I was an anorexic boy. This is my story.
2014
2014
2014 - Reflections (1)
We inhabit and are inhabited by the environments in which we dwell - family, school, church, work, locality, gangs, and even friendships. Enshrined within culture, laws, and doctrines is a truth of being in the world; they set expectations of who we are.
The choices we make define us, yet the course of our lives often feels like it has always already been determined. This can be seen in the apathetic slogan that we should accept a situation as the way it is, no matter how absurd or unjust. It is epitomised in the urge to play the game upon which organisations are founded.
The environments we inhabit are infused with value judgements of what is good and wrong. The significance possessing words, symbols, or actions predisposes us to pick certain options, shrouding them with a mystique of envy or fear. A promise of abstract perfection, or exclusion; which one will you pick?
We experience generalised anxiety whenever our instincts are at odds with the inherited understanding of what we should be doing, or what we ought to be. The sense of guilt and shame for going against the expected betrays our inner selves.
Invisible webs of significance allow us to shirk this anxiety, by sign-posting acceptable routes. Webs that we reproduce when making choices based on their terms of reference - what is of worth and what is not.
This is not determinism, rather a constructed reality that limits and rigs the pool of options available to you at any given time.
The environments we inhabit imprint histories upon our skin as if from nowhere. We are swaddled in layers of significance that claim ownership of who we are. The body is the object upon which power, both tangible and nebulous, is exerted to sustain established or desired orders.
Slavery. Chemical castration. Female genital mutilation. Abortion. Imprisonment. The burka. Circumcision. Prostitution. Rape. Page 3. Contraception. Indecency. Patents on genes.
The body as a tool of power.
2014 - Reflections (2)
Our environments cast the complexity of life in dichotomies - good and wrong; deserving and undeserving; beauty and ugliness; truth and lies; cause and effect. You are induced to think in polarised terms that deny incompatible considerations.
They propose loaded questions when our interactions are anticipated in culture, laws, and doctrines; we know what should happen. This creates a reality bounded by logical propositions that define the thinkable and unthinkable. A prism of understanding.
Whilst our environments foster similar ways of processing information, we are characterised by difference. Inevitably, we experience disharmony from inner contradictions with what these insidious logics expect from us. We are shamed, every look revealing, so close, knowing, must try harder, impotent frustration, backdraft.
Expectations can be found in the body-ideal created by mass media (photo-shopped images that dehumanise the subject), or the absence of role models (representation of gay or trans people), or the body as property of moral authority (regulating the sexual act).
The mind tries to order itself around the expected by separating into subject and object.
Aspects of your self that fail the ideal are foisted onto the objectified body. In penance, we carry out violence against the body-object, hoping to manipulate it into an image that fits. This act of self-harm reaffirms the truth of being that is imposed by our environments.
Power acting upon, through, and within us. The panoptical glare of the ideal sears itself onto the retina of the anorexic person, making us hyper-aware of all messages about body image. Observing the observer being observed. We harvest the tools to judge ourselves from our environments.
Why? Because in hating the body, you attack what you perceive it to signify: a vessel for a weakness that affronts what society values.
At the same time, you use images when interacting within environments to trigger desired assumptions about yourself. The image isn’t simply a look, but learned behaviours and commonplace phrases. They allow you to project an ideal-subject, a version of yourself that you believe the world will affirm as worthwhile.
Without a narrative of your being within these dissident environments, without an understanding of your experience, without belonging, you etch histories from nowhere on a parchment you detest.
“ These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure…
With this investment of its own sex by a technology of power and knowledge, which it had itself invented, the bourgeoisie underscored the high political price of its body, sensations, and pleasures, its well-being and survival. ”
— Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1
2014 - Reflections (3)
Many people speak of their anorexic self as Ana, Rex, or Ed. Known as narrative therapy, this approach lets people personify the disorder as an antagonist that can be neutralised.
However, there is a risk that you become trapped between dual projections. One being an idealised image of others to which you aspire and use against yourself - you should be that way. The other embodies the illness as an externality that is possessing you - something who the real you can fight against.
The fallacy of a singular identity may lie behind this effort to project negative attributes onto a transcendental subject. The escapist fantasy.
Identity carries cultural significance in the form of prejudices, assumptions, and expectations. An identity. A label. An image.
Identity is imposed upon you, in the sense that many of the signifiers are fixed before you assumed it – how a man acts, or what it is to be depressed. The allure is one of cloaking your immediate experience of being; hiding what you find shameful under something acceptable or violent.
