Shedding Skin

It’s hard to believe, in the state I am now, that there was ever a time when I was happy with myself.

You see, I’ve never been thin—I’ve always, always been the fat girl, and though no one ever said anything, I could tell.  I could tell when all my friends went clothes shopping without me, when no one asked me to homecoming, when my horse riding instructor praised the other girls and told me to work harder.  Logic, of course, tells me: it was because I was fat.  I lived with seething hatred of this body for years, but only recently did this hatred manifest itself.

At 175 pounds and 5’5”, I was, less than a year ago, just beginning to fall into the pit.  One night I dragged a shaving razor across my thigh and watched as the bad feelings poured out.  I put a bandage on it and swore to never touch a blade again.  But the next night I did it again and soon there was an arsenal in my bedside drawer and red zebra stripes covering my hips and wrists.

It was around this time, too, that I decided I needed to rid myself of my second skin.  I was huge, fatter than fat, disgusting, a whale.  At first I tried something called intermittent fasting, which involved fasting for 24 hours at least 2 times a week.  The other days I was allowed to eat normally.  The idea was that it would cut calories effortlessly, while the pattern of fasting would rev up my metabolism.

While intermittent fasting is a legitimate method for losing weight, I couldn’t imagine that my parents would approve of me refusing food 2-3 days out of the week.  Thus to complete my fasts, I began coming up with all manner of crazy ways to hide that I was not eating.  I woke up early to avoid my parents’ prying eyes as I had my breakfast of green tea.  When they got suspicious, I crumbled bits of toast onto a plate and left it out on the counter before hiding the uneaten evidence in the trash.  I made excuses to my friends at lunch time and hoarded sandwiches in my room until I could eat them again, though soon I began throwing out the whole brown bag.  Later on, I mastered the art of spitting my food into a napkin, and once chewed and spit two whole slices of toast, unnoticed and without swallowing a bite, right in front of my father.

As the pounds began to drop off, I became more obsessed, restricting even on my non-fasting days.  By spring I was eating 300-600 calories a day and beating my ass on the treadmill to make up for mistakes.  At 150 pounds, people began to notice.  “Oh, you look like you’ve lost weight!” they’d say happily, never suspecting something could be wrong.  My friends all paid more attention to me.  When I asked a boy to prom, he happily accepted.  And my riding instructor couldn’t stop telling me how much better I looked (skinnier girls look more elegant on horses).  I got nothing but positive feedback and I was over the moon.  After all, for someone as fat as I was, losing weight could only be a good thing.  But I still wasn’t skinny enough. No, not even close.

By summer I was falling victim to binges, and my self-hatred grew even more vehement.  As much as I jammed my fingers down my throat, I could not bring my mistakes back up.  After nearly slitting my throat one night, I finally told my mother that her daughter sliced up her skin.  I didn’t tell her that I wanted to die, nor that my nightmares consisted of fat-laden food that I could not stop eating.  No, I told her about the cutting, and she was kind and supportive and everything a mother should be.  And so I stopped cutting.  I found peace and I stopped starving.  With the pressure of senior year gone, something shifted and I was, for that blessed three-month period, happy.  At least I think I was.

And here I am now, in college—an art major, no less—with dreams of becoming a medical illustrator.  After moving into the dorms, it didn’t take long for the blades to make their way back into my drawer.  My weight has settled at 145; though this is the lowest I’ve ever been and is considered a “healthy weight,” I cannot be satisfied with it.  With every bite I put in my mouth, I can feel myself losing control.  There is too much here for me to handle, and I need the comfort of starvation again.  It’s disgusting, I know, and it’s wrong and no one—none of you—should ever think this way, but I’ve been eating less and less these past few weeks and making excuses again and I can feel the cold fingers of these thoughts wrap themselves around me, pulling me back into the arms of hunger.

This goes beyond wanting to be skinny.  I have pegged food as the enemy, you see, and I am finding that I can only feel sane when I do not eat.  I am strong when I starve.  I am powerful, I am in control.  I can feel yesterday’s mistakes and poisons clearing out of this disgusting body and soon, soon I will be clean and pure.

Call me insane.  But I will be thin.  I’ll be thin if it’s the last thing I do.

« Older Comments