The Truth About Food

It's so funny how disordered eating sneaks up on you... one minute, you are thinking about nutrition and reading cookbooks and making shopping lists... the next, you develop split personalities when it comes to food. One diet in front of people - "normal" food, fatty food, food that proves you are not obsessed... then the private diet, all liquids, or only vegetables, counting calories that get fewer and fewer until one day you are at the grocery store reading fat content on labels and you cave, walk to the chips or the chocolate or whatever your binge food is and you buy it all... it's gone before you know you bought it.

I say disordered eating instead of an eating disorder because I have not had a diagnosable eating disorder for some years now. The binge at the end of each starvation cycle means that I do not lose the weight for long enough for anyone to notice. Right now I am alone during the week, so it is broth and smoothies for five days, chips and buttered chicken and rice and empty calories on the weekend. I welcome the judgements I get for eating those foods, because it confirms my thoughts that I am bad, that I am broken, that I need fixing. It reminds me that I will be more lovable if I am more disciplined, if I am thinner. It helps me return to the restriction every Monday.

I always know exactly when things are going to get bad. I start looking at pictures of myself at 14, at the height of anorexia. I look like a bobble-head doll, skull too big for the rest of my skeleton, like it might drop off my shoulders at any moment. I start to re-read the eating disorder classics, those books published by "survivors" that are meant to tell a horror story but instead read, to a diseased mind, like a fairy tale or a treasure map, a guide to starvation.

I tell people that my eating has always been disordered, and it's true. I don't remember a time where I thought of food as fuel for my body, instead considering it an enemy or a therapist, depending on the moment. Yet somehow, when I tell people I was anorexic as a teenager, when I tell them I starved myself and scared my friends and family and woke up in the middle of the night to do crunches to burn off the quarter of a sandwich I had forced on me at lunch, I feel proud. Underneath those words, I am telling people that I was good, that I was pure, that I had the willpower to try and kill myself slowly. When I speak of my binging, it is with shame and self-hatred. Fat-shaming is built out of a culture that increasingly has everything it wants and still wants more; it simultaneously praises self-denial and rewards excess. One can never be too rich, or too thin.

I try to be myself in this blog, which is to say sarcastic and self-deprecating and hopefully a little funny. I don't want to depress people; I just want to share my experiences. I like to talk about myself, and this seems like a good vehicle. My social skills are not developed to the point where I know when I should stop talking in person, but in writing, you can tune out whenever you want. It's self-indulgent, but I don't feel guilty about it; I do feel guilty, though, when I can't at least be a little entertaining in the midst of my crazy.

But some things just aren't funny. I can't blame culture for my disordered eating. Eating disorders have been documented for centuries; don't get me started on the catholic culture of self-deprivation and sainthood. At the end of the day, it's about being a good person, which means being a thin person. It is about feeling shame for taking what I don't need. I am 5 foot 7 and have a large frame (read: child-bearing hips). I am overweight, although my suspicion is that my body rests most comfortably a bit above the norm for my height. I could lose 45 pounds and just tip over into the "normal" category; ideally, instead, I would lose 30 pounds and let my body find the range where I am healthiest and most comfortable. But I can't do that from inside this cycle.

Right now, I feel angry. I feel angry with a peer group that supports, tacitly or otherwise, what I do. I feel angry at myself, for reading blogs and books about girls whose hearts have almost stopped beating from starvation, and feeling jealous. I feel angry when I feel pressured to lose weight, and angrier when no one notices if I drop a pound. I feel angry when I read "health" articles online or in magazines, only to realize they are all about getting my body "bikini-ready" (as if any woman ever feels reading for a bikini.) I feel angry when I see someone turn down dessert, sure that they are only doing it as a subtle hint to me, a comment on my own self-control. And this anger feels like a part of me, it feels inevitable. The whole fight feels inevitable, and that's the problem. It feels too hard to let go of some kinds of anger; they become ingrained.

