Pink Bricks: How My Queerness directly tied to my Eating Disorder and Body Dysmorphia
If you were to ask me, “Luke, when was the first instant you purged yourself?” I couldn’t tell you. I don’t remember the actual start, just the ritualistic habit of watching the pink walls and tiles of my mom’s bathroom blend together with the scent of toilet water and Febreze.
Even those who asked me when I first did it, I declined to answer. I didn’t know of any classifications of eating disorders; the names Bulimia and Anorexia remained unknown information to me. I didn’t have names for what I did. I had urges for what I did. I looked in the mirror and superimposed images of how I viewed myself over how I actually looked. I saw hips that were too large, an ass that was too big, and a million and one things about me to change.
A million and one things for people to point out.
A million and one things for people to make fun of.
Even has an upperclassman in high school, men weren’t allowed to be sensitive. About anything. Men were expected to always accept things for how they were and never open up. I, as a queer man living in a rural town, felt alone. I felt trapped in wanting to tell people how I felt and how insecure and inferior I felt. The narrative of men, however, didn’t fit my description. Men weren’t allowed to show shortcomings when it came to physical representation. Men weren’t allowed to have mental illnesses. Men weren’t allowed to have body issues. Men couldn’t show weakness.
As a high-schooler, you saw this in a lot of the rhetoric kids used. They would say the term “manorexic”, automatically assigning men with body issues as a punchline because you suffered from a “woman’s condition”. I hid my issues so I could maintain the thinly-veiled illusion that I was “in touch” with my masculinity. I was afraid being vocal about my situation would proverbially “out” me since eating disorders, to the guys in my school, were feminized as a inherently a problem women suffered from. I became more concerned with keeping appearances than I did with addressing my own health.
However, one day in my Junior year of school, I went to a fast food restaurant and heard something that triggered multiple links in my head to finally click.
“That guy’s built like a girl.”
One of the things that stuck with me all throughout my Junior and Senior year was that phrase. “Built like a girl.” Not necessarily because I was offended by what they said, but because it finally caused me to question a lot of things on how I viewed myself.
It caused me to re-evaluate the psychological trauma of being shamed for my “build” when I was younger, I was constantly teased as a child because I inherited my mom’s wide hips and stout build.
It caused me to realize that pretending to be masculine isn’t going to make the problems I had with body issues evaporate. It was masculinity that fostered the idea that I couldn’t have bulimia or anorexia because ingrained in this system of beliefs was a perception that bulimia and anorexia were “inherently women’s health issues”. This didn’t save me.
Unabashedly looking straight into the lens of society that had modeled me to hate my body and emptying my prejudices I had previously constructed for myself, gazing at the curves of my body and looking pass them to see the stigmas that challenged me to seek help and encounter the convictions that had overwhelmed my days and nights with worry on how society would perceive me if I did. This. This is what saved me.
Ultimately, I hope for the future that more men are willing to address their ideas on challenging the ignominy of seeking help for mental illness, and the process of finding help for body issues and mental illness becomes as routine as seeking treatment for a broken bone.
