Ah, the liberty of a voice recorder. Do you know what a voice recorder means? It means that you can sit on the toilet and have a shit in relative freedom and work on a journal entry. It means that you can walk around your neighborhood, put your key in your car door [the sound of said key going into car door], open the car door [sound of car door opening], and still work on a journal entry. It means that no matter where you go, you can record your neuroses, and sometimes you need to record them. I don\’t know why — it\’s just what you need to do.
Now I\’m in the car and I am headed to the root of all local evil — I am going to Rockville. R.E.M. says don\’t go back to Rockville and with good reason, because Rockville is a pit. It is a retail pit, chain stores galore. Why am I going to Rockville? I am going to Barnes and Noble, or Border\’s, I don\’t care, it\’s all the same fucking thing. Gotta get a book. Gotta get a book on mental illness.
Which one? I\’m not sure. I have twenty-seven dollars. Twenty-seven dollars to decide which neuroses to indulge in. It could be bi polar, it could be borderline, it could be dependency, it could be addiction, it could be obsession, it could be an eating disorder — at this point, I don\’t know. I just want to spend my money. We\’ll see. I\’m leaning towards Wasted: A Memoir. The girl on the cover always struck as being very… I don\’t know. Wasted looking?
[the sound of rapid acceleration]
I\’m trying not to laugh. The top of my head is tingling. Tingling. So uncontrollably, and this is a feeling that comes with a few things. It comes with mania and it comes with food deprivation. I\’m not manic right now, even though I\’m talking very fast, I\’m not as of this moment hypomanic or manic, though I am going 55 miles an hour in a 40 mile an hour zone. I should probably slow down. Fuck it — there are no cars in front of me and I\’m alone. So.
Food deprivation. Shit. I just drove up over the curb. I should probably put my hands on the wheel; I\’m driving with my knees. Both hands are on the voice recorder and I am holding on to the voice recorder for dear life. It is the only thing holding me between sanity and… insanity. Uuuuh. Eating disorders.
I used to have a real, um… food deprivation problem? I still have a food control problem, but I used to have a food deprivation problem. It\’s happened a few times in my life. [close to crying now] I used to abuse diet pills on top of this, and… it gives you an interesting feeling on the top of your head, called paresthesia. [inaudible mumbling] It\’s kind of like when your foot falls asleep, except in your cranium. Light headedness, dizziness. It exacerbates my fatigue, but uh… you\’d have to give me about a million dollars right now to eat. I\’ve moved beyond the growling stomach hunger pains and now it\’s just that permanent empty nauseous feeling.
I try and eat, I try and drink water. I throw it back up, I have diarrhea. I\’m not digesting anything; it\’s all coming right back out. You know, which is this lovely mental image there for you! So, I\’ve given up, and I\’ve lost another five pounds in the past few days and I was looking at my profile in the mirror this morning and I was going \”fucking hell, that\’s hot,\” and you can\’t pay me to eat right now — there\’s no way you could pay me to lose that stomach. And if it can get smaller, then it\’s going to get smaller — I\’m not eating! No way in hell.
My jeans are falling off of me and they\’re the smallest pair I\’ve got. They\’re the smallest pair of pants I\’ve got and they\’re, um, they\’re about to fall off. I have lost so much weight but it is not enough! I have to lose another thirty pounds, um, because I am still a blimp. I am an obese cow. [sighs]
My BMI is still around 24, I believe it was. I have to check that number when I get home.
[Having checked, it is 25.3, which puts me +0.3 average weight, placing me in the overweight category and in the 60th percentile of women of my age and height. I repeat: I am huge. Though according to the BMI scale, if I lose another two pounds, I will no longer be overweight, so I guess I have just a bit to go. I was told by the nutritionist last year, however, that I need to weigh 130.]
I am still overweight. MW says to me, \”you can\’t lose anymore weight, you\’ve got such big bones, if you lose anymore weight you\’ll look like a stick figure.\” I say, what\’s wrong with being a stick figure? And he just, he just shook his head at me, lying there in bed. Well, it\’s my body, and you\’re a fucking stick figure anyway, so, you know… deal.
