Reweaving

Sometimes my body disgusts me, sometimes I despise it, sometimes I am so repulsed by it I want to run razors across it, to burn it, to deny it food, to overload with food and then throw it up again, but you know these feelings cant be real they must just be a front, I can’t really feel guilty or negative about my body and food (link)

The attitude in this article really angers me, it is both ignorant and dismissive of women with eating disorders/disordered eating.

In the second to last paragraph of the post Samara writes We’ll only stop this madness if we refuse to join in. I can’t refuse to join in, I can’t suddenly not have issues with food just because I want to. I would love to not have issues with food, but I can’t magic them away and nor can other women. It’s good that Samara doesn’t have issues with food, that she has a healthy attitude to food, that’s excellent but its not okay for her to belittle other women, other feminists who have issues with food.

Also food issues are not by and large about food, they are about control, power, space, unacknowledged emotions. From piecing together my own personal narrative my food issues come predominantly from three places

1)Severe physical neglect in infancy. Studies on this show that people neglected during infancy have a much higher rate of eating disorders than others because the brain doesn’t lay down the right pathways that regulate your food intake, (for me this means, I don’t get hungry till I’m about to faint, and I don’t know when I’m full so I eat too much.)

2)My main care givers through most of my childhood were power freaks over food and removed food as a punishment

3)Severe sexual abuse during my adolescence

My issues with food are complicated, and unless I say, I don’t think its immediately obvious that i have food issues, but I was borderline anorexic for a really long time with a bit of bulimia thrown in there, and now I tend to binge eat and eat things that I know are really bad for me as a kind of self sabotage.

Now I need to loose weight, not want to, need to, I am edging up to a size eighteen and that’s not comfortable for me. I have a history of heart disease and diabetes in my family and I need to take some pressure of my joints, but I find this really difficult to talk about in feminist spaces, because of attitudes like the one in this post and some of its comments. If i talk about healthy ways of trying to lose weight will I get told that its somehow anti feminist to want to loose weight even though I have good reason for it?

Then we come down to, actually we do live in a society that expects women to be a certain size and shape, and penalises bigger women. Maybe we should be critiquing why there weren’t any women at that press conference who were over a size twelve, are women over size twelve incapable of being journalists?

I also find the thought of someone making “observations” on someone else’s eating really disturbing, If I know people are watching me eat and making judgments on my food intake I either stop eating or finish what I’m eating and then go and throw it up.

yes we do live in a society where almost all women (weather they are technically eating disordered or not) have an unhealthy relationship with food but I don’t think essentially telling them to buck up and get over it is particularly helpful.

Women will stop having issues with food when we are allowed to take up the psychological and physical space we are entitled to, when we are allowed to display negative emotions rather than repressing them, when we stop having our body boundaries breached, when we stop being told both overtly and subtly that our bodies are out messy and out of control and need disciplining.

Working towards these things is much more radical and useful than dismissing women with food issues as being involved in “madness.”

I’ve been neglecting the Internet of late, well not exactly neglecting it, I spend hours on it avoiding my life, I just neglect the bits where i could make connections, write and read stuff that matters

and It comes to me that I’m angry, I’m angry about so so many things both personal and political, but I don’t deal with anger, i swallow it down, literally I swallow it, I eat when I’m angry, and not good healthy life/body fueling food either, but crap, sugar and preservative laden crap,  and i drink caffeinated fizzy drinks, gallons of it, which I know is bad for me, the anger turns inwards as it always has done and I sabotage my body, my health, my life, my time, my relationships.

and I’m angry at so many things, I’m angry at the state of feminism, either complete apathy or the increasingly poisonous hypocritical siege mentality of the internet “radfems” and that although i have massive issues with them there is heartbreak at realising that they don’t want me, that they are edging me out because I am the wrong sort of feminist.

I’m angry that the only faith community I can currently access is full of whackjobs many of whom are anti everything I stand for and I don’t know what to do about that because I need a faith community but I also need people who accept me as i am without me hiding or lying about who I am, on a wider level I am angry that the message of Jesus has got so perverted that myself and people like me are seen as unacceptable. I also have major issues with much of christian theology generally but that’s a whole nother post.

I’m angry abut my family situation, that I was adopted by a pair of abusive fuckwits, because they were seen to be the epitome of middle class respectibility, that I needed to be adopted in the first place that society damaged my mother and grandmother so much that they were incapable of bonding, that my parents were so poor that my father went to prison for theft when trying to feed his family, that the holocaust damage my paternal grandmother so badly that she passed that damage down to my father and made him incapable of bonding with his children.

I’m angry that I have been so wounded by this patriarchal capitalist society that it broke my brain, that the after effects of rape and abuse will be with me for ever and make my life much harder than it would have been otherwise. that very possible my infertility issues are caused by the body trauma of these events, and while mostly I am okay about being infertile sometimes it does hurt and it does make me angry.

I’m angry that I live in an increasingly crippled body, which is no ones fault and something I need to learn to be at peace with but the fact that society ignores my needs is someones fault and it pisses me off.

My anger boils over till it freezes, till I am turned to stone, indeed petrified, cannot move, cannot act for fear of blowing a hole in the roof of the world, and what I want to do with my life gets abandoned in case the anger seeps through into it

I went through a phase about  five years ago where I learnt to channel my anger into an incredibly powerful healing force that really propelled me forward in my development but somewhere along the way (probably at uni, when I was working extremely hard to appear “normal”) I squashed it back down, sat on it,made it taboo again, but when I was acknowledging that anger, dealing with it, utilising it, that was the time in my life when I was my calmest, healthiest, most creative

I want to read more, I want to read and write poetry, I want to grow vegetables, I love cooking, I want to go swimming, I want to develop a deep meditation/prayer life, i want to learn to utilise my body in ways that work for me personally, I want to develop a more healthy sexuality, I want to do more practical political activism

One of the things about my anger is somewhere inside I think i have a thing going on that still thinks life should be about fairness, like the people who did the things to cause the anger should fix my life which is clearly ridiculous. It doesn’t matter who broke it or why it broke, no one is going to fix it for me, I have to deal with the anger and fix it the best I can myself.