Lily Allen, one of my favourites singers, faced plenty of criticism in the media for her (amazing) curves. Although she actively told people to fuck off (quite literally; one of my favourite songs of hers is called Fuck You) that kind of attention takes its toll. On her first album she summed everything beautifully in a song called Everything's Just Wonderful:

"Why can't I sleep at night/Don't say it's gonna be alright/I want to be able to eat spaghetti bolognaise/And not feel bad about it for days and days and days/In all the magazines they talk about weight loss/If I buy those jeans, I can look like Kate Moss/I know it's not the life I chose/But I guess that's just the way that things go."

If somebody with her confidence and her swagger and her amazing talent is affected so strongly by external pressures, then what the fuck am I supposed to do?

No answers or uplifting sign-offs today. Just me and my thoughts.

Love,
K8

I'm Bringing Sexy Back

***I'm going to talk about sex and fucking a lot in this post. When I say these things, I do not (only) mean penis-in-vagina-thrusting-til-the-dude-cums-heterocentric sex. I mean anything that I do with one or more partners that theoretically gets me or my partner(s) wet/hard/any variation on mental or physical arousal. Which is a broad fucking spectrum.***
***I will also be swearing a lot. If you do not like it, I respect your feelings but suggest you go read something else. Language is meant to be tasted and experienced and thrown down on the floor so you can roll around in it. It is not meant to be handled like a goddamn fucking Fabergé egg.***

So. I think that I have a tendency sometimes to confuse feeling sexy with feeling sexual.

Sexy seems to imply something physical. When I tell people that I don't feel sexy, they jump to tell me that they like my body, or that everyone has body confidence issues sometimes. Weirdly, I do think that my body is sexy, on my better days. I'm not thrilled with my weight, and god knows I'm going to be waiting a long time for tits. But I've recently discovered the joy of a well-structured bra and uplifting corset that gives me honest-to-god cleavage, and clothed or naked I have always, at every size and shape, loved my ass. And I know that there are plenty of people who find me sexy, as in, they would like to spank/beat/fuck/lick/post-coital-cuddle me all the way to morning.

So that's not really what I mean when I tell people that I don't feel sexy, although the mis-articulation is all on my end, so I apologize. What I think I mean to tell people is that I don't feel sexual. Even women I've talked to who hate their bodies still often (although certainly not always) enjoy having said body pleasured, or using their body to give someone else pleasure. They may be very self-conscious, and this may impede their ability to process that pleasure. I hate blanket gendered statements, but it does seem in my own experience that women tend to get a bit more in their own heads when it comes to sex. That wonderful ability to multi-task seems less wonderful when you can't get your ass into the spanking and out of the schoolwork and job hunt (Metaphorically. Maybe if I put my ass into my job hunt I would get more offers.) But again, this isn't what I mean by not feeling sexy. In those situations, there is a problem with something external that is getting in the way of enjoying the sexy times, whether it's self-consciousness or preoccupation with outside stresses.

The thing that gets in my way is sex. It fucking terrifies me. I don't know what to do, where to put my hands, the right noises and facial expressions to make. And this fear has been getting progressively worse. It occurs to me that perhaps when I was a teenager this awkwardness did not seem so dire, as my partners were equally awkward and fumbling and inexperienced, and really it was just a miserable experience for everyone, as teenage sex I think tends to be. As an adult, I feel like I should have gotten at least a little more comfortable with it, and I haven't. The more time I spend around people who are sexually confident and adventurous, the more inadequate I feel.

Physical interaction with other human beings has been at more or less the bottom of my to-do list since before I could even walk - I'm told that for the first year of my life if anyone but my mother tried to hold me, I promptly screamed incessantly until I puked my little baby guts all over them. Ask the priest who baptized me and had to hold me over that holy water. I'm pretty sure he thought he was going to have to perform his first exorcism right then and there. So go ahead, Freud. Make of that what you will. When it comes to getting physical, I have not progressed beyond the baby-stage of yelling "I am panicking where is my mom oh god I need my mom right now." Which, if nothing else, makes panicking during sex awkward for all parties.

