My Voice in My Head – The ongoing battle with my body and my mind

“Tell me what that’s like,” my therapist says when I tell her I’ve been experiencing a lot of body image ‘stuff’ lately.

“Well, I’ve just – you know, not only did I not lose the weight I put on while teaching last year, but I seem to have actually gained weight?  Even though I’m not doing anything differently, except actually exercising more – it’s infuriating how little control I have, and I just…” and here tears spring unexpectedly to my eyes.  I swallow them back and continue, “Mostly I can’t believe I’m still susceptible to this shit!”

She nods, then asks me again to explain what I mean by ‘this shit.’

“Okay, here’s a great example: I was sitting in your waiting room just now and I started a new book, and the opening scene is this woman in a hospital – she’s got some kind of undiagnosable bacterial infection or something, and she’s been on IV fluids for weeks – she can’t keep anything down.  And I thought, there needs to be a place where you can go and lie in a bed and be on IV fluids, just for a week, to break you of the habit of eating.”

Her eyebrows shoot up and I articulate what she’s clearly thinking.

“I know.  So fucked up.  Just…so fucked up.  And the thing is, I knew that, and I heard it and was horrified at my own thought, but I still felt the desire, even knowing how sick it was.”

“Wow, Anne, I’m glad you were able to see that your thoughts were so unhealthy, but this is something I think we definitely need to keep an eye on.  Why do you think it’s been so much worse lately?”

“I mean, I’m definitely fatter, right?  Which is to say: my clothes don’t fit.  Weirdly, I don’t feel like I look super different – although I can see it in photos when I look back a couple years – but mostly it’s just that things don’t fit me.  These jeans used to hang off me!”  I gesture down at the crease where my skin-tight gray jeans are slicing a division between my thigh and my pelvis.

She nods again.  We continue on like that, talking mostly about anxiety and control, for the rest of the session, and I leave feeling a little relieved but essentially unchanged: I still have no idea how to cope. 

Lately I feel like I’m twisting in the wind; my boyfriend and I have been trying to figure out where to move (we can’t stay here in the Bay Area much longer, not with our low salaries and limited prospects) but the can just keeps getting kicked down the road by circumstance; I finally finished the first draft of my book, but then I did an intense workshop where I learned that I need to basically overhaul it before letting strangers (ie agents and editors) read it; my relationship with my parents has essentially disintegrated in the past six months, due mostly to my mother’s inability to engage with me on our unhealthy dynamic (a familiar refrain for me these days) and her position as the cornerstone in this rickety old bridge of a family (my sister is the troll underneath, poking at the cornerstone whenever she feels the need to remind the other stones of the true power dynamic at play).

As I told my therapist, it’s times like these that I often catch myself lamenting my lack of self-control – if I could just be anorexic, I’ll think, I’d fit in my clothes and feel like I was able to control some aspect of my life.

Yeah, I see it.  I hear it, and I do care – I fight it all the time, this nasty voice that not only tells me anorexia would solve my problems but simultaneously maligns me for being too weak to develop it.  If I heard a friend talk like that I’d shake her until she stopped, but that doesn’t work with me; my boyfriend has tried (not actually shaking me, but the tough-love verbal equivalent).

Honestly, I don’t have any conclusions to come to here.  I just needed to share my feelings in the one space (besides therapy, now) where I’ve always been able to be completely honest.  It’s a weird and frustrating emotional place I’m in: on the one hand I hate myself for not fitting into any of my clothes and considering all kinds of bullshit diets to remedy it (when I know they will only make me crazy, not thinner), and on the other hand I’m following all these fat-positive people on Instagram and reading all kinds of articles on body positivity and inclusivity and feeling 100% supportive of other people’s right to live happily in whatever body they happen to have.

It’s important to me to be transparent about this stuff, as uncomfortable as that is sometimes.  I know a lot of people just want to hear that I’ve ‘fixed myself,’ that experience and therapy have somehow cured me of body image issues and general anxiety and depression, but the truth is I’ll probably have to fight those things for my entire life, to varying degrees. 

For now, I’m just continuing to do yoga every day, trying to find clothes in my closet that fit me/don’t make me feel horrendous, and focusing on coping with my daily anxiety.  At some point I’ll need to address all the underlying stuff that’s causing it, but long-term treatment will have to follow triage.