heartbreak

(NOTE: Written about an experience in the past, does NOT reflect the present.)

It felt like I was losing the love of my life, and that was enough to press the blinking “fight or flight” button calling for all available trauma responses to engage.

Every night I laid in bed, doing slow 4-7-8 breathing, counting backwards from 200, imagining every calm and serene thing possible. Floating in the ocean on a magical mattress, walking in quiet woods, healing light flowing through my body, an angel stroking my hair as I laid across her lap on a cloud made of cotton. And every night the hours would pass as my heartbeat refused to stop pounding on its primal drum “DANGER DANGER DANGER DANGER!”

When I eventually did fall asleep I would always wake up in prayer, pleading for the clock hands to have moved more than one hour, imploring the sun to have risen. Before opening my eyes I’d whisper “Please, please, please tell me I was asleep for enough hours to keep living. Tell me I have been unconscious enough to be conscious. Let daytime have arrived.” And every time a dark-outside disappointment, my body spurning rest lest the enemy overtake my bunker or something like that. This went on for two months. I have no idea how people do it for any longer, insomnia must super suck and I get why sleeping pills exist.

However, I was not a complete stranger to sleeplessness. I have often stayed up all night, dealing with a plastered ex, too furious and terrified of what this meant for my life to sleep. I’ve stayed up all night in the bed of a drug-dealing pick-up artist. I’ve stayed up all night worried for the children. I once even stayed up all night just nervous about going to a new Muay Thai class. Not being able to sleep was unpleasant, and surprising in its duration, but not an absolute shock. 

What did surprise me was that I stopped eating. I have never stopped eating on accident. I’m not sure I have ever stopped eating, period. I LOVE eating. If anything, I am perpetually trying to eat less, aggravated by my inability to eat like a little birdie, or eat teeny portions like my mom. When I was younger, I was so annoyed I did not seem to have the discipline to maintain a proper eating disorder. I know, that is a terrible thing to say. But it is true. So it was new when my body was SO certain a mammoth or sabertooth tiger was coming straight for me, at any moment, that it wanted to be empty all of the time. For running, I guess.

I used to not understand what it meant to lose one’s appetite. I always thought “Well, just eat even though you don’t want to. Put the food in, chew, swallow, easy. You don’t have to enjoy it.” I always thought there were far worse things in this world than not having an appetite. After all, there are drugs invented purely to take appetites away. Ignorant me always thought “What’s going to happen to you? Going to have a thigh gap? Going to look like a model? Going to be able to wear whatever you want? Poor thing.” I did not get it, because I have always had the great privilege of constantly wanting to eat. 

But now I know how the body can rebel, how it can reject even a bite of toast, how it can clench tight and scream “NO NO NO NO NO!” to a morsel of oatmeal. It became a feat to get anything down. It was a victory to eat half an apple, it was a triumph to drink a chocolate protein by breaking it into small servings throughout the day. It was profound to experience how hard it is to get food into a body that does not want it.

There have been many times in my life when I was trying to be thin enough to have value. The last notable times were in 2014 and 2017, trying to skinny my way into the hearts of incredibly unavailable men. But even though I ate only one meal a day, even though I did Insanity and exercised for hours, even though our burlesque costume maker constantly made alterations because I was smaller every time I saw her, even though backstage my friend said “Oh my god, I can see ALL of your ribs!” I was never small enough. I could never get under 110, which is all I wanted, to be under 110. To be a size zero. To be the size of nothing.

So it was shocking when I began to melt and continue to melt. When I did not fit a single thing in my closet, when my shirts caught on the pointed blades of my shoulders, when I had to tie string around the crumpled waist of my leggings, when I was even too small for the remnants of the itty bitty clothes I wore in 2014. When I stepped on the scale and it said 103. 103?!! That was a number I did not think was possible. And it is not, unless I stop eating. A friend urged me to go to the doctor. A friend I have always envied for being thin.

And so I rattled around in my life, an insomniac skeleton, wondering if I would ever be okay again. Wondering how long I could not sleep and eat before something terrible happened. Wondering if I might be blown away by a tropical storm. The body whispers, then speaks, then screams. And it will scream until we listen. 

(NOTE: I will likely visit this in another post, but while the loss of weight was disturbing, it was a whole different mind-fuck when I regained it. It was so twisty for me my therapist suggested I stop using a scale, possibly forever.)