Guilt Complex

It’s funny how in life you “aspire” to be many things. I aspire to be a writer, healthy, with a nice place of my own….I also, in the darkest recesses of my soul, in the parts of myself I conceal from EVERYONE, aspire to be an anoretic.

Before anyone comes after me, let me explain…

I have suffered with bulimia now for two years- which isn’t long, not by any stretch of the imagination, but my disordered eating started way before that, in the form of binge eating. It sounds ludicrous to some that a woman of my age would suddenly “develop” bulimia, but during all the time that I’ve had recently to sit and and ponder how the fuck I ended so fucked up in a short space of time, I can see it was a long time coming and, frankly, somewhat inevitable.

When I was a child, if I left any food on my plate my mum would say: “why won’t you eat that, Eff? It’s crying now!” My hopelessly sweet, six-year-old self would not stop to contemplate the likelihood that a potato had the capacity to cry, I was a sweet little soul and very sensitive- I’d get upset and eat the lonely potato, just to keep him happy.

To this day, my BIGGEST bugbear is the anthropomorphism of inanimate objects.

Of course, as I grew older I knew that potatoes, or in fact ANY foodstuff doesn’t have the capacity to cry (unless perhaps it’s really, really past its sell-by date), but nevertheless, the seed of guilt had been planted and from childhood onwards, eating and not eating has always been tied up with guilt…I’d feel guilty if I didn’t leave an empty plate, but I’d feel guilty about eating so much. People would remark on how much I enjoyed my food, how much I loved to eat, how I always left an empty plate. In the back of my mind, I was trying to eat away the guilt. Very rarely did I feel full.

Fast forward to today and this battle with guilt is still going on, but in an entirely different way. When I first started to try to lose weight, I was at war with this guilt. I *knew*  I had to eat less and cut down my portion sizes, but if there was food left, I’d feel so guilty for leaving it, I’d end up eating it anyway and feeling even more guilty for letting  myself down.

Bulimia, it appears, seemed to be the next “logical” step….I could keep “everyone” happy and eat my food and present a clean plate and I could keep myself happy by trying to get rid of that food. It was just once in a while at first, after big dinners when I was feling stuffed- it seemed reasonable, something that could be done, but only out of necessity. It’s amazing how quickly once a month becomes once a fortnight, becomes once a week, becomes twice a week, becomes every other day, becomes every day….

The satisfaction and the freedom from guilt I feel when I am able to eat to make people happy, to gorge myself in order to fill my soul’s swirling massless void, to amiably have a snack with my friends and then purge it all away, to make it disappear from the inside out; makes me feel almost superhuman. I’ve found a loophole, a way of bending the rules, that keeps the guilt at bay and no one is any the wiser.

I’m tired of fighting the guilt. It exhausts me, even now with my “perfect” system in place, it’s starting to creep back in. Except now, the guilt has another voice in my head to contend with, and that’s the one that says: “fat pig”. I can’t fight them both and I can no longer keep them both happy. I no longer want to keep the guilt happy anyway, I’m mentally too weak to carry it. Over 20 years of carrying it has nearly crushed me and I just can’t, no,won’t do it anymore.

I want to spit in the face of guilt and say “fuck you”. To me, the way to do this is to simply not eat, show the guilt it doesn’t affect me anymore. I want to control the way I feel, not have some fucked-up, deep-seeded emotion dictate to me how to behave.

Therein lies my aspiration.

Only a complete lunatic would find this rational….