(I'm told repeatedly that) sex is the most natural human thing. We eat, we excrete, and we fuck. Although come to think of it, I have only just started eating in public, and I will drink a litre of water at school then wait until I'm home at dinnertime to pee rather than use a public washroom and risk someone finding out that I pee, so perhaps I'm doing the wrong thing by focussing so wholly on the sex aspect. I am terrified of physicality in general. Bodies are scary and weird and unpredictable, and I am wholeheartedly convinced that my reactions to the physical, much like my reactions to verbal social interaction, are just fucking wrong. I wonder- am I the only person who watches porn for education as well as pleasure? Not to learn new moves, but to closely watch their facial expressions and responses... "okay, she arched her back when he thrusted, and she yelled 'oh baby yeah' when he went down on her even though the way he's using his tongue looks immensely not pleasurable, and she looks more concerned with making sure she's looking through her eyelashes at the proper angle than actually enjoying his cock, is that right? If I don't do it that way, is somebody going to figure out that I don't know what the fuck I'm doing?" And so on, and so fucking forth.

Sometimes I feel very sexy. When I get dressed up to go out to a play party, and I'm in my tight clothing and fishnets, I feel sexy. I also often feel horny. Let's not confuse feeling sexual with feeling horny, either. I have the mind of a 12 year old boy, particularly when it comes to women. Hey, I'm bad at eye contact, might as well look at boobs instead.

So I feel sexy, and I feel horny, and this combination of things sometimes means people want to get together with me for sexy-times, and I'm all "yeah that sounds awesome!" because it does, and then the time approaches and I'm all "fuck I totally forgot that I hyperventilate at the thought of "doing it" to the point where I can't even say what "it" is like a grownup! At which point I inaccurately tell people that I am not feeling sexy, and they tell me how nice my ass is and I'm like "Thank you I know but that is not what I meant!".

Why am I writing this? Because in person, I tend to be horribly inarticulate. I babble and get defensive and inadvertently hurt people's feelings. When I write, though, I am a superstar. And now, when someone to whom I have been giving signals leans in for a kiss and I react as though they just told me they voted for Stephen Harper, I can direct them here, and tell them that YES! I like you! and YES! You're sexy and make my lady-bits tingle! and YES! We should totally get naked! Just, you know, slowly, and carefully, and without any sudden movements.

And maybe let me call my mom first.

With great love,
K8

Beauty is (XYZ)-Deep: Failing at Feminism

I always feel like a terrible feminist when I watch America’s Next Top Model.
Not because high fashion models represent a ridiculous standard of beauty. Strangely, I actually like Tyra Banks and her campaign to change “plus-sized” to “fiercely real” (“I’m fiercely real, yo” is a sentence that, while I can’t hear myself ever actually uttering, I can appreciate as a reasonable and kind of up-lifting alternative to “fat”, even if the show’s fiercely real models still weigh in at half my size.)

No, the reason I feel like a terrible feminist watching the show is because I throw a fit and find myself flinging an aggressive “fuck you!” at the television every time I hear one of those skinny-ass bitches complain to the “confession cam” that “I was teased a lot in junior high and high school for being too thin/having huge mysterious eyes/long legs/thick luxurious hair” (I’m paraphrasing.) Fuck you, I think (or yell, if I’m watching the show with an evening beer), you fit every standard for societal perfection, you don’t know what it’s like to be bullied, or to feel bad about your body!

This makes me feel like a terrible feminist because I know that I’m wrong, and worse, because I know precisely from whence my anger originates.
Yes, those perfect, skinny, big-eyed models do know what it’s like to be bullied. Most women I’ve met know exactly what it’s like to be bullied, for their size, for their shape, for their sexuality. Even if they haven’t encountered bullying directly, they’ve faced weird and often contradictory romanticized feminine images at every turn. Women I know who seem to me to have ideal bodies still don’t like them, or even if they do, have frequently experienced sexual harassment as a result.

Feminism often fails because of internal sniping. We want to support all women, but sometimes we find ourselves wanting to support women because we feel a shared sisterhood, a shared pain, and we are blinded by others’ apparent privilege.

