Long Locks, Maroon Jeans, and Denim Vests
Recently, there has been a tape playing over in my head. It starts with something silly like when I am brushing my hair, trying to tame the frizzy beast that the Houston humidity loves to awaken. I think about how long it has been since I got my bangs and how much they have grown out since then (thank god). That leads me to anticipate how long my hair will be come summer time this year. If it will be as long as it was when I left UT two years ago before several rounds of short hair eras commenced. I find myself longing for it to look like it did back then circa summer 2018. Wanting long hair again seems like a harmless and perfectly normal thing to desire, and it is. But it doesn't take more than a few seconds of wishing for my hair to grow back to it's former length for me to also wish other parts of me looked like they did back then. My mind flips through the files of the photos I have memorized of myself. One in particular comes to mind. There it is, the long blonde hair about elbow length. I miss it. But will it look the same on a body that isn't the one from the picture? I haven't forgot about those maroon jeans which I got rid of many months ago when trying to get them past my knees became equally painful physically and emotionally. And that cute jean vest that was only remotely comfortable when I was close to collapsing due to the exhaustion of doing anything beyond being awake. I want my long hair back, I do. But because the thought never just ends there and always transforms into romanticizing everything about my appearance and life during that period when the picture was taken, I wonder if this desire for long locks stands in the place of a more explicit desire to live in the body that the locks grew from. It may seem like a stretch when written in words like that: "my hair makes me miss my sickness", but I was so focused on my appearance at that time that everything I saw in the mirror back then I still today associate with that stage of my life and recovery.
Actually that assumption isn't an assumption at all, I just have a bit of trouble admitting it. I have indeed had the thought, "Man, this summer I'm finally gonna look how I looked like two years ago again!". I can only dismiss it for a moment until I decide I can not ignore that this is not, in fact, just about my hair. To be very blunt, my eating disorder (and, thus, me) wants to be that small again, that ill again. I use those words in context of my own story and self-image. I recognize that my memory is biased about which era of "sick" I tend to miss. I only miss the times when my body most closely mirrored the norms of how women are praised for looking and, in accordance, I falsely remember those times as when I was also the sickest. In reality, I was just as miserable and ill for months before in a body that looked the same as the one I had lived in for years prior. I try to check myself on those realities when I have such intrusive thoughts and narratives sail through my mind, but it is hard to breakdown the romanticisms completely.
However, remembering the pictures and remembering the emotions of the past are two tasks with vastly different difficulties. I can scroll through my camera roll all day and night looking at old images and feeling a distant attachment to who I was at their conception. It takes a deeper and sometimes unexpected moment for me to recall the way I was experiencing things as the person in the images. For instance, I had, what I would say was, a frightening realization this weekend. As these thoughts and narratives of recreating my past life have become more frequent and sometimes even convincing, there has been a lack of consideration on my part, of the unintended consequences that pursing them may cause. In other words, restriction over time, even if not severe, leads to an increased obsession with food, body, and in my experience, urges to binge and purge.
That is the expected biological effect of restriction which, historically, has played out like clockwork in my experience. This cycle usually happened within a day or even within a few hours when it was something that was really a struggle for me in an earlier stage of my eating disorder. That has not been the same since I came back from residential about a year ago when my binging and purging behaviors finally came to a stall with the reintroduction of proper nutrition and satisfaction from food. That is to say, my brain hasn't been on such high alert for those urges as their predecessor (restriction) hasn't been as alarming, rather it has been sneakier when it attacks. I wasn't expecting it this past weekend either when eating my dinner faster than usual turned into trying to satisfy a day's worth of anticipation and, one might say, "preparation" for this meal. The guilt and discomfort that followed lead me down a familiar but almost forgotten path. Did I have skills to deal with the discomfort that I could have used instead? Yes. Could I have tried harder to put off using a behavior that doesn't really solve anything beyond a fleeting second of relief? Absolutely. But I can't change the past, I can only try to learn from it.
When I was saying earlier that it's hard to remember the emotions of a time in my eating disorder by just looking at a picture, what I was trying to set up was how looking at those old pictures and longing for what I saw blinded me from truly understanding what it was I was seeing. Yes, I was seeing an old pair of maroon jeans and a cute jean vest on a girl with long blonde hair, but I was not in touch with the intense, unending fear I felt at every moment I thought of food (which was about 95% of the time). So this weekend as I sat there on the couch, hungry, exhausted, but filled with fear of moving for I thought that it would only translate into an eventual repeat of the inciting event, I remembered why I reached out for help for this thing in the first place. That romanticizing this monster is a very dangerous game and I have been teetering the line into falling off the cliff. A few weeks ago I talked about the hole I've found myself in with comfy furniture and few limitations. What I am talking about now doesn't land me there. No. Falling of the cliff is falling far beyond the reach of others. No furniture, no silver lining, just darkness.
