Filed under: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders
Well, things are still going well. Yesterday I did a reading of a new story. So far still no publication but I’ve got enough encouraging responses from editors (rejections, but with comments) to feel sure I’m on the right course.
I guess the reason I wanted to post was that I’ve been thinking about identity. Gradually I feel myself seeing myself as a writer first, and the eating disorder and other aspects of my life and past are receding in important. They aren’t who I am anymore.
When I say I think of myself first as a writer, I guess it sounds weird and pretentious and bullshitty, but I mean it in a concrete way. I mean that writing is what I do with my time, not sticking my fingers down my throat. I mean that story ideas and characters are what have colonized my thoughts, pushing food and my weight off to the edges. I mean that when I see people I don’t see them as better than me because I am a jobless mental case while they are functioning.
At the reading yesterday I felt respected. I’ve been feeling that a lot more and I’m not sure I ever felt that way before, even in school or at my old job where I felt taken advantage of and under-valued.
Respect feels more valuable than praise. I’ve had praise for my writing from some people, and however many times people say complimentary things I can’t stop feeling embarassed and believing they’re sincere but feeling as though I still have so much farther to go it barely matters. Feeling respected is more subtle, and more valuable. I feel like when people look at me they see me, and what they see is something I’m okay with projecting to them.
Funny, now I think of it. When I first lost weight, waaaaay back, when I’d been fat for all my teen and young adult years, I felt like for the first time I had people’s respect and that for the first time people saw me and treated me like I was a normal person.
Back then it was bitter. I knew how I had lost the weight, that I was eating 500 calories a day and keeping it secret from everyone, that I didn’t want to stop restricting when I reached my goal and anyway my goal was way too high. Etc. Etc. Etc. So the respect I felt from people made me angry. I blamed them for not seeing how shallow it was to treat someone better just because they were a normal weight. I blamed them for treating me like I didn’t exist when I was heavy.
Now the respect is connected with something I feel proud of myself. It makes a hell of a lot of difference that way.
Filed under: anorexia, bulimia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders
I’m ready to rejoin the human race now, please.
Back a step: I’ve started therapy again. Not because anything was going wrong, particularly, but because winter means my mood is going to crater and I’ve been toying with the idea of an eating disorder relapse and I just wasn’t willing to give in without a fight. Or even to play the game of letting things go to a certain point and then acting all sorry and mad at myself for having to pick up all the pieces again. At some point you have to at least try not to take the pieces and throw them on the ground and stomp on them in the first place.
I. want. More.
If I can’t have more then who knows? The life of a perennial basket case is hardly going anywhere. But I’ve been kinda kicking ass with all this writing stuff. No, okay, not published yet. But I’ve gotten past the dismissive form letter with several editors, enough to make it not a fluke, and it seems to me if I keep going I’m certain to get an acceptance sometime.
After that, who knows? I have a realism side and a perfectionism side. The realism says that making a successful career as a writer is something which very few people can accomplish and there may be more luck than talent needed in achieving it. The perfectionism side says it makes absolutely not one bit of difference who likes my work, who publishes it, who pays me for it. All that matters is that I aim as high as possible and don’t accept anything less than whatever I am capable of.
So that’s the deal I guess. Being a basket case can go back to lurking in the corner, plan B forever and ever and ever. Plan A is that I don’t stop now when I’m so close to making it past one of these editors I can taste it.
Seriously, I just bought these. They’re way cute, too. No more than 2 weeks ago I picked them out, and today on the subway I was running to try and get a train and I swear they almost ended up around my ankles. They’re not falling off under ordinary circumstances- yet. But I’m beginning to think perhaps I was being a bit dramatic when I chose the size 12, agonizing over whether I should go even larger to be sure if I gained even more weight they’d still fit me. In retrospect squeezing into a slightly tight 10 might have made some sort of sense.
Since I really don’t have any decent clothes for winter in between the new ones I got and my old nice (size 0) things, I think the only rational solution is to commit to fitting those again. My wallet can’t be having with going around buying all these new clothes all the time. I’ll make do with a shoelace-belt when I stop fitting the new stuff, and make a mad dash for good ole familiar itty-bitty jeans territory.
Yes, it’s a plan. What could possibly go wrong?
Filed under: anorexia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders, pro-ana
Sure, my heads gonna get away from me sometimes. That’s- you gotta expect that. If I’m trying to lose weight, if I’m watching my calories of course there’s some sick part of me which is going to want to turn it into something- into something way bigger than it really is. That’s- it’s normal. It doesn’t really mean I’m actually doing anything.
So maybe I miss being tiny, maybe some sick part of me misses feeling my ribs and hip bones in the bed at night. The smile I’d get, the secret triumphant comfort of that smile. But that’s not what this is about. This is about a perfectly ordinary, even healthy, desire to regain control of my weight. Any doctor would advise the same thing. Any doctor, anyone, any normal woman wouldn’t want to be overweight and neither do I.
