I want to talk about this throwback photo.
I look pretty happy, right? Long blonde hair, about to get onstage for a show that I was acting in with my first boyfriend and best friend, absolutely ready to give it my all.
I was also only having a coffee every morning and a lollipop from the school vending machine for dinner every day; I remember this because that lollipop was the best fucking part of my school day, the one time I got a sugar rush that would carry me through rehearsals into the evening when I could sleep.
If there's any of my high school friends reading this, I'm sure a lot of you are going, "but hey, I remember you eating! You ate bagels with us! We had dinner at our houses!" and you are exactly right--I did all of those things, and I hated myself for it. What you might not remember is how I would excuse myself to go to the washroom after each of those meals, and you certainly won't remember how I shoved my fingers down my throat and threw them up.
Some of you are probably a bit uncomfortable right now, and I get it--it's hard to read about these kinds of things, but the older I get, the more I'm realising that it only gets easier for me to live with this if I talk about it.
Three years ago I published a piece discussing how it felt to be in a relationship and have this monster in my head, but I never really outright addressed how it felt to just exist with it, to live a life and try and function every day like my brain wasn't still forever mentally calculating caloric content in every piece of food that graced my lips. And you know what? It fucking sucks.
You want to know what I actually looked like?
I was miserable--any time anyone wasn't looking at me, everything changed. That dress was about three sizes too big on me and I felt like I was bursting it at the seams; you can see the bloat in my cheeks from purging (a nice little side effect that no one bothers to tell you about) even though my jaw line is the sharpest it has ever been, and my hair has never regained itself from the time it used to come out in clumps in the shower.
That's what I looked like. And I need to talk about it; we all need to talk about it, because I know there are millions of other little girls and boys out there suffering in silence, thinking they're the only people who hate their bodies this much, who think they're the only person that hasn't discovered the secret way to love themselves. We still have so far to go in terms of discussing these things, but if I don't speak about it, and you don't speak about it, then that little girl up there sits in her room and picks at her stomach and weighs the fat on her hips against the weight of her life--
And sometimes, she decides that the weight isn't worth it.
If you told that girl (and yes, I was a little girl, I was only fifteen, and at that point I had hated myself for almost a decade) then that she'd still be dealing with those issues ten years later... I'm not sure she'd still be around. But if you told her she'd be dealing with them, and talking about them openly and honestly and trying to advocate for their representation, then I'm sure she'd have felt a lot better. And maybe I can make someone else feel a lot better, too.
I want to end this on a less somber note--I'm not perfect, I still have all of those same issues I had in those photos above, but I approach them differently. I struggled through them and still struggle with them, but the only thing that has made them even halfway bearable is that in the past decade everyone around me has welcomed this talk, has told me (and so many others) that it's okay if we make you uncomfortable, that our existence is worth the momentary discomfort you might feel. And I want to tell anyone reading this that I'm always here to listen, too, because if the last fifteen years or so of suffering has taught me anything, it's that purging yourself of these feelings only works when it's words, and it might be just as painful, but the end results are a lot easier to clean up.
Haha, get it, I'm talking about vomit.
(as a side note, I'm perfectly comfortable discussing these things mentioned with people, so if you want to ask me about it, please don't feel awkward--I'll let you know if you crossed a line)
Anyway, we'll return to the regular Australian shenanigans posting in the next post!
- C
No comments:
Post a Comment