bloody marty mix
99/365: 1980-1981
Tuesday, 02 September 2008.
40 Years in 40 Days [ view the entire set ]
An examination and remembrance of a life at 40.
For the 40 days leading up to my 40th birthday, I intend to use my 365 Days project to document and remember my life and lay bare what defines me. 40 years, 40 qualities, 40 days.
Year 13: 1980-1981
In the spring of my 7th grade year, I had what I'd have to call my first real boyfriend. I'd had mutual crushes before, and had even held hands with other boys before, but this was something more tangible. We were known throughout the junior high wing of the building as an established couple... a unit. We were together for four months, which, at that age, may as well have been four years. Most relationships among our classmates lasted a few weeks, at best. I use the word "together" pretty loosely, of course. There's not much you can do when you're 12 and reliant on your parents to drive you places. We sat next to each other in class, held hands in the halls, hung out near each other's lockers, and snuck kisses when no one was looking. Before the school year was over, we broke up. A year later, his parents sent him off to a seminary in Wisconsin, hoping he'd opt for the priesthood. Instead, he returned senior year, got his freshman girlfriend pregnant, and joined the Air Force.
The summer of '81 came to be known as The Awesome Summer. My best friend Lisa and I spent our days wandering around town on foot or on our bikes, mostly talking about boys and clothes, and occasionally getting up to what you might call hilarious hijinks. We flirted with older boys, sometimes boys we knew, but mostly downstaters, vacationing up in the north woods with their families for the summer. They, too, would wander up and down the 1/4 mile main street in town, looking for laughs or trouble. Most of them stayed down at the county park campground, along the shore of the backwaters, just west of the dam. Wearing our bathing suits, we would walk down to the campground, and then through to the shore, and out to the dock to sunbathe. When we got tired or bored of our wanderings, we would stop in at the short-lived T-shirt shop, where you could get any of dozens of glittery, airbrushed, rubbery transfers ironed onto a T-shirt. If you were really feeling spendy, you could get your name across the back, spelled out in velvet-flocked iron-on letters. The people working the counter got used to us hanging around, and so we spent a lot of time in there, admiring the designs and chatting with the staff, who were not always averse to a little girl-talk.
We lived on Tab that summer. Convinced we were grotesquely fat (we were not), we simply decided to stop eating. It was easy to do so, as we spent so much time out and about that neither of our parents knew we weren't always getting meals at each other's houses. I lied about it with ease. When we were forced to sit down to a meal, we ate miniscule amounts, claiming to have already eaten at the other's house. I lost a tremendous amount of weight from a body that did not really have a tremendous amount to give. At first my mom complimented me on having slimmed down a bit, but as I lost more, the comments seemed less complimentary and more observational. If she was concerned, though, she didn't let on.
This was the start of a battle with food that was to consume my life years later.
Who am I?
I am in recovery.
I have had some sort of eating disorder or another (bulimorexia, BED, BDD) for almost 30 years. After more than a decade of therapy, I can confidently say that I am recovered now, but as any alcoholic will tell you, an addiction never goes away. It just gets better (or more poorly) managed. Food is a tricky one, because you can't quit food. Every day, you are forced to confront your demons anew.
To make matters more difficult, I refuse to deny myself the pleasure of good food. Food is not just energy to me. Food is a celebration of life. It would be easier, I think, if I forced myself to view food as units of energy, of which I need X to perform optimally. But, that leaves so much joy out, I just can't do it. And so, some days I overindulge, and other days I go without to make up for it, and I try to do so with a level of hyper-self-awareness that I hope will prevent me from falling into the old pattern of extremes: binging and starving and binging and starving. It would be so easy to go back to that, and God knows I'd probably be thinner, but I'd also probably be dead shortly thereafter. Better to be fat and happy.
Texture Credits
"unicorn rainbow" by no-frills marilyn.