So maybe my head goes off, goes into places which are a little darker than a normal dieter. That doesn’t make what I’m doing, what I’m actually doing rather than what I imagine I might do later- that doesn’t make any of it unhealthy. It’s not out of control, I know the difference between what I’ve done and what kinds of things I’d do if I was sick again. I’m going to draw the line, I know I will. I don’t really want all that sickness back again.
I’m over reacting. Stop over reacting. Act normal. You’re normal now, this is silly, this is hysteria, just act normal. If you act like it’s a big deal you’ll make it a big deal. It isn’t a big deal. IT ISN’T A BIG FUCKING DEAL. Okay?
I just want to lose a little weight, that’s all. Like a heroin addict just wants to get a little high. Like any normal overweight woman. That’s what I am. That’s all I am, now.
Filed under: anorexia, eating disorder recovery, eating disorders, pro-ana, short story
Breakfast with the Flipper
The word breakfast, outflanked on its left by pre-heated-egg-muffin-sandwiches and on its right by Special K-plus-bowl-add-milk and enjoy, surrendered at last to diet coke plus nothing and retreated into fantasies of the 19th century where it had been told words still retained some semblance of their meaning. Miss with the Flipper advanced, filling her cup with soda as she went.
Coke, Diet 2.6 calories. That would be if she still cared about something as nonsensical as the calories in diet soda, which she didn’t. Two point six would have been rounded up to five and noted carefully down under the category: breakfast in her daily journal. Two point six (rounded to five) would then reoccur throughout the day on scraps of paper or in the margins of school notebooks as she re-counted everything starting again from breakfast, just to be super certain. A total projected daily caloric intake would be there too, below a line of tiny penciled figures, and it would be gradually revised downward as the day progressed until it reached about five hundred. Perhaps eight, if she was really trying.
Breakfast for the anorectic is not so much a meal but a condition entered into upon waking which lasts until, approximately, two-thirty in the afternoon. Or four pee em, if one is making a proper effort. Miss with the Flipper has not made such an effort for a wearyingly long time now. She could not tell you to the decimal how many calories she had for breakfast. She doesn’t count such things or keep a running total in her journal. Really the best she could do would be to estimate roughly that yesterday she ate approximately sixteen hundred calories.
Anyway, that’s breakfast sorted. An objection could be entered into the record on behalf of the word “with” as well. A modest preposition, with would not ordinarily be the sort of word to quibble. However there is a question of proximity (not to mention propriety) in applying the word “with” to the case of writing an email response to someone who is not, has never been, and never will be in the physical presence of the emailer.
Miss withthe Flipper rolls her eyes at this. Only a pedant would argue grammar. Flipper might like to argue with her grammar. It reminded her of the way the mole-faced Mrs. Fowe, her third grade teacher, used to insist on parts of speech while she embellished eyes and faces in the voids of Os and zeros in her spelling book. It hardly made a difference what games she played to make the time go faster. Miss Flip always knew all the answers anyway.
If there is a similarity between the child-girl and the adult it must be the way both of them always had the answers. Miss Flip can argue breakfast, with, and even “The Flipper”; which isn’t a name at all but rather the an alias for a nonexistent person. A marvel of this electronic age, she thinks, that one can argue with nonexistent people and have them answer you in the glowing rectangle of your laptop computer. Non-breakfast would be a sad affair indeed without its company.
(more…)
Filed under: Uncategorized
This is new, something I wrote today in my workshop. But why don’t you check out http://threenewstories.wordpress.com to see the brand new blog I’m starting?
She didn’t need new clothes. Not really. Or a new coat, either, because she had the old one her mom had given her from last year. Need is a funny thing. Not something she was comfortable admitting to.
Her two pairs of jeans were size 14- but with a big oversized sweatshirt no one could see the cord she threaded through her belt holes to keep them falling off, so that was fine. Okay, maybe the fabic was a little thin for winter but she could always wear them over her black stretch leggings if it was cold out. Maybe even do without the cord that way, a string really, which she’d whipped out with a snap of breaking stitches from one of the hooded sweatshirts.
So clearly there was no actual need to stand under florescent lighting hoping the fitting room attendant would be neither young nor thin nor stylish. No need to be cold and decked out in goosepimples as she shivered the jeans on and tried to find a sweater which wasn’t itchy. Even less need for the dress. It’s just that it looked so frickin cute there on the hanger. Like it was saying “Hiya cutie, why don’t we get to know each other better?”
The moment in the mirror, though, now that was necessary. Everyone needs to look at themselves once in a while and think “Yeah, okay, I’d do her.”
