Well, not only am I a schizophrenic, but I’m a regular girl type. The kind of girl you all know. Which means that growing up I had regular girl problems (not that eating disorders are girl-only problems), not just schizophrenic girl problems. I was a chubby kid. And then as a teenager I went on a crash diet right around the time I first started losing touch with reality. I essentially starved myself so the weight would come off, but then, my hair started to come off too. And, eventually I got hungry. So hungry that it scared me. I just wanted to eat. I remember the day I broke down and began to eat again. I was babysitting on New Year’s Eve and the family had some chips out and I ate some. I was devastated at my lapse. And thus began my move into binge eating and bulimia. I laugh now at the very few chips I ate then, but then it was a catastrophe.

So, let me just say that pretty much everything people do and concern themselves with about eating, dieting and body image can be seen as completely relative to the person’s point of view. That is why the anorexic girls and boys simply DO NOT see themselves as thin enough yet. It is probably why I can’t recognize how huge I am right now. What the scale tells a person and what they feel and believe inside can and often are two different things. Even when I was about 135-140 pounds at 5’4″-5’5″ I felt like I was HUGE! Now I cannot believe that I ever got down to that weight, and man, if I thought I was huge then, then now I am gigantic! lol

I wanted so badly just to stop eating altogether. I saw it as a nuisance that I would rather live without. It didn’t occur to me that I NEEDED food to survive. I worked on cutting down the calories as far as I possibly could.

Some people remember the first time they make themselves throw up. I really don’t even recall the first time. There must have been a first time and one would think it would have been monumental enough to remember, but I have forgotten it among the hundreds of times that I made myself vomit. At first it was hard to do, so I used a toothbrush to aid in gagging myself. As the years passed I eventually learned how to purge with just a finger down my throat. Towards the end I didn’t even really have to do much more than eat too much and just bend over the toilet. And, if you are grossed out by just reading this, I’m sorry. At least I hope that you haven’t spent more of your life than is absolutely necessary puking your guts out.

I hated it all and I guess I loved it at the same time. After I purged I would feel such relief. I could breathe again. The tightness in my body would go away. You’d think that I would be a bulimic for the bingeing part, but I don’t know. There was always so much guilt and anxiety with the bingeing. Shame that people would see me buying food. Trying desperately to hide the vast amounts of food from sight, so no one would know that I was going up to my apartment to binge. Sometimes it wouldn’t even be vast amounts of food. During some periods it was just every day food. I hated to be seen eating anything at all actually.

What I always thought was amazing was that no one knew unless I told them about it. It was this consuming part of my life and it was hidden. I mean, it pretty much is still hidden, except now I’m ranting about it in this blog, so it isn’t hidden to everyone! lol People think it is fun or hip to talk about and joke about eating disorders. For me, well, it makes me feel shame. I don’t want people to think of me like “that”—whatever “that” is I am not sure. What is it? Broken, fragile, weird, stupid, girlie, powerless, self-destructive, insane, dishonest, disgusting, freakish, unrelate-able, and god knows what else.

{ASIDE: It is so weird. There is this sick part of me that just craves fitting in! I want to look like everyone else, act like normal people, be normal, etc. I guess I thought that if I was ever a decent weight that I would somehow magically fit in with the rest of the world instead of being this huge freak of nature in every possible way! I mean, intellectually, I have no problem with being weird or different or eccentric or whatever, but I must on some level just CRAVE being “normal.”}

I guess part of the shame is also because I was never good enough at being a bulimic. I figured if I was good enough at it, then I would be thin. Of course, a lot of bulimics are normal or overweight and some are even as fat as me. I mean, the whole point of my own bulimia was not just to feel relief from bingeing. I wanted to lose weight! I would say that most of the binge-purge cycle was related to me trying to starve myself and then failing miserably, getting upset and bingeing because I was just SO HUNGRY. I wanted to get back to that girl that was able to eat nothing but air and still go on, but I just couldn’t stop eating!!! Every time I ate ANYTHING I would feel guilt and shame and quite frankly, it is still difficult for me to eat and not feel some amount of guilt and shame. I know I shouldn’t be eating this, that or the other thing. I know I should be on a diet. I know I should be able to live on Diet Pepsi alone. I know I’m too fat to be eating. But, well, fuck it! Now I eat. I shove down the parts of me that creep up to say, “you are too fat to eat. You need to stop eating. You need to go on a diet. You need to lose weight. You need to take up less space. You need to die!”

And, well, somehow I have managed to step back from the binge-purge cycle. I am sure I eat too much. I am sure I eat the wrong things. I know the world tells me I am wrong just for being and being fat. But, right now I don’t care. I’m just happy not bending over a toilet to puke my guts out five times a day. Really, living like that is just too hard and too painful on every level.

More about my bulimia later…thank you for listening.