EDIT: Read this one, the previous one posted on the 10th for some reason so had to delete it!
Also, as much as I appreciate your compliments, you don’t need to comment saying I’m not fat etc. The point of this is- even if I were, even if I were 400lbs- it doesn’t matter, because there is no shame in a body and nobody has the right to shame your body. Fat, thin, whatever- it does not matter.
First of all: look who we met!
Robert does not always wear a bicorne, although like Eddie, he used to ponce around in a dress. It was at 2am. Ignore my stupid face please please please. I would have put a happy yellow face there but that’s very antisocial (edit: that is not fishing for compliments, by the way). We were at the screening of Eddie Izzard’s self-documentary, “Believe”. It was interesting to see what he’d waded through to be so successful, and he seems superhumanly driven.
But at the Q&A afterwards if he’d just wanked into the audience he’d have saved us all an hour and a half. I still love Eddie Izzard as a comedian, but the lengths of the documentary to show just how BRILLIANT he was became almost parodic. At one point, the voiceover from his tour manager reverentially tells us that his shows are almost a “religious experience”. And then a tearful girl dressed as a bee breaks down and said that Eddie healed her when she was sick. I thought, “Aww, this is touching (unlike Eddie, however. No healing hands, just a CD of Definite Article”). Then I did a double take and stammered, “Hang on a minute- is this documentary seriously comparing Eddie Izzard to Jesus?!”
The premise of the documentary, by the way, was Eddie Izzard was accused of fraud by Watchdog for repeating material in new shows. The episode he was accused in was like some Brasseye special, it was so over the top and ridiculous. So, upset, he took a break from comedy then returned with the all-new Sexie. WATCHDOG. REALLY. WHO CARES. That’s like hanging yourself because Esther Rantzen slagged off your fridge.
So I was left wondering if it wasn’t just a bit of sly mockumentary too. His manner at the Q&A attested that it may not have been. He seems genuinely devastated by the Watchdog shenanigans. He also seems very wounded by the fact that Michael McIntyre is on TV a lot, and he isn’t. If that’s a comedic genius’ aspiration, we’re doomed. (However, I think almost witty is correct in that it’s mostly an incredulity that McIntyre seems to have just shot all over the place).
My flat is a mess. My bed looks like its been the lucky host of an orgy in which I blew copious amounts of cocaine over the breasts of a nubile young woman, pausing only to flick through some De Beavoir to assuage my dizzied conscience. No such luck. It is the talcum powder I haphazardly snowed upon myself earlier, and it will remain there until I can be bothered/can afford to do a wash. I don’t know why I own talcum powder. There are no soft, rosy baby bums to be buttered, nor do I wear latex pants. (That would look like a joint of meat wrapped in a bin bag). I have no recollection of buying talcum powder, so can only assume it was one of the wares of my hypomanic episode a month ago in which I bought things I decided I needed, or that it’s been sneaked into my bathroom by Robert. What a fucker.
The reason my flat is such a mess is that every time I think, “Right, I’m going to make this place look less like a crack den”, I am inexplicably drawn back to the computer and, almost in a trance, type the words, “Come Dine With Me” into Google. I only recently discovered this wonderful programme, and have devoured almost every delicious episode.
Come Dine with Me is a cookery programme. Four strangers meet up, cook each other dinner, then score each other’s efforts. All this is presided over by a sarcastic narrator whom upon Googling has a face as irritating as his voice. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? But I’m obsessed. I am helpless in its grip. And it’s not the first, and it won’t be the last. There were times in the recent past when I’d wake up in a sweat and check 4oD for new episodes of Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares. When I can be arsed to buy the Sunday papers, it’s usually so I can perv over the Observer Food Monthly.
I can’t cook. I don’t like cooking. It’s boring and I’m shit at it. I give people food poisoning. I heated up something in someone’s microwave the other day and melted the plastic. My warped little failure was a testament to the fact that I just don’t know what the hell to do with food. I have successfully razed four cookers to the ground. And I have an eating disorder, and BDD. Food is a fraught affair for me. I feel guilty when I eat, I feel guilty when I don’t because I’m trying to be healthy, and I am trying not to revisit the land of blacking out after spending the day with my head down a toilet bowl. I am trying to align my emotions with my logic- I am fat, but so what?
It only recently occurred to me that my obsession with cookery programmes and paraphernalia wasn’t despite the fact that I have an eating disorder, but because of the fact I have an eating disorder.
It’s strange that I hadn’t thought of that before. A lot of the people I have know who have also suffered from eating disorders have been obsessed with food. Obsession with food, is, of course, fair dos. I am obsessed with what I put in my mouth (FNAR!). I think about food, all the time. Recently, it’s been on my mind more than usual. I have gained weight since the contraceptive implant, and weirdly, the weight has gone directly to my stomach. It is a bitter irony that the baby I didn’t have seems to have left a phantom in its wake. I genuinely look pregnant.
