Surviving with Food

I am having body-image-shit-thoughts again.

Lethal combo of period-brain and when the weather turns icy I want to eat more to insulate myself from the chill winter world (because human instincts OBVIOUSLY).

And so theres the shame... and the wanting to throw up.

My relationship with food in a nutshell, has been, painful and a great love affair. (First world/human race problem I know.)

I experienced some minor, yet memorable body shaming when I was young, I had a Mean Girls experience in high school years, a bad break up followed...

Then bulimia.

Now, a slow crawl to healthy food-fun-times.

SO not there yet.

Is anyone there?

It feels to me as if I meet two categories of women.

The ones who have food issues, and the ones who don't really care about food and hardly think about it. Lord give me grace.

Whenever I am met with a blank, uncomprehending stare if I or someone in the vicinity mentions disorders or other food related struggles, I am overcome by a blue-hot need to shake the individual like a bottle of hot sauce. "What version of media flooded America did YOU grow up in!?! Were you just born with a scaly thick skin Ashley, or are you an emotionless alien?!"

I love pasta. Hot chocolate. Croissants. Gelato. Toast and strawberry jam at midnight. I like to throw onions and garlic in hot olive oil and breath in the scent of good things to come.

And to be entirely honest with you, I don't think liking those foods is a bad thing.

I am CONSTANTLY caught between wanting to live a rich life filled with pleasurable food, and wanting to look in the mirror and feel sexy. And according to the society I happen to be in currently, I guess these things are not synonymous.

Let's talk about the above mentioned "CONSTANTLY" for a minute.

The constantly kills.

The constant brain chatter.

"Eat it. Don't. It will probably earn you 5lb. Eat it, this is a short life and at least its organic gluten! You will feel so hateful towards yourself if you do. Eat it, you can throw it up later. No. You're done with that. You eat and you don't throw up. Thats the new deal. The new deal sucks."

This never turns off, and I'm EXHAUSTED.

Most girls or women who have struggled with an eating disorder, an addiction, or well...life, could attest to the power our own brains can have over us. I want to unhook. The longing to just be able to flip a switch and breathe in the still and ensuing dark feels unbearable some nights.

Nights after eating more then I meant to, or not eating anything. Wishing to disconnect my mind from my body.

Cannot my soul just disembark to a nice lake house in the mountains somewhere, whilst below my physical shell sleeps off the over full feeling or as it may be, the hunger pains?

Even writing about this makes me feel sleepy. My eyelids are sliding shut staring at the keyboard. My body is so not into thinking about food that it would rather shut itself down then dwell on the subject longer then it takes to select a menu item.

I don't have answers to the over all problem yet.

I'd like to be able to hand every little girl a manual titled: Allowed to Eat: A How to for Feeding Yourself in the Modern World.

Maybe I’ll Write it.

The first chapter would be dedicated to an attempt at undoing the horrific brain beating our society has inflicted on girls and women and basically all of human kind when it comes to body expectations. Okay yeah, maybe that should be its own book. Then in the next one we can talk about feeding oneself again.

For now, if these things I’ve written make any sense to you, know you are far from alone. And I am proud of you for every time you take a bite.