on skills, side-quests and eating disorders
I feel ashamed, my dentist recently told me that I had unusual dental enamel wear, he politely asked me if I had acid reflux, something that’s pretty common in people my age. I played along. Why yes, I do have acid reflux, how can you tell? He explained how the part of my teeth that meets near the gum was showing unusual wear, and that my throat was always red and inflamed. I acted surprised. He showed me a picture he took of my teeth with his cool camera tool. It looked as if a miniature stone carver had been chiseling at my teeth from the inside. Fuck. How did it get this way?
Sia, you know exactly how you ended up here. I guess it has something to do with being trans and my body behaving in ways that I absolutely did not want, it’s just not that. I think I’ve been collecting eating disorders since I was a child.
I’ve had trouble controlling the quantity of what I eat since I can remember. My father is a firm believer of measuring yourself, and in this case, it meant eating the correct amount of food. Eating too much was forbidden, and the way he enforced this was that if I ate too much, I would get the shit beat out of me. As a kid I had no idea what this meant or how to do this right. How much food should I serve on my plate? How much food did I have to leave? Beating the shit out of your child for not knowing the rules you don’t disclose for a game you don’t know you’re playing seems cruel, but I digress.
The way I learned to measure myself was to judge the amount of anger in father’s eyes before the breaking point. In that way I could devise the correct time to stop eating. Eating became something I disliked and something shameful I would do when no one was present. I would gorge myself before meals to make sure I ate the correct amount of food and not remain hungry. Look dad, I ate the correct amount! I would feel sick to my stomach afterwards, but hey! At least I didn’t get the shit beat out of me.
No one told me I would acquire the Binge skill after embarking on this side-quest.
I remember reading books about the Roman Empire, the ones with the anecdotes about the banquets and orgies and how the misunderstood word vomitorium gave someone the idea that Romans had special rooms where while gorging themselves at banquets excuse themselves go to the vomitorium and make themselves vomit so that they could continue feasting. Sometimes I would eat too much before eating, and I figured that if it’s good enough for the Romans, it was good enough for me, besides, I had Italian heritage.
You know how things tend to escalate when you abuse them? The more I ate, the more I would binge. The more I would binge, the more I ate. I used to read the beauty magazines my mom bought to understand what was happening in women’s world. I read a story about how Prince Charles was reportedly disgusted by Princess Diana’s breath because it always reeked of vomit. Princess Diana was bulimic and so was I.
No one told me I would acquire the Bulimia skill after embarking on this side-quest.
Anorexia.
This skill was the hardest to acquire and it involves a quest, you can’t get lost in the side-quests if you want to acquire it. It takes will and determination. It doesn’t happen by mistake
I was always tall for a kid, I’m not that tall, I guess I’m tall in my age group percentile, all the kids are as tall or taller than me now. Which would be great if I wasn’t this old. Sia, we’re writing about anorexia. Get. Back. On. Track.
Ok, the point that I was trying to make is that growing up my body didn’t respond how I would have liked it to, and that was a constant source of stress and disappointment. All the girls my age started getting curves. I didn’t. I got muscles. I got acne. It was bad. I have bad acne scars; I gave up on being a girl. Who would ever want a tall muscly woman with acne scars?
I guess it was good to get muscles as a late 80’s teenage boy. You had Stallone and Rambo and Van Damme as role models. Except I wasn’t a teenage boy, not really. But yeah, I discovered bodybuilding and the muscle cycling thing and caloric intake. So if you don’t know about body building and muscle cycling, when you do the muscle building cycle, you eat a large caloric intake and do anaerobic work out like crazy and you’ll get muscly fat. You then do the cut cycle, where you’ll reduce your caloric intake to a bare minimum and do aerobic exercise like crazy until you get toned and defined for when you want to show off your body.
I wasn’t good at this, I mean, I really love sidequests, so I’d just indulge in binge eating and working out like crazy. I got big. 220 pounds big. I have the stretchmarks to prove it. Anyhow, what’s another scar on a tall muscly woman filled who’s already filled with scars? Also, people tend to avoid muscleheads. Which was a big improvement on getting bullied at school for being an effeminate kid who would cry if you called them a girlboy, plus I finally gained approval and respect from my uncles and aunts and cousins and peers. I actually hated my body, I hated what I created. I started drinking. Most of my 20s are a blur. I’m glad I don’t remember most of the things I did. I was filled with so much self-hate that when I eventually got my shit together it left a scar deeper than whatever skin marks I have. Self loathing is one of the demons who still speak to me to get me to do things.
I guess music saved me. I started starting and playing in bands, writing my own music, and trying to organize stuff so I could make punk rock happen. I stopped working out and eating and giving a fuck about what people thought about me. When I got thin(er) the spell was broken, Transitioning was a real possibility. I had never felt better in my life. Bodywise.
Then Kate Moss happened. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. It’s true. I started skipping meals on purpose, then I started skipping eating at all on certain days. Hey, If Jesus fasted 40 days and 40 nights, who was I not to follow in His steps? I love the feeling of hugging myself and feeling the ribs in my back. At my thinnest I could feel my pants or skirts chafing on my hipbones, my spine chafing on chairs when I sat down. I cannot overstate how much I love this. It’s still a dream I start chasing again if I let myself go.
I had finally gained the Anorexia skill.
So, there’s this thing about people who don’t have good genes and have gone through second puberty before transitioning. Your body doesn’t really feel right. You get thin and clothing fits better and you look better but your face looks gaunt and if you gain weight your face will look nicer, but your clothing will fit you like if you’re dressing a brick.
This is how I got my teeth wrecked. I never really stopped purging. Purging is my go-to for calorie control, purging is a throttle; It’s how I control my food intake before anorexia kicks in. We’re already in the RPG reference type of thing I’ve been writing, so think of Anorexia as my special attack, it needs preparation or mana or keeping a button pressed long enough to unleash it. The downside and the problem with special attacks is that they drain your life energy. It’s not something you can keep up if you want to keep living and playing the game.
Fuck, i just wanted to feel good in my skin and that I own my body
I theoretically knew that this was destroying my health somehow. Now I have the proof. I know what I’m doing is unhealthy and it’s messed up. I have a bad relationship with food. I’ve gone over this with my therapist and they’ve told me that food is one of the three basal ways that we bring pleasure into our life. I’ll let you guess the other two. I really envy people who are able to enjoy food, which seems to be most of us, I’ve tried the faking it till you make it approach but it just hasn’t worked, food is a tool which makes me feel either sick or not sick. Maybe my dad was actually right about measuring yourself. I just wish he hadn’t beat the shit out of me then.
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