Anorexia

Posted December 20th, 2003 by Sean Williams

People tend to wear their disfunctions on their sleeves. If it isn’t an eating disorder it’s a struggle to battle addiction or to overcome a rotten childhood. We start wanting to be judged by what we *aren’t* doing; that we need credit for overcoming our inclinations for bad behavior. Food is described as “sinful”, running for an hour on a treadmill, one of the most absurd activites invented by man, is greeted with congratulations.

I quit smoking a year and a half ago in a flurry that deserves no attention and no credit to me. I suddenly lost the taste for it. Those of you who smoke will know this feeling, when you smoke a cigarette and it does nothing good for you, just makes you feel hollowed out like gallon of cookies and cream with all the oreo bits gone covered in freezer burn. That happened one day, the next cigarette was just as bad, the price of a pack jumped and I sorta wandered away from it. I had been trying to quit for years before, but sometimes the path makes it way for you and last May was when I was supposed to quit.

My ex was an anorexic. Not so’s you’d notice, she never seemed to be unhealthy although she was always very trim. But it’s the behavior that I identify with. Anorexics aren’t trying to be thin, that is incidental. They are trying to find control, control over their world ultimately, but the have to begin with themselves. They deny themselves food because the weight loss and the feeling of hunger is their fault and they know they are in charge of it.

Fat people have the same thing. The feeling of fullness and the extra weight you have gained is your fault, you’re in charge of it. And that’s a refreshing feeling. You get angry when people congratulate you for losing weight, you resent feeling good about being thin. It’s hard to explain this to people, but fat people want to be fat, they want to have reasons for the hate they feel and they want to be in control of who they feel it for.

I have enormous wellsprings of hate. I used to direct it at my dad, then I directed it at the “system” and the “world” and a thousand other groups of people. The reason this blog is called “Seanrants” is because I am pretty well known for just losing my temper and explaining, in long exhaustive detail, about how much shit is pissing me off.

But I know I’m wrong most of the time. Sometimes I still get angry for the right reasons, sometimes those deep wells of fury that burn inside of me, those reserves of magma-like hatred that make my back break out in boils, sometimes they come to the surface for rational reasons. But knowing that hasn’t done anything to make me any happier, I have to take a two step approach; A) avoid the thing that fills me with fury and B) find ways to control my anger when it is undirected.

I have found that cooking really helps with my anger management. I really like to cook for other people. I cook a lot, I cook at unreasonable times, and I cook too much. I like to make big breakfasts, I like to make deserts, I love the way brown sugar feels and the way butter and flower mix in a pan. I put together dinner menus and I invite over people who don’t make me furious and feed them food.

But this cooking of mine is essentially anorexia, and I know that. I am fascinated by cooking the same way I used to be fascinated by how much and how quickly I could alter my body. Strange to think that my anorexia does nothing to change my weight and actually makes the people around me fat. But allowing some self expression to come out like that, giving me something constructive to control, means I’m not going to blow up the next time someone does something horrible. I’m just going to walk away and bake some cookies.