I want to be petite for the first time in my life, I want to be a small girl. I don\’t want to be one of those big girls. I want to be so small that [in tears] I disappear. I just want to disappear. You know?
When I don\’t eat, it\’s easier not to eat, because I\’m controlling something. Because look what I can do — I can have control over something in my life, I can have power over something in my life, I can deny myself this, I can, I\’m not going to give in, no matter how much I want to, I\’m not going to — fuck you!, you can\’t make me — this is my choice, fuck off.
And then other times, food is my drug. I don\’t want to feel, I don\’t want to think, I eat. And I eat, and I eat and I eat, and I eat, and I eat, and I don\’t stop eating and I eat until I puke and then I keep eating because my stomach is empty, and then [with joy in voice] I can eat more! And that\’s the beauty of it, and I eat, when I\’m like that. When I eat when I\’m like that, I go numb, and that\’s what I need at that point.
But it\’s been a few weeks since I\’ve done that… which is good. I hate it when I do that, I hate myself when I do that. I loathe myself, I get fat. I put on the weight, and then I don\’t want to move. And I don\’t want anyone to see me, and I feel awful, and because I feel awful I want to not feel and not feel awful, and I eat more, and it becomes a vicious cycle, a vicious cycle of eating.
You know, it might be safe to say that I do not have a healthy relationship with food, which is a shame because food is really… quite delightful. It tastes really good. Your body needs it to survive. It is adventurous. It is… so many things. Really, a universal language, food is. Everyone needs it. I mean, come on — who doesn\’t like food? People with issues with food don\’t like food but everybody else likes food. [something inaudible] It\’s, it\’s a whole means of expression. Food\’s always been a passion for me. [something inaudible] …communicating through food. It\’s an art form. One I\’ve never been all that particularly gifted at, but I\’ll take a stab at it, nonetheless.
I\’ve always wanted to be a creative person and have always failed miserably. Everything I try and create I end up looking like a four year old, looks like the product of a four year old\’s shaky hands… an oversexualized four year old. Four, eleven, thirteen. You\’d never guess I\’m twenty-one. Thirty four… you know… but no one ever goes, \”oh yeah, she\’s twenty-one.\” No. Act like a little girl, I look like I\’m thirty four. [wryly] No one believes me when I say I\’m twenty-one. [resigned] Maybe it\’s just as well. An old soul, a little girl with an old soul.
I\’m being very self-indulgent right now, and I know this. But I, I don\’t want to get back on the medication. I just don\’t. [tape cuts off]
[singing] Oh doctor, is there nothing I can take? Oh doctor, to relieve this bellyache. Oh let me get this straight — you put the lime in the coconut…
I love this song! Fred Schneider, my new musical obsession. I\’ve been sitting on a gem all this time. I\’d totally forgotten. But isn\’t that usually how it goes? [wryly/bitterly] You don\’t know what you\’ve got \’til it\’s gone! And until you get bored and have no money and say, well, let\’s look at this again, revisit this. And then you go [yells] \”fuckin\’ hell! This is amazing! Damn!\” And I just keep listening to the same [laughs] fucking Spice Girls record, and all this time I had, you know, Fred Schneider, and, and, Gus Gus, and, well, I don\’t know, Tom Waits – my god. Tom Waits just — oh. Tom Waits gets me into so much trouble. [tape cuts off]
There\’s a rainbow… right in front of me. Just a little, itty bitty one. It doesn\’t even arch. It\’s just, little, glowy, right there, this little — I don\’t even know how to describe it. It\’s beautiful. I don\’t know where it came from; it hasn\’t rained today. Now it\’s fading out. [quietly, choked up] I\’m afraid of fading out… And now it\’s gone… Hrmph. [whispered with bitterness] I wonder if that was supposed to be a sign. [tape cuts off]
