The last couple of years I’ve been making resolutions pretty much every week. I’ve had a lot of day ones, even more day zeroes, many a cleansing ritual. Today is December 6, 2018, Thursday, 8:48 PM. Again I am finding myself saying this is the last binge and purge I’m ever going to do.
I don’t know why I do it anymore. The first time I did it, it was because I wanted to eat something other than a sad lettuce-tomato-cucumber-with-balsamic vinaigrette-no oil salad and I didn’t want to gain back all that weight I lost from dieting and exercising. The next few times was because the woman who raised me died, just died, and no one had a chance at all to say goodbye. One of the best ways she showed us she loved us was with food, and when she’d just gone the only thing I had to remember her by was food. Rice. Eggs. Lasagna.
Now I’ve gained back enough weight to be considered overweight, BMI-wise, and I’ve done my mourning and said my good-byes, I think, and I’ve gone to the therapist and I’ve taken the ayahuasca and the LSD and the whippits but I still haven’t stopped binging, and purging, and binging again.
Is it because I am lonely? I cannot possibly be lonely. I was lonely when I was a little girl wondering why the body I lived in didn’t match the mind that it carried around. I was lonely in high school, fatter and stranger than most girls in my class. I was lonely in college, chasing men much older and subtler than me because no boy my age would look at me twice.
But now I have good a man—a loving man—a man who kisses my hands and my self-inflicted scars and my thighs and my belly sagging from weight loss and weight gain and loss again and goes down on me without me even asking—
Why would I be lonely?
I don’t know. I can’t really know. The last time I went to my therapist she gave me the impression she didn’t want to talk to me anymore, told me to grow up—not in those words exactly. And I agree, I’ve got to grow up. But I’m not sure how, and I’m too embarrassed to go back there now.
So I make another resolution. Another day zero, another bullet journal, another habit tracker, mental health tracker, exercise schedule, meal planning service, promise to myself. I’ve learned that rituals and traditions and myths are important to humans because rituals and traditions and myths are what keep people sane—keep people feeling like there’s an end to all these means—a beginning, an end—a hello, goodbye, see you later in the afterlife. They keep families together. They keep people going, products selling, et cetera, yadda yadda and so on amen.
I can’t wait for New Year’s Eve for this particular ritual of making doomed resolutions and wiping everything down with bleach so it stops smelling like vomit and ice cream. My stomach is sore and my back is creaking from bending over the toilet all day. If I get any fatter, I’m not going to have any clothes to fit in; if my teeth get any more fucked I’m not going to have any left for a kiss at midnight. No one likes denture breath.
Guess we’ll see what happens.
