Apologies for the long hiatus.
I suppose one's boyfriend is bound to find one's blog, eventually, but it was no less shocking for that supposition. At first I thought, Well, fine, and then, over the course of the evening, I remembered things I'd written. Like little stones dropping in my stomach. And then a big stone, last of all: My weight. The number. Is on this blog. Which he read. Oh God. I can't think of anyone who would think it's fun for her boyfriend to know what she weighs. But apparently he still likes me.
But here's the thing: what throws me more than anything—more even than the numbers—is that I feel I lost my ability to put a good face on things. That keeping this blog—that wanting or needing to keep this blog, having the thoughts with which to fuel it—make me a little bit totally insane, and now I can't hide it. I like to be able to do my own spin control. Lately I have been more positive about my body, happier about it, than ever before. But that is a state that includes ambivalence—and, as always, it's the ambivalence with which I have a hard time. The I'm not sure. I like to have a defined position, even if it is sometimes more aspiration than totally reflective of my constant internal state. And I like my current defined position, such as it is outwardly manifest. It is lovely and open and light and charmingly countercultural and it is politically sound and it supports me and other fat people and I like it. But I don't always reach the high bar it sets. And that's what I have trouble with. Perhaps unsurprisingly.
We—he and I—drove down to a group therapy meeting at the treatment center at which I spent a month more than a year ago. I was on edge. Nitpicky. It was an intimate experience. I did not make a lot of eye contact. I was aware of doing that. Of feeling collapsed into myself. Was the nit-picking, then, an attempt to ward off what otherwise might have been a terrifying intimacy? Based on someone liking me (let us say loving me, even) even sitting in a physical presentation of I am not as on top of things as all that, really.
I like things to be sure. I like them to be clean and solid. Food has a lot of that resonance to me: in my most eating-disordered moments, I decide based on clean or not-clean? and what that means is safe or not-safe? I have trouble in in-between spaces and in-between times (like, say, now, this pre-semester limbo). I am not at my best in the liminal areas. And it's why being outed is disturbing, because I have been a little liminal here. Sassy and confident, yes, but also insecure and obsessive and gross. Both. Which are both sort of percolating around right now. Which doesn't mean I'm not doing well. I'm doing better than I've ever done before. Which means confronting liminality, I guess.