She grew up skinny. She grew up rich. She grew up popular. Those girls – those girls aren’t part of what we support. They can’t be the enemy, but...  they can’t be allies, either. Being a woman has to mean feeling the pain I have felt, whether that means body shaming, or reproductive pressure, or assault. Being a woman means having known what it is like to be me.

This is complete and utter bullshit. I know this, and it’s why I feel more than a twinge of guilt when these feelings well up in me. It’s jealousy, or it’s ignorance, or it’s a refusal to admit that I’m not alone in being sometimes ashamed or scared or hurt. Being alone in it sucks, but it feels righteous and noble. Sharing that pain is hard, and scary... and absolutely necessary.

The whole “we’re all beautiful” movement in anti-bullying culture is interesting and in some ways useful, but ultimately incomplete. I don’t know that acceptance from strangers is what we need. I am not beautiful to everybody, and trying to be is part of what ultimately harms me. But I am beautiful to my partner, and that matters immensely. I am beautiful to my friends, and that matters too. Being beautiful to myself is a work in progress, but it’s one that should never be an issue of relativity. It needs to come simultaneously from a place within myself, free of comparison, and one that recognizes the incredible variety of beauty that exists in the world, and the incredible variety of experiences that can foster that beauty.

With great love,
K8

Avoiding a Bleak & Dystopian Future Through Chain Letter Manupulation

While wandering around the internet, I recently found one of those blog questionnaire things that actually intrigued me. Like those oldschool internet forwards (What's on your mousepad? I always answered "my mouse, duhhhhhh" because I was 15 and stating the obvious was the most amazing form of humour I'd ever encountered) but with questions that are actually interesting.

I think that it's meant to be answered over the course of 30 days, one blog post per day. However, I'm going through a try-and-feel-good-about-myself binge, so I'm eliminating questions that will make me sad, dredge up painful memories, or force me to contemplate a bleak and dystopian future. Also eliminating questions that sound too much like they belong on the oldschool chain letter. I will post the whole list here in case someone wants to do the whole thing themselves, but I'm crossing out the one's that I won't be answering.

Day 01 - Something you hate about yourself.
Day 02 - Something you love about yourself.
Day 03 - Something you have to forgive yourself for.
Day 04 - Something you have to forgive someone for.
Day 05 - Something you hope to do in your life.
Day 06 - Something you hope you never have to do.Day 07 - Someone who has made your life worth living for.
Day 08 - Someone who made your life hell, or treated you like shit.
Day 09 - Someone you didn’t want to let go, but just drifted.
Day 10 - Someone you need to let go, or wish you didn’t know.
Day 11 - Something people seem to compliment you the most on.
Day 12 - Something you never get compliments on.Day 13 - A band or artist that has gotten you through some tough ass days. 
Day 14 - A hero that has let you down.
Day 15 - Something or someone you couldn’t live without, because you’ve tried living without it.
Day 16 - Someone or something you definitely could live without.
Day 17 - A book you’ve read that changed your views on something.
Day 18 - Your views on gay marriage.Day 19 - What do you think of religion? Or what do you think of politics?
Day 20 - Your views on drugs and alcohol.
Day 21 - (scenario) Your best friend is in a car accident and you two got into a fight an hour before. What do you do?
Day 22 - Something you wish you hadn’t done in your life.
Day 23 - Something you wish you had done in your life.
Day 24 - Make a playlist to someone, and explain why you chose all the songs. (Just post the titles and artists and letter)Day 25 - The reason you believe you’re still alive today.
Day 26 - Have you ever thought about giving up on life? If so, when and why?Day 27 - What’s the best thing going for you right now?
Day 28 - What if you were pregnant or got someone pregnant, what would you do?Day 29 - Something you hope to change about yourself. And why.
Day 30 - A letter to yourself, tell yourself everything you love about yourself. 




