I HAVE LOST.

"What is worse? To be a recovering anorectic with the weight of the world in your arms, or to display the structural straitjacket on the outside - show the rest of us how wonderfully strict and precise your thoughts and discipline are by displaying the hollow grooves in your collar bones?"

I have a confession to make. I've gained weight. 

In these three (or four) little words, lies an ocean of conflicting emotions and horror within me.

I hate those words. I hate how they make me feel. I hate the numbers on the scale. I hate the constricting feeling of my clothes, how my pants somehow convey to me, through their clingy fabric, that I've lost. They somehow convey the horrible realization that I've slipped and now I'm worthless. I'm despicable. I'm out of control. I'm weak.

I hate it. I hate that I've gained weight. I hate that I hate it even more.

A few months ago I posted an article in CORE about the "societal structures that govern our self image" and the obsession with staying thin.

I am, I'm sorry to say, so not over this - I'd like to think I'm somehow above all of that old diet sh*t, but sadly... No... I'm not.

And my heart just breaks when I look at myself in the mirror.

I have failed myself. 



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CORE ARTICLE: 
Symptoms of society's structural disease

The great divide. When your body is the enemy, and the enemy is you. An article by Margaretha K. Aase

There is an inherent discord in our society and our world, a great divorce between the body and the mind. You see it in the advertisements, commercials, Facebook walls, the resolutions and the goals, the girls flipping through magazines, the women walking past you  in the hall. It is everywhere around you, on every page you turn, every picture you glimpse from the corner of your eye, every commercial jingle in the background, every dream you embody through the madness in your mind.

We are sitting at the far end of a restaurant. The walls are a deep shade of wooden brown, the pictures are old newspaper clippings and pieces of maps, on the shelves old jazz instruments and old crates, rusty buckets, jars filled with buttons and nails.

This is Jonas B. – Jazz restaurant and pizzeria. In front of you an old friend - one you have not seen in almost a year. She is young, even though you both consider yourself “old”, and she has the light hearted, dry humor that cracks you up every time he offers her witty view of the world. She is only 25, but she is limitless wisdom, accepted defeat, her life a millennia of hatred and pain, her smile - from her heart - a well, or a fountain, of what remains.

You used to work at the gym together, as receptionists, and during that time you learned that she, too, struggled with the unforgiving,dissonant thought weavings of diets, weight loss, perfection and suffocation through Self-improvement. She has the body of a cello, the curves of the deep resonating bass lines of femalehood. She is like a Goddess, divine.

She has been anorectic since fifteen.

Ask her why one would ever want to overcome the disease. What is worse? To be a recovering anorectic with the weight of the world in your arms, or to display the structural straitjacket on the outside - show the rest of us how wonderfully strict and precise your thoughts and discipline are by displaying the hollow grooves in your collar bones?

She asks you how you are doing “in the head”, and you answer through a thick mask of tightly woven structural rules that you’re ok. ”You look healthy” she says, and the sadness of that is immeasurable. Healthy equals excess weight and curves, and that is not OK. That is outside of the neatness and cleanness and the exuberant feeling of restricting life into shapes that Fit. Fit the method, fit the imagery, fit the notion, fit the norm. Healthy is not good enough. Life is unruly.

We are never good enough, because we do not fit. We do not fit our bodies in our heads, or the clothes on display, we do not fit our expectations of ourselves or the measures we live by. We are failures, and we know it, and we huddle together in a corner with our magnificence on a leash and our starshine in our hands.

She talks about the sugar rush, and invites you for a drink, but you know, with immediate response, the exact amounts of calories in each glass, and the risks involved. Sometimes you take the spiritual shortcut and blame the restriction on it “not being healthy or good for my energy”. Fuck it. It’s the same judgment in a different form.

We are not self-absorbed or weak. We are not a generation of light-headed, hollow puppets on display. We are not the empty shells that look back at us from magazine displays and cover models. We are warriors, and we are fierce. Our unforgiveness and mercilessness are beyond measure. We are clean cut,razor sharp, crystal intelligence reflected. We bear our hunger and our hate in our portfolios, draw them on our sleeves, keep them in our fridge. There is a great divide between our bodies and our world.

There is a great divide, and we are it.

You can find the original article here.