This issue does not include body composition data — see note from the author for more information.
My therapist asks me to talk to the part of me that asserts itself when I don’t want to work. My fear perches on a stool while I sit on the couch. I take on her physicality: curled over my front line as if around some precious heirloom — some splendour, or sickness.
More of her: head trained forwards, eyes wide open. Weight on the balls of my feet. She’s strong like that — I am, I mean. When I’m with her. I can stand my ground like a stone, gathering moss. I’m ready to run.
The rest of me adapts to her temporary absence. I call more of me forward to fill the void she left. I sit like posh housewife, all good breeding and finishing school, my ankles crossed and slightly to the side. Manicured hands resting in my lap. My shoulders squared, but dropped and honest. My face a brick wall of well-mannered pity and contempt. She is, after all, pitiable. Contemptible. I don’t like her. I don’t like her fear or her shame.
I have been trying to live without her.
This thing lives in me. She’s always there. I cannot get rid of her. My massage therapist tells me I cannot out-diet or out-exercise or out-bodywork the essential facts of my human life. There is no other thing that I am. I am the aggregate total of my own worldbuilding, the choices I make. If the choices I make are to spend most of my hours spent curled over my keyboard, in the stance exaggerated on the stool in my therapist’s office, then that is what I am. I bought an under desk bicycle, a standing desk riser — I’m to create from a position that isn’t one of fear.
And it is when I discard these changes, and create from fear again, that I make the work that feels most like me.
My whole first book of poetry, Girth,1 is primarily about the interplay between desire and fear. When I wrote it, my whole life was emergent leftist student politics — which has always registered to me as an erotic act, a set of seduction practices or a romantic dance, more than anything else — and my bulimia. I was obsessed with hunger. I was a bit player in some great game of wanting. I felt completely incapable of choosing my own life. I let things happen to me and then exploded into rages — heaving over a toilet bowl, throwing the body I hated into a riot cop.
I was a lady of perpetual hunger. Denying my hunger or masking it did not make it less real. Like exhaustion, it was a material fact. It lived in me like a moneylender. It accrued interest. It sent its loan sharks to find me.
I don’t know when I noticed that my physical hunger for food was a hyperliteral manifestation of a frustrated hunger for other things, but it was probably Antoine.2
I get into this more in my book, but I spent years in an obsessive and almost entirely one-sided love affair with a man I met in college. I was dating someone else at the time, as was he. I have a hard time explaining what happened to make me like Antoine so much, mostly because nothing did. It was chemical. Mammalian. Years later, when I read people online talking about the concept of twin flames, I felt the sort of grief I always feel when I see something that could bring me relief, or joy, or pleasure, and I don’t connect with it. I met Antoine and I suddenly got why people would launch a thousand ships. I also felt the deep understanding I may simply not be a person who launches those things.
In a lot of ways that are embarrassing to admit, this love affair was the most important of my life. It solidified my sense of self. I think it’s the kick in the pants I needed to really become a writer. It was also a ghost. I was self-aware enough to know that the evidence about which I felt so compelled would not hold up in a court of law. It was a slightly more intellectual version of plucking petals off a daisy. He loves me. Objective assessments of the circumstances as such seem to indicate we were ill-matched. He loves me not. Our relationship did eventually become physical. He loves me. It was for a little less than 24 hours — he loves me not — between 2 and 11 AM after closing Casa Del Popolo, joyful and perfect, he loves me, and between 11 PM and 9 AM one I thought he was going to kill himself. He loves me not. I don’t care. I love him, I love him — I love you. Say it back. I don’t care if you don’t mean it the way I do. I can’t die without hearing it.
I think he has been the you to whom I write, ever since. It took me years of therapy to identify that I wasn’t as fixated on him, specifically, as I was fixated on the way I felt about myself when I was around him. Around him, I felt like some forbidden, undeniable truth. I thought I knew everything, and around him I had no idea — no idea about anything, no clue what would happen next. I expected to feel destabilized, and I did. But I also felt like the whole world had yet to be discovered. Like I was never, ever going to get old — not in any way that mattered.
I also wasn’t hungry at all. I wrote thousands of words. Maybe I was trying to prove something to him — trying to find some way to cope with the the time I inevitably had to spend not with him. I listened to that Hozier song a lot, at this time — so full of love I could barely eat.
He would remove his attention. I thought that if I created some kind of chasm there, between us, I’d never see him again, and I might die — or at least my writing would, which is the same thing. So I did not lash out. Instead, I just felt a kind of absence I could only satisfy by eating. I would expand like a grieving balloon. I’d feel ashamed, like this. What will he think when he sees me. But the pain was present, and he was not. And no matter what, when I saw him, the cycle could start again. So I had that, at least.
When I’m big, I’m invisible. I’m in pain. I can also be left alone to do my work. When I’m small, I am reached for — and I’m so hungry, from this long absence, from this long period of fasting, that I gobble it up. I get satisfied, and I eat. I get big again. The attention stops. I think the magical combination, with this man with whom I was obsessed, who was not obsessed with me, was that he never quite gave me what I wanted — I got some of the intensity of the thing, but never the satisfaction required to close the circuit, or really relax, which kept me striving, and kept me moving. It kept me from eating very much.
I just also had a very hard time thinking about anything else, when I was like this. Became self-obsessed — other-obsessed, I thought, but it was a self-obsession — with no time or space for the human topography of my friends or community. I felt like I was alone, with my God of love. I wasn’t, though. She was there.
On the stool, in my therapist’s office, I name the curled-up part of me after my fear. Later, alone, I call her Bhao — Chinese for fear, because I can’t find any names that mean failure on the baby naming websites I’m using for this purpose. There are no names for fear of failure and wanting and not getting what you want and also getting it. That’s what I haven’t wanted to feel. I haven’t wanted to know this: that so much of my work — so much of what I am truly proud of in my life — has come directly from a part of me which understands myself as not good enough. Spite and jealousy and bitterness. I thought that was pitiful. Contemptible. Small idiot, obsessed with the futile work of closing gaps which are fundamentally unclosable, every muscle trained to run or play dead, a crown of daisies with every second petal plucked out he loves me not, he loves me not —
I think I need to invite her back in.
Note from the author —
I need at least one more week of not posting my body composition data. It’s not that I don’t think it’s important — I do, and will post them again soon — it’s that my period is wicked late (for the third month in a row? From my very moderate caloric deficit? Is there a vitamin deficiency that does this? Tell me in the comments if you know), I’m retaining water like a motherfucker, and I’m finding the fluctuations very upsetting. I know what they are, intellectually, and I’m still taking the measurements, but I feel like posting them this week might take me too close to “triggered” territory. So enjoy this extremely emotionally vulnerable piece, instead! That’s way less scary, in my brain! What is wrong with me!
Now out of print — cherish your copies, if you have them!
Not his real name.
❤️ real af