Ah, much better. Can't you just feel the tension go out of the room? (In case someone was curious why the pregnancy question was crossed off, for me that falls under bleak dystopian future. No offense to people who like/have/will have kids. My womb is just not open for business.) (Also eliminated was the gay marriage question. I am a queer Canadian kinkster whose opinion on gay marriage is that a) let's just call it marriage, shall we? Since I don't call yours a straight marriage, b) my queerness should probably tip you off to my general feelings about queer rights and equality and c) I feel the same way about marrying a girl as I do marrying a guy - go ahead if it's mutually legally and financially beneficial. I'm a romantic like that.) 
Anyways, that leaves me with the following questions:

Day 02 - Something you love about yourself.
Day 05 - Something you hope to do in your life.
Day 07 - Someone who has made your life worth living for.
Day 11 - Something people seem to compliment you the most on.
Day 13 - A band or artist that has gotten you through some tough ass days. 
Day 17 - A book you’ve read that changed your views on something.
Day 19 - What do you think of religion? Or what do you think of politics?
Day 20 - Your views on drugs and alcohol.
Day 23 - Something you wish you had done in your life.
Day 25 - The reason you believe you’re still alive today.
Day 27 - What’s the best thing going for you right now?
Day 29 - Something you hope to change about yourself. And why.


There we go. Those are some questions worth answering! (Or at least that I find mildly interesting.) Starting whenever I get around to it, which is to say whenever I get bored with property law studying (so, uh, 5 minutes from now?)


With love,
K8

Tear it Down

A lot of people put up walls of strength to avoid showing that they're vulnerable.
I put up walls of vulnerability to avoid showing that I'm strong.
Fuck that noise.
Let's tear some shit down.

Pieces of You/Rebel Without a Cause

There are certain things that the girls I went to high school with seemed to grow up knowing, without ever being told. I marvelled at the way they knew the makeup and the clothes to wear, but more than that, I was always puzzled and jealous of the way they held themselves. Not their posture, although that’s an ongoing issue for me (I round my shoulders like a turtle trying to sneak out the back of its shell while no one is looking.) Rather, it’s those endless Facebook pictures of rows of similarly attractive girls in short dresses mugging for the camera before a night out on the town.

And sure, there is the possibility that taking that one picture where everyone looks good took a thousand tries, as it would with me. But my suspicion is that it is in some sense ingrained in them, that this pose was not something they learned but rather something that they absorbed.

Here’s the kicker: it’s my fault. As an adult, watching my sister grow up and seeing what influences the way she talks and acts and dresses, I realize that those girls were never blatantly showing off their social skills to make me feel bad about myself (as I often suspected), and they certainly didn’t have a handbook that I missed getting. We took the same classes, played the same sports (although I backed out of those as soon as I was permitted), lusted after the same boys. So what did I do wrong? Willful ignorance.

I was torn as a teenager between wanting to be a rebel and never really being able to commit to it. I hung out with the “wrong” crowd because I didn’t understand the “right” crowd, and it was ever so much easier to pretend that I didn’t want to be cool, rather than that I just had no idea how to go about it. I had a passion for older music, movies, and TV fostered by my parents, and I grew up on a strange mix of Alice Cooper and M*A*S*H. I don’t regret this for an instant. As an adult, starting to grow into my tastes, I am eternally thankful for having been exposed to these things, particularly the music that forms a big part of my identity as an adult. But I also missed out on something. I missed out on music videos and the pop culture of my peers. I was a pre-teen in the blossoming days of “girl power” (the Spice Girls disbanded when I was 11), and by the time I hit 15 or so we were beginning to see the intensely overt sexualisation of young women that exists in the media today. I didn’t go see the teen movies in theatres by choice, because I scorned anything popular as unworthy of my attention.

I have a slightly more nuanced view of the world now, but every time I think I’ve reached the point where I understand how it all works, I am reminded that I thought that very same thing at 15. I still want to be cool, although those stakes have changed. Whether I’m at a fetish event or a law event, I see women who seem to be more comfortable with themselves in their chosen environment than I fear I will ever be. They are sexy and flirty and confident. My go-to feeling for a very long time was to take an instant dislike to them, and to be one of those awful women who is “only friends with men, because women are catty and awful.” Really Katie? So you’re the only woman in the world worth knowing? I call bullshit.

I’ve gotten to a place where I can more comfortably be friends with all sorts of people without feeling constantly jealous or intimidated, but not so much that I can make a go of it myself. It’s the same dumb mentality that tripped me up in high school. What the hell happens if I try to be sexy and confident and, god forbid, cool, and I fuck it up? Isn’t it still easier to be shy and bumbling and awkward, to make the self-deprecating jokes so that no one else can make them first? I preface most introductions with “I’m shy and awkward”, as though if I didn’t alert people beforehand they might think that I’m not self-aware enough to know that I’m staring at the ground and blushing like a fool.

Girls I went to school with are starting to get married, and have children. I run into them from time to time when I visit home, and each time I am struck by a disconcerting revelation: very few of them were actually “mean” girls. Yes, there were bullies at my high school, and yes, I was a tantalizing target. But the majority of the girls I spent my time avoiding for three years were not malicious, just more informed and better at appearing self-confident than I was.

Like most of the things I ramble on about, I’m not really sure yet what this means. I’m hesitant to say that it will change me, because I find it hard to figure out how to change when I am not sure what I am changing from or to. I am still always torn about how to present myself honestly to the world. I cleaned out my closet this weekend, and was struck by the odd feeling that both the fetish wear and the business suit were wholeheartedly a part of who I am. I feel fragmented; there are pieces of me in so many places that I have a hard time drawing them together to make one picture. But I think that the first step might be to stop trying to tell people how they need to see me before they get a chance to see for themselves. Maybe if I trust enough people use their own judgement about me, I’ll start to get a real reflection back from them of what pieces of me I like.

With great love,

K8

Summertime Blues

I just realized that I still, as an adult, cannot sleep with my feet overhanging the bed even slightly as I am afraid that someone/thing will grab them.

I am also regretting choosing to share this in the dark at 1am, as I now can't stop thinking about it. Fortunately, my 8 year old sister got me a nightlight for my 25th birthday. She doesn't sleep with one anymore, but... yeah.

My fear of the dark is one of the few things that makes me appreciate summertime. During the winter, my operational hours basically dwindle down to anytime between 8am and 4:30pm. Beyond that, I am stuck in my apartment unless someone comes and picks me up. Daylight savings time, and bam, I'm a rockstar, staying out until 8, sometimes 9 o'clock.

That's really the only thing that I like about summer, though. I start to get in a panic the minute the heat starts to rise, and this week it came on way too fast for my liking, triggering a brief period of anxiety that I'm hoping will clear up this weekend (it's calling for snow! I love you Montreal). I have read before that some people experience seasonal summer depression (similar to winter depression, commonly known as SAD, but less common because who the fuck gets depressed by summer? Besides me.) To me, though, spring starts the early stress - exams and outdoor sports and and skimpy clothing - and summer brings it on home with the lack of school leaving me with no social outlet, the heat making me pass out, and even skimpier clothing making me hate myself regularly. While Montreal has improved my socialization, it scores far worse on the heat than anywhere I've lived before, and the incredibly attractive women who show off their bodies make me cry.

I seem to recall hating summer even before I started with body issues, though. No school meant no friends, and the stuff I'm really good at - brain stuff - was replaced with the stuff I really suck at - sports. At least my parents can no longer force me to take tennis, or swimming, or softball, or sailing, or soccer... the only one of those that I enjoy is swimming, and my inability to let people see me in a bathing suit has been squashing that one since I was 12 or so.

If this post sound kind of like a downer, that's because it is. I want to be positive, but there is an actual scent in that air - the summer scent - that is infecting my brain. We skipped right over the smell of spring. I know the smell of spring very well, because it makes me feel like Easter morning, and it's a great feeling. This one just makes me feel like someone is going to force me to go outdoors, and it is not going to end well.

Everybody knows that there ain't no cure for the summertime blues, but this year I've got a few tricks up my sleeve. I've told friends to make sure I leave my apartment, I've enlisted someone to help me shop so that I can find some clothing that makes me feel cool in both the literal and figurative sense, and I've made a vow to be seen in my swimsuit at least once over the summer. So fuck you, June, July, and August. This week was just a trial run. When you get here, I will be ready for you.

With love,
K8