I had a good day today. I had one of those days where my self esteem was stroked like a purring little kitten. But in my joie de vivre, I thought it was okay to break my own pact about not weighing myself anymore. I could take it! I was in a great mood! But it fucked my mood. I have over 30% body fat, when I used to have under 25%. All my self esteem came pathetically tumbling down because of a few numbers. I felt like a total failure. BMI 27. I am panicked. I spend most of my day in a panic. I hate my face, but you already knew that. It is bloated, deformed. I split whatever I eat in half, and throw one of those halves away. And I have a habit of listing my intake that day to whomever I’m with. I am obsessed with food, and, because of that fact, self-obsessed (I am certainly self-obsessed- just look around you. It’s partly my personality, but partly because various mental brainwrongs make one so- the internal landscape is frightening, the external, threatening). It is dull.
I have been trying to find a more balanced approach to eating in recent months. Robert is the polar opposite of me in that, lithe little sod that he is, he loves to cook and loves to eat. He practically shags attractive kitchenware. He has a pepper grinder that would make most people seriously question if he was overcompensating for something. He’d be buried in a 6ft casserole dish if he could be. When he cooks for me, it’s healthy food, partly to encourage me to eat it, and partly because that’s the food he enjoys most. Sitting down for a meal with him has become part of our relationship. I would miss it. But I still don’t really enjoy eating. So I find my enjoyment in other peoples’ enjoyment.
I watch Robert eating with a mixture of jealousy and joy. Jealousy because he seems to always be eating yet is still slim, and joy because eating makes him happy. When he likes what he’s eating he makes a little unconscious humming noise, like a happy child lost amidst a new toy. When he’s hungry, I become my Irish Catholic grandmother (a close relative of the Jewish mother). “Eat! Eat! You are wasting away! Look at your bones! Let us find you food!” And then I take to the streets dragging him by the hand and morph into a pushy market stall owner at every almost-shut newsagent. “These aubergines! Only a quid! They’d be lovely roasted!”
And cookery shows are food porn. And because I’ve watched Kitchen Nightmares so religiously, I keep thinking that I can go into any restaurant and tell them how to run it better. Or imagine him doing it instead, then carrying me off like An Officer and a Gentlemen.
At the height of my bulimia, I used to go for meals with Rob or with friends, and tuck in with gusto, make all the right noises and not give away the fact that fear was clenching the beating out of my heart. I’d have the dessert, too, and then make noises about being full, fuck off to the bathroom and puke it out. Worried it wasn’t enough, I’d do it again when I got home. Disabled toilets were my best friend and I still instinctively always use them.
So I watch other people having dinner and having fun and think, “That looks nice”. And I read the Food Monthly and think about all the things I’d like to eat.
I’m not even extreme- I’ve met far more extreme people than I. And I have almost never met a woman who doesn’t worry about what she eats. When I was growing up, I’d watch my mother cook meals for us, then sit and eat almost nothing herself. My dad would be the served the biggest portions, us, the girls, smaller ones. We are taught, from a very early age, that “boys need food to be big and strong” and girls need to be pretty, thus, in our warped society, thin. Robert has a male attitude to food, and I have a more pronounced female one. I deserve to eat less, because the price of eating enough is fat, and greed. It is not right, but it’s true.
I have an academic interest in it all. I read a lot about feminism and the fat acceptance movement (How I envy Fat Acceptance bloggers. They struggled but they got there, to the magic place that my brain lives in but my heart doesn’t). My daily reads are Shapely Prose and Sociological Images. It’s one of the things that I talk most about in my day to day life. It fascinates me and I have seriously considered studyin it. It’s one of the things I notice a lot, how people are represented, how prejudice is widespread and accepted. (And there are some things- interesting to me, at least- if you look on a McDonalds wrapper at the calorie content, the illustration is of a woman. Usually a “default” is a man- so either this is something progressive, or they think that woman are the ones who will look at the calories, either for themselves, or for their children).
I consider myself a feminist. I spy implicit gender reinforcement in our day-to-day media bombardment. I torture myself by reading Femail (particularly horrible Daily Mail subsection that loves using the word, “lumpy” to describe womens’ bodies) and “womens’ weeklies” because the implicit division makes me angry, and because our little worlds are so little to them. In Take a Break last week, a guy had made his “dream woman”- a robot. And the subheading was, “…but she still talks back!”, because perfect women don’t.
And it irritates me, everything. The WAH obesity epidemic making fat people, and anyone in between, feel as if we’re taxable space-hoggers. The fact that, after I wrote this (it’s two days later- I am really not getting on with stuff lately), I went to Piccadilly Circus and someone shouted, “FAT CUNT!” at me as I walked up the escalator. It angers me that I know, and am, a woman who finds it difficult to eat in public lest she be judged. Who puts the lettuce at the top of the shopping basket as if to say, “I AM TRYING”. That every time a successful woman is interviewed, her physical beauty is mentioned. And if she isn’t what’s considered physically beautiful, then she’s “made up for it” in other ways. IT. DOESN’T. MATTER.