"Fake TTV Texture 5" by DLSDesigns
[ view previous | view next ]
99/365: 1980-1981
Tuesday, 02 September 2008.
40 Years in 40 Days [ view the entire set ]
An examination and remembrance of a life at 40.
For the 40 days leading up to my 40th birthday, I intend to use my 365 Days project to document and remember my life and lay bare what defines me. 40 years, 40 qualities, 40 days.
Year 13: 1980-1981
In the spring of my 7th grade year, I had what I'd have to call my first real boyfriend. I'd had mutual crushes before, and had even held hands with other boys before, but this was something more tangible. We were known throughout the junior high wing of the building as an established couple... a unit. We were together for four months, which, at that age, may as well have been four years. Most relationships among our classmates lasted a few weeks, at best. I use the word "together" pretty loosely, of course. There's not much you can do when you're 12 and reliant on your parents to drive you places. We sat next to each other in class, held hands in the halls, hung out near each other's lockers, and snuck kisses when no one was looking. Before the school year was over, we broke up. A year later, his parents sent him off to a seminary in Wisconsin, hoping he'd opt for the priesthood. Instead, he returned senior year, got his freshman girlfriend pregnant, and joined the Air Force.
The summer of '81 came to be known as The Awesome Summer. My best friend Lisa and I spent our days wandering around town on foot or on our bikes, mostly talking about boys and clothes, and occasionally getting up to what you might call hilarious hijinks. We flirted with older boys, sometimes boys we knew, but mostly downstaters, vacationing up in the north woods with their families for the summer. They, too, would wander up and down the 1/4 mile main street in town, looking for laughs or trouble. Most of them stayed down at the county park campground, along the shore of the backwaters, just west of the dam. Wearing our bathing suits, we would walk down to the campground, and then through to the shore, and out to the dock to sunbathe. When we got tired or bored of our wanderings, we would stop in at the short-lived T-shirt shop, where you could get any of dozens of glittery, airbrushed, rubbery transfers ironed onto a T-shirt. If you were really feeling spendy, you could get your name across the back, spelled out in velvet-flocked iron-on letters. The people working the counter got used to us hanging around, and so we spent a lot of time in there, admiring the designs and chatting with the staff, who were not always averse to a little girl-talk.
We lived on Tab that summer. Convinced we were grotesquely fat (we were not), we simply decided to stop eating. It was easy to do so, as we spent so much time out and about that neither of our parents knew we weren't always getting meals at each other's houses. I lied about it with ease. When we were forced to sit down to a meal, we ate miniscule amounts, claiming to have already eaten at the other's house. I lost a tremendous amount of weight from a body that did not really have a tremendous amount to give. At first my mom complimented me on having slimmed down a bit, but as I lost more, the comments seemed less complimentary and more observational. If she was concerned, though, she didn't let on.
This was the start of a battle with food that was to consume my life years later.
Who am I?
I am in recovery.
I have had some sort of eating disorder or another (bulimorexia, BED, BDD) for almost 30 years. After more than a decade of therapy, I can confidently say that I am recovered now, but as any alcoholic will tell you, an addiction never goes away. It just gets better (or more poorly) managed. Food is a tricky one, because you can't quit food. Every day, you are forced to confront your demons anew.
To make matters more difficult, I refuse to deny myself the pleasure of good food. Food is not just energy to me. Food is a celebration of life. It would be easier, I think, if I forced myself to view food as units of energy, of which I need X to perform optimally. But, that leaves so much joy out, I just can't do it. And so, some days I overindulge, and other days I go without to make up for it, and I try to do so with a level of hyper-self-awareness that I hope will prevent me from falling into the old pattern of extremes: binging and starving and binging and starving. It would be so easy to go back to that, and God knows I'd probably be thinner, but I'd also probably be dead shortly thereafter. Better to be fat and happy.
Texture Credits
"unicorn rainbow" by no-frills marilyn.
"Fake TTV Texture 5" by DLSDesigns
[ view previous | view next ]