Three or four years ago, I decided to be anorexic. I hated my body, I hated my sexuality, I hated everything about me, and thought the best way to start being able to control myself and my life and the way people saw me was to be skinny, and the only way I could do that was to stop eating. As I began this, I started to notice that people took concern when they saw me simultaneously getting a lot skinnier and not buying food when we went out to eat. And inside I flipped out. I wanted to be skinnier, and I wanted people to think better of me, but they wouldn't think better of me if they knew I was anorexic. I had to find a way to cloak my disorder. So I stopped earning money. I guess I thought people perceiving me as poor would be better than as anorexic, and if I was poor, I had no excuse to not eat. Sure, other people could offer to buy me food, but I could very easily decline and then explain it away as me desiring to be gracious. Every one loves a good martyr, right? So just like that, I stopped eating, stopped earning enough money to pay for anything but rent and utilities, and I have continued on that path for the past four years.
The issue here, however, is not necessarily the anorexia. That was just a sick symptom of a larger dis-ease within me. Embodying anorexia gave me the opportunity to embody powerlessness, which in turn was magnified by my mental filters once I stopped earning proper wages to support my life. I became irresponsible with money to ensure that I would never have a surplus of funds to spend on food, which led to excessive debt. At the age of 19, I immaturely spent a $30,000 student loan my dad cosigned for me on clothes and furniture -- within three months -- and I wasn't working, so I was immediately evicted from my new apartment (so much for that furniture) and manipulated an ex into letting me live with her and a bunch of her friends on the cheap. I was living the high life as far as any gay was concerned (which was all I was concerned with). I had a nice house in Sugarhouse, $30K of clothes and furnishings inside it, had near to no body fat, had the hottest boyfriend any of my friends had ever seen, and was burning through condoms like they were going out of style. I was a king among lesser men. Finally, now that I'd been released from my family situation and the ideals they held about me, I could finally feel like the royalty I truly was. But the tide is an easy foe when it comes to sandcastles.
Reality came knocking and it slammed the door on the way out! Within two weeks, everything I thought I had -- the CONTROLLED fantasy life I had concocted for myself -- crashed down and I was left with nothing. I lost my job, I got kicked out of my place in Sugarhouse, my boyfriend is actually the one who arranged for me to be kicked out of my house, so needless to say, I lost him as well. And to top it all off, I was out of condoms! ;) I sat there wondering what I had and where I could go. All I had left, in my eyes, was my skinny body. These other things must have just been a couple strike-outs that had nothing to do with my current way of operating in life, right? Silly, I know, but this is what I thought to myself. However, as I'm sure you've learned from this story, by operating in anorexia, I was perpetuating the sickness inside of me that kept me small. So I went out and did it all again. I got a job I didn't like, I fucked any man that breathed, and I spent all of my money irresponsibly. Continuing to act from such spiritual invalidity only compounded my self-degradation like a skyrocketing 401(k).
Long story short, this cycle continued until this summer as I started to really take a look at my self-worth. I am changing the way I interact in my relationships, ascertaining the reason(s) I degrade myself to get sex and validation, and really coming to clarity on my disastrous relationship with money -- financial scarcity AND abundance. And this blog, thankfully, is here as a place for me to set it all out to be ironed. A huge shout-out to Al Gore for inventing the Internet! :P