Likewise, I’ve had comments on this blog when I have been severely suffering kicking at my appearance. When I get insulting emails, that’s what they focus on, because, as a woman, the greatest insult you can throw at me is that I am ugly. Once, when I moaned about the three stone I piled on in as many months of antipsychotic treatment, someone had a go at me for it. How can you accept this, they say. When I am very ill, my FAT is the biggest problem. I should be focusing on losing the weight rather than grasping back the last remains of my sanity. Be thin and insane instead of fat and well.
I hate that women are considered shallow, I hate that there’s culture and lifestyle, then female culture and lifestyle, when there should be no such thing. I DREAD writing a book and its cover being a high-heel or something, it just being so because I’m a woman. That someone might call me “sassy”. I’d take that illustrated stiletto and force it through their eyeball. It is geared to make us hate each other. To bitch, to judge, to envy, to blame ourselves and each other for the still present inequality in society. To quantify worth by the size of thighs and not personality. To assume we’re all united by our love of shoes (I do not give a toss about shoes, I hate shopping, I don’t really care to write about relationships, I don’t have “girlfriends” I go to for advice), so that we can be divided in more meaningful ways. I’m not saying there is no intrinsic worth to the “female” sections of magazines and newspapers, and women-orientated media (indeed, I am a hungry consumer of most of it), just that the power of such a thing is misused. Some of it is great (such as Jezebel), but even the supposedly intelligent mainstream has two types of women: rich homemakers, rich career women. And women like me- that is, young people with a mental illness- live in Take a Break and the Sun.
I hate that adverts on the tube encourage us to butcher ourselves and remove the sexual and biological function of our breasts. And I HATE when people call those who undertake it shallow. They’re not shallow. It’s a rational reaction to extraordinary pressure. I hate that it’s seen as trivial. IT IS NOT TRIVIAL. It is insidious. As much as I utterly detest listening to anybody talk to me about their diets (likewise, I hate it when people comment upon my weight unless I ask them to, as I tend to lose weight through unhealthy means) or cleanses or some other crap, I understand the urge to evangelize. Because in the twisted culture war, you’re rallying the troops. Culture is killing women. This isn’t a simple choice someone makes one day. “So, I’ll care”. The choice is made from the moment we’re born. This is what you have to be. You can fight it but it’s still there. It is not vanity. To borrow from Ginsberg, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving. The vigilance is a frenzy, the energy, wasted. Fluttery from hunger, focused on lunch. It’s hard to function on any meaningful level sometimes. The culture around is tunnel vision, except the sense of it getting narrower and narrower is real. The mouth of the tunnel is wider than the exit. We get suffocated, we get stuck.
And yet… for all I am intellectually aware, I am still bulimic and I still have body dysmorphic disorder Although media dictates that I shouldn’t. After all, I have a “partner”, I have an outside voice reinforcing the idea that I am beautiful therefore worthy. But it doesn’t work that way for me and many other people. It isn’t true that if someone looking at you thinks you’re beautiful, then you are. I believe the people who think I am. But it doesn’t change how I feel, and I regret that, because I know how frustrating I am. I still always wear a hat or my hood up, I still have days when I can’t leave the house, I still have scars on my face. My mind gets it but my emotions don’t. They’re rubbish.
If it were just a choice…
And I am bitchy, too. I became annoyed at Robert earlier when he was commenting that he’d only eaten about 1500 calories yesterday. For me, that’s overeating, for him, under. I was resentful that was the case. He can twice as much as me and I can eat fuck all. For a second, I felt as if a deep injustice had been wrought in the world. My intellectual mind says, “What the hell. You’re hungry, eat something!” My irrational mind says, “You pig, you’ve eaten too much”. Why should I resent his body, though? His body is his and it is lovely and it would always be. It isn’t his “fault” he is tall and slim and goes to the gym and needs to eat a lot, and that I am short and can’t eat much without putting on weight. I shouldn’t shame him for his body. It tangles me up, it wastes my energy and it’s why I’m sitting here feeling hungry instead of cooking dinner. And it makes me, even for a second, hate people I love. And the fact I’m living in clothes that don’t fit me anymore doesn’t help (I thought about investing in Spanx, to hold me in enough so that I didn’t have to buy new things). But I don’t know what to do. As soon as I consciously diet, all the old bad behaviour comes back. And I don’t have any money so I can’t buy new clothes. Does not make one feel good about themselves, really.
So, I’m trying to see food differently. As social, nurturing and un-hateful. But it’s bloody hard. I just hate the way I look. And I worry that I could achieve everything I’ve ever wanted and still break down every time that I accidentally glance into a mirror, and that hatred will follow me for the rest of my life.
And, in terms of mood, I am alright. I’ve had a funny six weeks. A wee hypomanic burst that made me ragey, then two weeks crying in bed. But, yes, I actually went to a CPN appointment today and said, “I’m fine!” And I wasn’t lying. How lovely.
Stumble It!