Filed under: Uncategorized
Did a reading in front of people yesterday, very scary but went okay I hope. Also had a workshop in the morning, and one of the exercises was to take your favorite novel and write about what happened before it started. I chose Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut, and wrote the following:
Before I was Timequake I was Kurt Vonnegut. No, wait. Go back you fraud! Vanessa Vitiello is trying to say something about Kurt Vonnegut. Sure she is.
Kilgore Trout, the famous alter-ego of Kurt Vonnegut, the famous alter-ego of Vanessa Vitiello, woke up one morning and decided he was tired of having all the shots called for him. Instead of being written by Kurt Vonnegut he came up with an insane idea to have Kurt Vonnegut as a character in a science fiction story of his own devising. Also Vonnegut’s sister, who committed suicide. So Kilgore Trout came up with a contraption, half-typewriter, half-time machine, half-zombie, to trap Vonnegut as a character in one of his own novels.
Before Vonnegut was Kurt Vonnegut in the not-as-appreciated-as-it-should-have-been novel Timequake, he was a guy called Kurt. Vonnegut, as it happened. But you don’t really believe that, do you?
The zombie/type-writer/time-machine tried to say something deep about the character of human existence. Being a machine it got it wrong, of course, but since the character of human existence is to get things wrong nobody minded.
Also, World War II. Just so you know how serious this is.
Right, that’s it then. Gosh I wish I’d been Kurt Vonnegut, a a writer! I never try to actually write like him because that’s just pathetic, but when I had an excuse I was pathetically eager to try my hand at it.
Geek Tragedy mentioned my blog on their podcast, which was awful nice and made me think I ought to put some sort of recent sci-fi up, on the off chance that someone will expect this blog to contain that sort of thing after they said it did.
So, here’s something I wrote a couple days ago, just a fragment I’m afraid because I’m hoping someone will publish the real work I’ve been doing.
It takes two minutes journey through the snowplain from Antarcticae to Arctica Uno. Two minutes via magway, and the magway doesn’t mind the cold but even for two minutes I sure do.
The only thing more frozen than the snowplain is the sky above it. That sky could suck the warm from anything. It tries to do it too, believe me. By the second minute you’re just about sure your toes and fingers will never move again, and you entertain fantasies about your soul itself condensing and sublimating to join the whiteness of the sky and plain around you. Then finally two minutes is finished and you’ve made it at least as far as to the forest which surrounds Arctica Uno, where there are trees enough to keep a pocket atmosphere, and the atmosphere is sufficient for the magway to be heated.
It’s not a pleasant journey. But if the doctors say the human body can heat itself enough to last two minutes who am I to argue?
Thank you, Geek Tragedy podcast. You sure have good taste in SGOTI science fiction writers if I do say so myself. Also, when discussing sci-fi westerns I was waiting for a Trigun reference, or maybe Cowboy Bebop?
Filed under: fiction
“Excuse me, do you by any chance have cat food, kitty litter?”
“There.” I said, and pointed. I said “there” with as heavy accent as I could inject into a single syllable to make her think that I could not speak English.
“Oh thank you. I just moved down the street. The street, you know, Lawrence Avenue?” She pointed. I said nothing.
“I have a little black and white cat, you see, and I realized that I hadn’t brought his food or anything else for my itsy-kitty-cat.”
I continued to say nothing. This became a victory when the foolish middle aged woman with the frizzy hair turned at last in the direction I had pointed. She came back without another word and put the items on the counter.
“Cash. You see?” I told her, pointing at the number which had lit up on my register. She handed me a $20. I made change and then I put the cat food in a bag and let the silence explain to her that I expected her to leave now.
I only talk to parrots. Eager-eyed American women fail to interest me.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Well, you may have noticed this poor blog may be dying. It served me well, until it didn’t. Like all such internet wonders it may one day rise again, as nothing really dies in the age of everything, but perhaps it will just fade away until one day consumed within a singularity.
I thought for those that still check in on me, though, I might as well give you an update. I’m focusing all my energy on writing the sorts of things which might one day be deemed worthy enough for publication somewhere. Writing on the blog was a great crutch, and one I’ll use again if I stop being able to write without an audience, but I’ve learned to work without it.
My new project is the longest thing I’ve tackled yet. Definitely headed for novella length at least, which I have mixed feelings about. I like the story enough to commit more time to it, though, and I have a few more ideas on the back burner which I’ll turn to if my interest fades.
The new thing is about a culture built on an asteroid wired throughout with explosives. Every citizen wears around their neck a detonator which would allow them to blow their entire little world to pieces, killing themselves and everybody else. I find the idea fascinating, if everyone had the ability to destroy everyone else if they were treated poorly or unfairly how would that change peoples behavior? And would it all go horribly wrong? (lol, of course it would!) Thus making it an excellent setting for a story.
