The last few hours before bed are the most difficult. Waiting waiting waiting. A test of endurance. It is a one-player game, like solitaire. My opponent is myself.
I made a lot of money yesterday. Today was not as lucrative, but I did have a booking at the Studio and a tutoring appointment immediately afterward. I stopped by the pet store to get food for the birds (I splurged and bought Parrot a new toy) and then came home, exhausted. I missed my Friday night meeting and I feel badly about that–can’t afford to do that too often–missing meetings is one of the things that contributed to my pre-Christmas relapse.
I am very hungry right now. But I know that if I can wait it out till bed, I’ll wake up thinner. I know that this thinking is dysfunctional, but I want to be honest here, to tell you how it is.
When you are very hungry, you will find that you do crazy things. You start to obsess. I have had the opportunity to speak at length with other girls who endeavor not to eat, and they all relate similar behaviors. You start to spend a lot of time thinking about food. Fantasizing about it. Tonight, for example, I have perused four restaurant takeout menus. I ask myself: if I were to order something, what would it be? Which sounds best? I weighed the merits of each. A distraction, a flirtation with danger, as I watch Charlie Rose interview Bernie Sanders on the television (actually, the program is mostly in the background; I am primarily focused on the idea of a chicken avocado sandwich). Then, in a burst of determination, I put the menus away, only to end up reading the restaurant reviews on the New York Times website.
When the disorder was at its worst, I would read cookbooks and Gourmet magazine recreationally. I would pour over them, devour them with my eyes, collect recipes that I had no intention of ever cooking, squirreling them away. This behavior is not uncommon.
Six years ago, I cooked all the time. I loved to make dinner for my boyfriend. I loved to work with food. No longer. I am nowhere near as bad as I was–nowhere near–but even now, the idea of cooking beyond a subsistence level is incomprehensible to me.
And tonight, this. This back-and-forth with myself, this struggle. It is all internal to me. I have created it. It is mine, my pure gold baby.
Another hour, and I can go to sleep and wake up hollow, leaner, smug. I’m never hungry in the morning. It’s smooth sailing till mid-afternoon, at least.
You see, gentle reader, what an evening I’ve had. One day, when I have the courage, I’ll write about what it’s like to be insane with an eating disorder. The really scary stuff. At the party I went to on Wednesday, an English Lit professor I am quite partial to told me that I ought to stop drinking 2-liter bottles of diet Coke every day. “It’s awful for you,” he said. “You’ll ruin your beauty.”
I let out a short, barking laugh. I didn’t mean to be rude; I couldn’t help it. “My beauty,” I snarled. “I could tell you stories about what I’ve done to myself. They’d make your hair turn white.”
In the course of my studies and therapy with a psychoanalyst, I have been told that every masochist is also a sadist, consciously or not. We possess the opposites within us. I’ve blogged about this before; I won’t go into detail now.
In this case, this dynamic, I am both. I am a disobedient and disappointing child, and I send myself to bed without any supper.
“Every masochist is a sadist.” So true. I call it my inner fascist. I think my actual masochism is a purge of these feelings, a catharsis that lessens that inner slave-driver for a while.
John