-year-old classmate (whose girlfriend was in Japan…) on my sixteenth birthday. (I seem to attract guys who cheat on their girlfriends. Sigh. Maybe I’ll tell that story, too.)
About how I was mugged on the streets of Shanghai in the summer of 2007. (Actually, that story’s not as interesting as you’d think.)
About my first real “relationship” (I say it was real yet put the word in quotes… hrm), and my first sexual experience (it was far from “making love”).
About my first love that spanned five years and lasted as a flicker through two unrelated relationships.
About…
(It seems that most of my traumatic experiences happened as a result of males. Tough luck, dudes. Though a couple of males have also been, in a way, my saviors as well, so it balances out.)
One big deterrent was always that these were real people I was talking about, real people who could even be reading this now (though I flatter myself in thinking so). But that’s just one of the risks in putting a slice of one’s self out into the open, right? (And even more so with this medium).
Thanks for sticking with me this far. My story’s only just begun. It’s almost six in the morning and it’s another bright, new, beautiful day. Well, after I sleep and awake again, at least.
And if you were wondering what my first favorite word is… well, at first thought, I’d say it was love… which does happen to be a close first. But the truth is I don’t have one. I love (there’s that word again!) words too much to associate with such petty favoritism. Hah! (I probably should sleep now.)
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