Asleep...tired...or it malingers

5 days since getting the wisdom teeth removed. I've gotten some reading done but nothing other than that. No writing, unfortunately. I've been so drugged out. My main goal for tomorrow since I'm improving is to revise and write write write.

I'm not going to do any poem stuff today. I'm too spent to forage my "archive" for a poem to post. I want to bring up this nonfiction piece of mine. Being restricted to mushy foods has had an interesting affect on me. I want some cool, crunchy cereal soooo badly...yet, I have lost weight, and I've forgotten how easy it is to not eat. That's a road I dare not step towards, but I've been thinking a lot about body image and food and the like. This is a piece I wrote in February when I was in a similar state of mind:

A Hunger Manifesto
02/25/10

More and more the suggestion “how to be anorexic” pops up in search engines. Obviously the person searching for such a thing is not and will never be anorectic. What the pursuer wants is the ultimate knowledge that the anorectic seems to hold. How do you get so thin…how do you not eat. The anorectic seemingly holds the key to the Western ideal of beauty, of perfection: Thin. And for every person aware that anorexia nervosa is a dangerous mental disorder, there is a person who secretly or not so secretly is envious of the anorectic’s refusal of food.

As if it could solely be about food. It would be so easy to change, to cure, to eliminate if the anorectic simply did not want to eat. Anorexia, after all, means lack of appetite in medical translation. This is what Westerners want to know. How does one suppress appetite? The anorectic, however, is the absolute wrong person to turn to with such a question.

Anorectics want to eat. They daydream of eating and write of eating. Their dreams are full of cake, pasta, bread. Food is their religion: Thin is the God but low calorie foods are the saints. Salads, fruits, vegetables, aspartame, black coffee, and water so much water. The day, the week even, is placed in the framework of food. They have appetite. There is no question of that.

But anorectics are good daughters and sons. The best friends and star students. And starvation is the ultimate act of selflessness. Here is my body on a silver platter. All my food goes to you. I don’t deserve it. I need to serve instead of gorge. They are rapturously devoted. Anorectics cannot state “good enough.” Cannot state “average.” These are alien concepts. More so, these are blasphemy.

And of course everyone prays to Thin. Thin is purity, the adherence to tradition, before food could be gotten anywhere in any quantity (keeping in mind anorexia nervosa is almost strictly a Western occurrence). Thin is upward mobility because Thin is glamorous, fashionable. The initial choice to restrict food intake is all on the anorectic but encouragement is inescapable. I wish I were skinny like you…

While anorexia nervosa can cripple men just as well as women, women are incredibly sensitive to it because of the Western perversion of youth. As soon as the female child begins to soften around the breasts and belly she is sexualized. Men drool at the mouth for her limberness, her excitability, her purity and naivety. He wants to be the first to take her so she always remembers him and at least he can be confident enough to “satisfy” a child. And as the girl grows softer and begins bleeding and feeling tightness in the lower belly around certain boys her father snarls in fear and her mother in jealousy. The girl quickly realizes that she is a new creature who can no longer relate to her father because she looks like her mother and yet cannot identify with her mother because her mother pushes her away in necessity and partly in envy, knowing her daughter will now be the subject of desire she once was.

And if the girl is subject to the most abhorrent act imaginable—sexual abuse—her new body is found an enemy. The softness not only pushed her parents away but seduced my abuser, she concludes. He touched me because I look too sexy. This is her deduction. The only way to be rid of softness is to starve it off. So starve she will.

Above everything the anorectic rejects—selfishness, aging, sexuality—there is consumer culture. Take take take buy buy buy consume consume consume. In this flurry of gluttony the anorectic holds steadfast, saying I do not want, I do not want. In hunger is the affirmation of humanity. Consumer culture dulls senses. Anorectics opt out of the dizzying modern lifestyle in favor of feeling. It is a paradox that in starvation is living, but it makes perfect sense when placed in the context of Western society. The “average” modern person falls victim to the numbing patterns of desk work, commuting, television. Anorectics do not believe in average and will do anything to be exemplary, and this means the rejection of the ultimate consumption: food. The “average” people take their on-the-go food for granted. Not me, I need to feel, says the anorectic. And of course this will result in Thin and Thin will be praised and praised until the anorectic is dying or dead.

As if it could solely be about food. It would be so easy.

Anorexia nervosa is flourishing, becoming an American epidemic. The fact that obesity is an epidemic of the same proportions is no coincidence. Both anorexia nervosa and obesity cross generational, racial, and gender boundaries (albeit they are concentrated in certain demographics), more and more striking at younger ages. The obese suffocate themselves with consumer culture—buying popular, easy, manufactured food and working their sedentary job, blind to the health risks because they simply have too much to do to think about weight gain. The anorectics are hyperaware of this suffocation. They vow to sustain on as little as possible and push the physicality of their bodies despite the temptations of technology, blind to the health risks because “average” must be avoided like a rabid animal.

What is for certain is that consumer culture is here to stay until the next paradigm-shifting technological innovation. And while people are enraptured in consumption they will always bow to Thin as the holy ideal because Thin has the will power to reject modernity. Thin is pure, Thin is transcendent, Thin is youthful, Thin is perfect. And this ideal will continue killing their sons and daughters, their friends and students, because Thin is never Thin. In the mind of the anorectic, the Thinner means the greater and more pleasing, and Thinnest will occur only in death. It is the sacrifice they make to Thin and all its promises of greatness—they will finally be noticed positively by their parents and their body will be a temple instead of a tool of hedonistic desire. Anorexia nervosa is the want to sacrifice. The fact that starving to feel in a deadening culture or starving to feel accomplished results in death is known quite well by the anorectic. He or she is willing to make that sacrifice if their loved ones let them.