Time is a luxury, and being of the no-income bracket, I spent the past seven days of vacation sprawled out, curled up, indoors, outdoors with books. BOOKS! What magical creatures that can set your mind to spinning and take your brain and heart and - if you're lucky - spirit places that you couldn't fathom on your own. A week of reading has reminded me, I do have a brain! I can think! Deep thoughts! It's been a while...
How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran [2011], is one such paperback I am currently devouring. I'm about half way through, and it's like no book I have ever read. I've never really been much into autobiographies, but I realize now it's because I have never read them! This book will shock you, perhaps bore you at parts, have you cringing, and make you burst out loud in barks of laughter. I highly recommend it.
The last chapter I just finished was about Fat. With a capital F. With unapologetic flair, Moran takes us through her experience of growing up female, piecemeal. This chapter was dedicated to her experience of fatness as a teenager. She finishes the section with a brilliant essay on what being Fat means and exposes the ridiculousness of the perception of compulsive overeating being farcical and absurd compared to that of other addictions or compulsive behaviors (drugs, alcohol, sex). Why do people flagrantly expose, and even boast, of their misdeeds with narcotics and booze and f***ing ("Wow, I got SMASHED last night and woke up with a stranger, naked) but furtively hide any evidence or trace of excessive consumption of food? If we talked about our food behaviors,
"Then people would be able to address your dysfunction as openly as they do all the others. They could reply, 'Whoa, dude. Maybe you should calm it down on the high GI-load carbs for a bit, my friend You have gone a bit bongo-mondo. I am the same. I did a three-hour session on the microwave lasagna last night. Perhaps we should go out to the country for abit. Get our heads together. Clean up our act." (p.113)
Disordered eating for me is about secrecy and isolation, from my own consciousness and others. However, the more I can push at the the precarious pedestal that is my pride, by sharing my experience and admitting my actions, the closer it will be to tumbling to the ground in pieces. And that's what I need. My pride to be blown to bits. So I can regain a sense of humility in my fallibility as a human. So I can regain the knowledge and wisdom that I NEED other people, to connect with, to help me, to offer help to them.
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