Marking Our Bodies As Our Own
Content Note: Disordered eating & self-harm
I am a monster with many mouths, a cartoon tornado. I am a bottomless stomach. I judge myself for overeating, and I can’t stop.
At midnight, I find myself seeking comfort in my kitchen. Between spoonfuls of peanut butter and handfuls of potato chips, I scroll through Twitter to read about the latest attacks on democracy and the media, the surge of Islamophobic hate crimes, swastikas spray-painted on playgrounds, attempts to roll back the rights of women, immigrants, and trans kids.
I binge on food and information.
Both make me feel sick.
In my recovery from alcoholism, I’ve heard it called “the phenomenon of craving” set off by the first drink: a flipped switch that calls for more, more, more, and leads to oblivion. I’m still sober, but lately it’s been happening to me with food. The switch is flipped by the first bite, especially something sweet, or fatty, or creamy, or cheesy; it triggers a frantic desire to cram as much comfort into my body as possible. I have to remind myself to breathe. I have to remind myself to finish chewing before I take another mouthful. I have to remind myself to stop eating when I’m full.
I’m embarrassed to put this into words. But if at least one person can relate, then it’s worth it, to make you and me both feel less alone.
I wonder if it’s a desire to feel grounded by the earthly act of eating, to feel present in my body when it’s easy to spin out into the fevered void of headlines and outrage. I wonder if it’s the opposite of feeling grounded: eating to numb out and escape.
It’s related to my desire to say “fuck it” and self destruct — because if an ignorant, incompetent, hateful man can take over our country, what does anything matter? Does it matter if I gain 10, 15, 20 pounds? Does it matter if I spend a hundred dollars on fancy Korean skincare or books or shiny crystals for my friends or all the pork buns I can eat? Does it matter if I become a monster with many mouths, a cartoon tornado?
I know I’m not alone. Lena Dunham jokes controversially about her dramatic weight loss from the stress of the new administration; others talk about gaining the “Trump ten.” A friend tells me about an Ayurvedic concept that the body needs to digest information just as it does food. Our bodies have so much to digest right now, and I see the chaos it brings to me and my loved ones.
Some of us can’t eat.
Some of us can’t stop eating. My wife gets nauseous and dizzy when she hears Trump’s voice, and we set boundaries about what time of day we can handle discussing the news. Everyone I know feels overwhelmed and angry.
My therapist encourages me to feel anger. She tells me, “When you’re angry, your instinct is to turn it inward and harm yourself. I want you to keep an eye on that. You don’t have to hurt yourself anymore.” I think of this after a binge, when I’m uncomfortably full, when my stomach hurts. When does self-care become self-indulgence? When does indulgence become self-punishment?
The last time I struggled hard with my eating, I was a teenager. I have to remind myself what it was like. How bad it got. I have to remember the time I spent over toilets and bathtub drains with my fingers down my throat, coughing on the sting of stomach acid. I have to remember the days of almonds and celery and constant headaches and isolation. The illusion of strength as I made myself weaker. I have to remember the time in high school when I woke up to find that I’d shit myself in the night because I hadn’t eaten enough the day before, and my body panicked. I thought this was control.
Though I had occasional relapses of disordered eating behavior throughout my 20s, I’ve been in a stable, mostly-recovered place for a few years. But it feels like it’s always waiting beneath the surface.
Like now: I’m three months shy of thirty and I still panic on some deep level when I see my belly growing, when my jeans get tighter around my thighs. My eyes still slide across magazine covers at the grocery checkout — “flat belly,” “killer abs,” “bikini body.” This is what a woman should be.
I worry that it wouldn’t take much weight gain from stress-eating before I’m back to tracking my meals, making mental lists of “negative calorie” foods, remembering all those hoarded tips to boost metabolism, my years spent studying weight loss like a foreign language I became fluent in. The old knowledge and habits rush back to the front of my mind like old friends, crowding out the body-positive feminist I’ve become.
I have to remember that I don’t do those things anymore. That I’d rather be alive, happy, and healthy. But to love myself unconditionally in our fatphobic society is like swimming upstream. Like other invisible illnesses, recovery from eating disorders is ongoing; it doesn’t happen once and disappear forever. It’s insidious because it’s invisible. Only at my very sickest did I look sick; mostly, you wouldn’t know I was struggling if I didn’t tell you. Eating disorders thrive in secrecy, in the dark, like mushrooms. That’s why writing and talking about it are such powerful tools of recovery.
Eating disorders are not disconnected from other struggles, from other invisible illnesses like depression and anxiety. Overeating can comfort me when I’m depressed, soothe me when I’m anxious, and provide fleeting pleasure when the world seems dim. I can’t entirely separate my disordered eating behaviors from other forms of self-harm. My first tattoos were the tiny lines I carved into myself, the jagged rainbow on the hidden flesh of my hip.
My first high school girlfriend showed me the marks she’d made on her thigh — crude razor lines spelling first F-A-T, then transformed into F-A-G. There were many different but not unconnected reasons to hate ourselves. This is not what a woman should be. Punishing ourselves for our secrets before the world had a chance to.
Last month, I got my first real tattoo: a flowering chamomile plant on my arm as a symbol of self care, a reminder to slow down, to be patient with myself and others. The artist asked me what made me decide to get a tattoo now. I told her I’d always wanted one, but since the election, I’ve felt the need to do something, anything, to show that my body was my own. She nodded. She talked about the power of tattoos as a radical way to reclaim our bodies. An act of defiance. She said other clients had expressed the same thing.
Eating, starving, growing, shrinking; tattoos, piercings, haircuts. This desire to reclaim our own bodies is a logical response to a president who has outlined very clearly what he thinks of women. A former beauty pageant owner who values women chiefly as sex objects, only worthy of his time insofar as they conform to his standards; a misogynist who attacks women who disagree with him as “pigs,” “dogs,” “fat slobs,” and “nasty women.” A president who brags about sexual assault and watching half-naked underage girls in their dressing rooms. A president with the support of conservative politicians who see female bodies as hosts for fetuses, who refuse to prioritize our health and reproductive autonomy. This is what a woman should be.
It makes sense that we’re searching for ways to mark our bodies as our own in defiance, since so much of the political conversation right now is about bodies and how they are governed and policed. This affects the bodies of women, queer and trans people, people of color, immigrants, Muslims. Threatened and dehumanized, we carry the anxiety with us, inside our skin, and we seek new ways — or old ways — to relieve it.
I know I don’t want to go back to my old ways of coping: purging, starving, punishing. Long-term resistance to this administration will require strong bodies, minds, and spirits, so I want to keep taking care of myself, empowering myself to fight another day. I don’t want eating to become a battleground again. As an adolescent, it seemed like the only area of my life where I could really exercise control.
Now, at the end of my 20s, I’ve made deliberate choices to create a life that reflects who I am and what I want. I have a say over much more than the shape of my body or a number on the scale; I choose who I love, how I live and express myself. The Trump administration can’t change that. I look down at my arm and see the definite black lines of the chamomile plant tattooed over my muscles, haloed by my freckles; I feel grounded and calmed knowing my body and my heart are my own.
