the struggle to reconcile apetite with apetite

I love food. I've always loved food. Cheeses; warm, crusty, buttered and sweet breads; custards, cremes, and tartes; warm bowls of jasmine rice and coconut curry; thick cuts of lamb; the sweet melting comfort of white or thick milky chocolate on the tongue are only a few of the tastes that held my mouth captive through childhood and adolescents. Needless to say by sixteen puberty and my rich affair with food had fully taken hold of my breasts, hips and thighs, making them full and soft- curvaceous if you will. I wish I could say that I relished my womanly figure, but I did not. The only of my friends to have an hour glass figure, I began to resent my apetite, and the body I lived within. In those years a deep sense of embarrassment and desire for smallness bloomed into a full blown obsession with food- or rather, with-holding food- and the shape of my body. What once I considered my home, a fleshy vehicle for my life and experiences- became something wild, unruly, and manipulable. I believed I could attain a sense of control over my flesh. I could be my own master. In later years, when personal crises, pain, and an unbearable sense of powerlessness dominated my daily life, my desire to own, mold, and make perfect my body escalated from an obsessive desire into a full blown religion that ultimately left me nearly 80 lbs, alone, and psychologically destroyed. I can honestly say I went mad, and even though every day I lost weight I felt both more and less in control in my life I developed a strange capacity to love intensely every aspect of the world- as if I was in some way aware of a pending fatality. I loved the movement of light on the floor, the quiet of campus early in the morning, and the movement of chill december air against my face more than I have ever loved anything- more even then I loved food or the idea of thinness. In some ways, I feel that these things became the nourishment that kept me alive- and perhaps the very things I realized I was in danger of loosing when heart palpitations, horrible cramping pains, and soaking night sweats suggested that my body was shutting down. I'd found perfection, and it was painful, ugly, and alienating. I was dying. I know that now. I was insane. I was broken. I was killing myself slowly, like an violent exhibition of my self-hate, agonizing pain, and desire (oh god, how I desired) for a sense of security.

I'm 108lbs now, and I would be a liar if I said I'm happy with those numbers. In honesty, those three digits make me sick, and I often consider them with a sense of disdain for what seems to be my weakness, my ugliness, my embarrassing imperfection. I am at a "healthy weight" but I am not well. I live every day in a constant battle with myself, my combating hungers, my desire for a sense of peace. It is possible that I will never understand what it means to be satisfied with myself, or ever respect my body. I could not begin to tell you what my body wants. I could not begin to tell you what I want. And I could not begin to imagine a day when I will not struggle with these feelings, these questions, this woman's body.


In looking through photos on my boyfriend's computer I came across this and the last photo of me. My heart ached a little. I don't look like that any more. I don't look like that any more. I want those bones. I want that shape.

But I hunger. And I eat. I savor and I regret.

Because it gets me too far away from there.