Coming out is an act of claiming an identity, a cultural space. This space is defined in relation to your environments - you understand yourself as gay because you are not straight. It is a constructed space, where you are afforded visibility on someone else’s terms.
This is apparent in the tendency for gay people to state they are normal, or straight-acting. They plead for inclusion because the queer space is colonised by value judgements. Stereotypes embedded within identities drive people to self-govern according to dominant logics, such as fem boys, trans people, or butch girls being ridiculed within the community.
As a boy with a ‘girl’s illness’, which is treated as synonymous with weakness, the stigma of being other to what is expected antagonised the eating disorder. And the solution? Man-up; adopt the stoicism you ought to be demonstrating. Difference is defined in such as way as to reinforce the dominant order - preconceptions exist for a reason.
Upon revealing my sexuality, I assumed many of the attributes expected of a gay man. It served as a vehicle for understanding myself anew in the public realm, offering refuge from the bewilderment I still felt about myself. Identity allows others to make easy assumptions of who you are, shielding you from anxiety about how they will respond.
To enter into an identity, you fling incompatible traits onto a receptacle, whether your body or a personification of the disorder. In doing so, you can misrecognise the identity as your self, internalising its prejudices, assumptions, and expectations as a truth of being in the world.
Without an understanding of yourself as comprised of compromising parts, you cannot resolve any form of masochism. You can use abstract models to unpick the disorder, or find a place in the world, but they hold a significance that stands in detached judgement.
“The mirror stage [assuming an image] is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality… and, lastly, to the assumption of the armor of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.”
— Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the ‘I’ as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience (1949; Écrits, 1966)
2014 - Reflections (4)
Labelling is distorting. Overlay all your identities and they may reflect splinters of your fragmented self. Always already partial. Always already imposed. Always already existing.
Nobody has a singular identity, regardless of sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion. We reveal different aspects of our selves at different times with different groups in different places.
To strive to be whole requires recognition that you are a multi-dimensional being. You are one and all of the labels attached to you, including attributes that have been ostracised onto an-other (ana or rex).
Getting better calls upon you to reconcile yourself to an inner contradiction: you are and you are not anorexic. The impossibility in your mind of being free from ana is neutralised when you understand yourself as both.
It is about being aware of engrained thought patterns, catching them at earlier points before they spiral off with their own furious momentum. Vigilance. Free from denial, the contradiction opens space in your mindscape to reason with responses to certain stimuli. A state of suspended belief in your triggers, in what they purport to signify.
Pause, breathe, disarm. Realise the potential to eat and the potential not to restrict or purge.
Part of you will always hold the spark - a predisposition. That is not to say that you do not fight the disaster that is an eating disorder, it simply means that you needn’t hate yourself for being that way.
Self-hatred closes the circle, trapping you in torment. The oppressor and the oppressed standing before and reflected in the mirror.
The fictions cast by the disorder have defined my lifeworld, just as much as the fictions cast by my environments. They are realities I have experienced.
All exist simultaneously.
Interwoven in chaos and harmony.
All have meaning.
No overriding significance.
One is all of them.
The multitude within me.
One is not reducible to its parts.
“Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in the object or “return” in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature.”
— Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
2014 - Reflections (5)
We exist on the threshold of potentiality – it is possible to do anything, even what is considered to be impossible.
This panoramic vision is cropped by partial truths. People coalesce around the centrifugal force of ever spinning webs of significance. Threads constrict, locking our minds. With strangled vision we glean impressions from our environments, acting unquestionably on the assumptions they conceal. We give life to the order of the truth-making classes.
Our environments possess us and reproduce themselves, difference measured as deviance or lack. You turn desire into hate, either inflicted outwards (the repressed homosexual goes queer bashing), or against yourself (restricting, purging, binging, self-harming).
There is always more rot to dig out, so the story goes. You will never reach an ideal.
The ideal is a false consciousness, as much as it is truth affirmed through people’s actions. Motivation enthralled to the spectacle. The exterior image is understood to express the substance of the subject. We seek recognition on those terms, finding only exclusion.
Yet a truth is so unless and until it is disproved. During my education, it was impossible to speak of homosexuality by virtue of law. Fear for livelihoods, and a culture laced with homophobia, restricted the positive representation of gay men and women during my formative years.
