Tonight I was confronted with a lot of weird painfully deeply difficult to process things that take me back to my deepest darkest parts, the stuff that keeps me up at night. All night.
So I saw emerson tonight. That happened.
Earlier, I met b. at the Smith Art Museum, because it was Northampton Arts Night Out, and when the Smith Museum is free (as it should always be, of course) and Lauren Greenfield's Thin & Girl Culture was at the Smith Museum
That was really good, but weird and hard for me, because it was a lot of photos of women with eating disorders, and eating disorder stuff is still oh so indescribably hard for me to deal with, and I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to write about it tonight. Still the hardest thing for me to talk about/deal with/acknowledge in anyway/think about.
Even though the year when I regularly weighed under 100 pounds was when I was 14, so 16 years ago now.
I've been living pretty much as normal and appearing normal for 16 years. weird.
To be clear, I can talk about it, in a very specific way, a way that I've created, a language I've created, where I can mention certain controlled truths, and act like I'm dealing with it, but that actually never really even scratches the surface. Of what I've done. Of what I've felt. Of how I still live.
I certainly don't talk about it in the present tense. It's 10:50pm and all I've eaten all day is a single yogurt. I'm fighting with myself with what I'll eat next. Since I've been fired, I can at least on some level see that I'm exercising compulsively (now 205 situps a day plus all this other stuff) but I can't stop. I love when people buy me dinner, because then I'm allowed to eat whatever I want without following my rules.
I eat plenty, and I maintain a normal weight, mostly, but the amount of rules, involved, I know it's not normal, whatever that is, because I can't find the words to talk about. I would never, ever tell anyone what I really think when it comes to eating.
I eroticize it, I play games, I deny myself things...I think this why I want to just go live on a farm because I figure if I was really in touch with food and the sources of my food than all this nonsense my intellectual mind knows is silly and ridiculous would go away.
Gardening helps. That's why I do it. Inpatient eating disorder units should have gardens. And animals. Really.
The show we saw tonight had all these photos of girls being forced to eat cookies, but what if they had to raise chickens and then kill and eat them? Or just gather eggs? That seems like something that would have shaken me out of my self obsession as a teenager. In a good way. And eating disorders are always a self obsession. not that you can stop it just because you know this.
Send all anorexics to sustainable farms and see what happens. seriously.
Food I create myself has less guilt. Food I cook myself does too.
Something about labor, hands, work, touch....
So seeing those photographs...I was almost in tears by the time I left that exhibit. I was choking in my throat.
Not in a bad way. I was really glad I saw it. But it wasn't easy. I think a lot of the point of my own work is that I'm trying so hard to conceive of a language in which to talk about these things.
I need to talk about them. It's part of why I am an artist.
Someone should. And that show tonight, that all from an observer's perspective, because most of those girls photographed are too fucked up to make their own art.
I want to be the voice from the inside, the one who was just that bad, but survived anyway. And I will survive what is happening to me now.
So it was an intense evening in my soul already...
And then I was walking alone down main street in the cold back to my car and standing at the light at the main intersection waiting to cross, and I look over my shoulder behind me for some reason I still can't figure out (ali says I was looking for him) and I see first one member of his band, then the next, and I knew what was coming but it happened so fast, then him, come around the corner, and I didn't know what to do, so I looked away, but I'm pretty sure he saw me, and looked away too, and walked past me.
And then I felt like crying again and I still do.
Both of these are things I'm ashamed of.
That I've treated and still treat my body this way. That I loved him and trusted him and that he treated me this way.
Shame.
That ties this whole night together.
And a lot of my recent life.
In the recent past I've been on my knees in front of one person while someone who likes me sincerely called me on the phone to make plans with me. And have been at the computer at 1am eating leftover homemade curry and dirty instant messaging two different people with the same first same name at the same time.
Shame.
What's going on here?
Starving myself/loving the wrong people. A lot to think about.
And it's almost valentines day...and I take holidays, even stupid ones seriously, because I love ceremony.
It's gonna be a long night.
Thanks sweet jesus that K. made me a 21 love songs mix for valentines day that arrived unexpectedly in the mail this morning, along with this month's cosmo (An Orgasm Almost Killed Her: we are not kidding)(actual headline).
and I'm gonna listened to that truly excellent mix and write my heart out and drink cheap white wine and eat a chicken sandwich from the food the guy who doesn't eat much left behind.
good for me. I am embracing having an appetite. I think I'll make curried chicken salad.
Fuck shame. So what I loved him and I was wrong. He should be ashamed, and he is, cause he can't even look me in the face. Fuck that.
I've got a lot more to write on this subject, I think. Stay tuned.
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