I apologize for the continued use of that iffy metaphor if you find it confusing, it's far from polished and is sort of a last attempt to hide behind intelligence (if you call it that)/wordy run-on sentences instead of being direct and vulnerable. The realization that I came to, surprisingly for the first time, is how eerily similar things are to how they were two years ago as I returned for my spring semester at UT. Granted, I have acquired many more experiences and a greater awareness now, that doesn't take away from the parallels that exist regarding my actions between the two times. I hadn't taken into account the fact that aspiring to look a way I looked in the past might (and likely will) result in a reprise of the events that got me there, too. I'm back in college now, so it would be easy to mimic some of the exact routines that put me at such risk on the campus they first developed. Having this moment where I could recall what those days were like for me changed a few things. It changed how I am seeing my eating disorder now because I know that the way it manifests in my life can change at any moment from something that feels safe and numbing to something that just completely and utterly sucks. This weekend I was reminded of that. How much it can just fucking suck.
Glo
Actually that assumption isn't an assumption at all, I just have a bit of trouble admitting it. I have indeed had the thought, "Man, this summer I'm finally gonna look how I looked like two years ago again!". I can only dismiss it for a moment until I decide I can not ignore that this is not, in fact, just about my hair. To be very blunt, my eating disorder (and, thus, me) wants to be that small again, that ill again. I use those words in context of my own story and self-image. I recognize that my memory is biased about which era of "sick" I tend to miss. I only miss the times when my body most closely mirrored the norms of how women are praised for looking and, in accordance, I falsely remember those times as when I was also the sickest. In reality, I was just as miserable and ill for months before in a body that looked the same as the one I had lived in for years prior. I try to check myself on those realities when I have such intrusive thoughts and narratives sail through my mind, but it is hard to breakdown the romanticisms completely.
However, remembering the pictures and remembering the emotions of the past are two tasks with vastly different difficulties. I can scroll through my camera roll all day and night looking at old images and feeling a distant attachment to who I was at their conception. It takes a deeper and sometimes unexpected moment for me to recall the way I was experiencing things as the person in the images. For instance, I had, what I would say was, a frightening realization this weekend. As these thoughts and narratives of recreating my past life have become more frequent and sometimes even convincing, there has been a lack of consideration on my part, of the unintended consequences that pursing them may cause. In other words, restriction over time, even if not severe, leads to an increased obsession with food, body, and in my experience, urges to binge and purge.
That is the expected biological effect of restriction which, historically, has played out like clockwork in my experience. This cycle usually happened within a day or even within a few hours when it was something that was really a struggle for me in an earlier stage of my eating disorder. That has not been the same since I came back from residential about a year ago when my binging and purging behaviors finally came to a stall with the reintroduction of proper nutrition and satisfaction from food. That is to say, my brain hasn't been on such high alert for those urges as their predecessor (restriction) hasn't been as alarming, rather it has been sneakier when it attacks. I wasn't expecting it this past weekend either when eating my dinner faster than usual turned into trying to satisfy a day's worth of anticipation and, one might say, "preparation" for this meal. The guilt and discomfort that followed lead me down a familiar but almost forgotten path. Did I have skills to deal with the discomfort that I could have used instead? Yes. Could I have tried harder to put off using a behavior that doesn't really solve anything beyond a fleeting second of relief? Absolutely. But I can't change the past, I can only try to learn from it.
When I was saying earlier that it's hard to remember the emotions of a time in my eating disorder by just looking at a picture, what I was trying to set up was how looking at those old pictures and longing for what I saw blinded me from truly understanding what it was I was seeing. Yes, I was seeing an old pair of maroon jeans and a cute jean vest on a girl with long blonde hair, but I was not in touch with the intense, unending fear I felt at every moment I thought of food (which was about 95% of the time). So this weekend as I sat there on the couch, hungry, exhausted, but filled with fear of moving for I thought that it would only translate into an eventual repeat of the inciting event, I remembered why I reached out for help for this thing in the first place. That romanticizing this monster is a very dangerous game and I have been teetering the line into falling off the cliff. A few weeks ago I talked about the hole I've found myself in with comfy furniture and few limitations. What I am talking about now doesn't land me there. No. Falling of the cliff is falling far beyond the reach of others. No furniture, no silver lining, just darkness.
I apologize for the continued use of that iffy metaphor if you find it confusing, it's far from polished and is sort of a last attempt to hide behind intelligence (if you call it that)/wordy run-on sentences instead of being direct and vulnerable. The realization that I came to, surprisingly for the first time, is how eerily similar things are to how they were two years ago as I returned for my spring semester at UT. Granted, I have acquired many more experiences and a greater awareness now, that doesn't take away from the parallels that exist regarding my actions between the two times. I hadn't taken into account the fact that aspiring to look a way I looked in the past might (and likely will) result in a reprise of the events that got me there, too. I'm back in college now, so it would be easy to mimic some of the exact routines that put me at such risk on the campus they first developed. Having this moment where I could recall what those days were like for me changed a few things. It changed how I am seeing my eating disorder now because I know that the way it manifests in my life can change at any moment from something that feels safe and numbing to something that just completely and utterly sucks. This weekend I was reminded of that. How much it can just fucking suck.
Glo
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