It is no longer impossible to talk of homosexuality to children. The age of consent is no longer 21, as it was when I was born. Marriage encompasses same-sex relationships.
The vanguards of the gay community faced illegality of the act, of being present. They faced the brutality of order. They created a celebrated space within and outside their own moral condemnation. They realised our potential to be in the public sphere, by realising our potential not to exist within the paradigm of deviancy. They eschewed their own impotentiality to be self-determined.
A truth of the moment does not negate the possibility of its falsehood.
You can eat and you won’t get fat. You can be gay and not lose everything. You can be depressed and allow yourself to be happy. You can grieve and keep on going.
“Potentiality (in its double appearance as potentiality to and potentiality not to) is that through which Being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding or determining it (superiorem non recogna scens) other than its own ability to be… an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself.”
— Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
2014 - Reflections (6)
I can only speak for my own experience. There are many gay, straight, bi, trans, or asexual men and women battling an eating disorder, all with individual stories to tell. This shouldn’t hide the affinity in our experiences. Eating disorders are indiscriminate; they defy boundaries and so must we.
I was not anorexic in pursuit of the velveteen skinned magazine model. Starving yourself isn’t a vanity project. I have come to understand the disorder as a sexual awakening gone awry. I may be wrong.
Layers of significance coiled around me, offering certainty to live in. My mind warped into a hyperreality, all logics contracting to their extremes in an attempt to cancel out the error. I grew frustrated as I disassociated into the disorder. The task was never complete.
In righteous hatred, I throttled my recalcitrant self. An alarm call scorched my throat for help and in warning to the glowering gaze upon me. Tunnel vision. It felt as if I had been infiltrated. I hadn’t. I am multiple aspects; the voice was mine. I was speaking from an encroached space.
I was captured by and yet detached from my environments; my self ruptured into abject parts and projected untruths.
We are not stencils with off-cuts. Throughout life, the full spectrum of emotion bursts erratically. In these moments, aspects of your self are unveiled. Not all good, not all bad, not all or nothing, but all you.
Your presence defies logics plotting out social consciousness. Yet the space you attempt to claim is absorbed as a failure of the rule. A defect to correct.
Rebellion. We are complicit in reproducing partial truths by defining ourselves in opposition to them. Coming out is celebrated, in spite of the need to do so resting on the assumption of heterosexuality bestowed at birth.
The unquestioned faith in so-called normality, defining itself through binary oppositions. Polarised and shed of nuance, rhetoric appeals to our shared assumptions. You are included through exclusion, shamed back into the fold. Cast as functionaries of a larger order.
2014 - Reflections (7)
This is not the story of ana then, and recovered now. Its neediness to be sustained entices me to follow well-worn grooves.
As a perfectionist, I criticise myself hyper-actively. I map self-worth against elevated expectations, in the hope of projecting an idealised version of myself.
I watch myself in anticipation of falling below an expectation from afar. Pressure rises. I can’t always subdue it, hating myself for feeling this way, for not being better. I punish an object fat with failure. A punch, a puncture slit in skin, a wasting of flesh, a pipe worried into bursting. Self-harm to relieve the anxiety.
There will always be triggers of self-doubt in my life-world. Perfection is a bastardised idea. It is a conceit that defeats potential, forcing us to deny and fall into line.
I need to understand all these moments not as parts to discard and patches to wear. I occupy space within and outside multiple environments. A space suspended of preconceptions, informing not defining me.
Recovery isn’t finished when weight is restored, or by acknowledging the illness. It takes time to claim ownership of contradictions with the world and myself. To resist being conscripted into carrying out the violence of another on my body.
Truth is ambiguous, unveiled in my experience of situations. Beauty is the expression of personal experience unencumbered by fear of difference or imperfection.
Recovery is a horizon. You get closer.
2014 - Reflections (8)
Every moment, every action crystallises in the expanse of all that is potential.
Beacons perch aloft this terrain. Stoked by many, they swell with import.
We stare, convinced by the resilience of a path forged through repetition.
The landscape strobes light and shadow.
Difference is starved of luminescence, unseen, beseeching affirmation.
Mindscapes dissected by a glare stuttering through blinds.
Yet darkness is not empty.
The beam blots out what it cannot covet, encloses what it cannot contain.
Hues of colour swirl without reflection in its wake, disillusioned and lost.
From behind the veil, you act.
Your presence flares through crystalline.
The route widens.
“The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but unites it only in its separateness.”
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle