My ribcage was always a fixture, but never in the way I wanted. I always thought it was too big for my body. I would strip down to my undergarments, stare at it in the mirror, push my fingers into the bones and try to force them back in.
I spent all of middle school sucking in so hard that the muscles would ache. I don’t remember exactly why I started doing it, just that the way my body looked as I walked down the hall to math class was all I could focus on. At first, I only did it when I wore the plum colored skirt, adorned with pretty blue flowers accentuated by small beads, with its cursed elastic waistband. The first time I put it on, I felt sick. I was twelve and could feel my preteen chub being squished out the sides. So I sucked it in—and spent all day forcing my belly button into my spine, taking short breaths and sitting up so straight that my back often hurt at the end of the day. Then I was doing it all the time, only ever liking myself when I looked in the mirror and saw the cavity beneath the fixture.
I started throwing my lunch out at school. I would pretend to eat out of the paper bag my mom packed it in, try to fill the cavern inside me with water, and toss it all into the trashcan halfway through the period on my way to the bathroom. There, I’d splash cold water on my face because I felt the headache coming. It always came.
I didn’t think anyone ever noticed. I went from school, to dance, to home, always surrounded by different people. It made it easy to lie about eating something at the place before, or promising to eat something at the place I was going.
I was sure there was nothing wrong with me. Everyone wanted to be skinny. Everyone was dieting and calorie counting and going to sleep at least a little bit hungry. When I was eating one meal a day, recording all my numbers in the journal I wrote my poetry in, and laid in bed with a pain in my stomach, I thought, this is girlhood.
I grew out of it and then grew back in. Living in London, I survived on jammed toast and red wine. My clothes gapped at my waist for the first time since the first time and my camera roll was filled with proof that I could look this way when I tried hard enough.
Now, I sit in front of my therapist every few weeks and lament over my relationship with food. Attempt to reconcile my love of dinner parties and nice meals with my need to be thin. I promise that I won’t focus on the way my body looks in a leotard when I attend ballet, and then go home and wrap the measuring tape around my thighs.
All of it is exhausting. I can’t remember if it’s always been, or if it’s only this way now that I don’t entirely welcome the constant internal berating. I want the scared and hateful girl to shut up, to let me work out and eat cake and have sex in peace.
Dr. K tells me not to think of my body in terms of appearance, but ability. “Think of all it can do—and be grateful,” she says. She asks me to thank it—each part of it—either in the shower, or in the morning before getting dressed. I don’t know how to be grateful for something I’ve never wanted. I don’t know how not to think that my body could still do all these things if it was smaller, and so why can’t it be?
None of this was a problem until I started writing about it, which is kind of my MO. Problems are easy to ignore when you’re not looking right at them, not spreading them across the page and dissecting them for some kind of meaning. It always starts with romanticization, which, to some degree, I’m sure I’m doing now. Everything is easier to digest when it’s pretty, when it’s wrapped up in some Sofia Coppola packaging, set to the sound of Taylor Swift’s You’re On Your Own Kid. Everything is easier to stomach when you’re using it.
I’ve used my grief, my heartbreak, my yearning, all of it, to write better stories. I’ve picked these pieces of myself apart and stitched them back together into something nicer to look at it, something easier to stomach. But there’s nothing nice about skin and bones. There’s nothing sweet about hunger.
This isn’t something I know how to use anymore. I can’t write the poems to read to a room full of my peers, can’t gift this curse to one of my characters, can’t write this now without wishing that none of it was true. An empty space cannot be twisted, cannot be held, or mended. I can’t write myself through a mess I’m still hiding under the bed, hoping no one sees, or hears the growling.
But now it’s on the page—it’s dissected and documented. Spread out on the floor—not in neat little piles, my hands still orchestrating, itemizing, counting.
There is finally something to clean.