17-April-24
Food is such a wonderful thing. I love cooking, I love eating, but it has taken me a long way to get there. When I was a teenager, I would go through phases of starving myself, of throwing up after meals, but they were never consistent enough to be a real eating disorder. My mum was really into diet culture, god rest her soul, and it's one of the things I mourn most. She never got the chance to live comfortably inside her body, even before she got sick. There was always something. It's always fucking something, isn't it?
I'm not sure I know a single woman who has always had a healthy relationship with food. Being a child for the 2000's superskinny fad was a part of it, sure, probably the lion's share of it. But I wonder if it goes deeper. Women's bodies have been their main asset for arguably all of recorded history. As such, the shape of them is subject to great amounts of observation and criticism as shapes go in and out of fashion. There doesn't seem to be a male equivalent - men have three body types; fat, skinny, and strong. And while there is some social consequence and difference in treatment depending on which one you have, it is in no way comparable to women.
Fat women are some of the worst treated people on earth, interpersonally. At least in the West. And yet, with the rise of 'thick', skinny women are being sunjected to mockery too. I think this current ideal is probably one of the worst because it is so impossible to naturally achieve. In the past, at least, women were expected to achieve the ideal figure through structures garments, which presented its own problems, sure, but it at least ackowledged itself as an illusion. Now, with social media and BBLs and fitness influencers, you are just expected to look like that.
And I wonder if I'm speaking from a place of priviledge. Despite what teenage me might have thought, I'm not fat and never really have been. I was never skinny enough to be Skinny, but the only person who ever called me fat was myself. Also, being a lesbian, I think I'm shielded form the worst of beauty culture, because it's a very heterosexual thing. Women don't demand the impossible from each other, at least not gay women. I don't really know the nuances of straight women's psychology, because I don't hang around too many of them. But it makes me despair, how trapped we are in our appearances. I used to want to cut my own face up, make myself resolutely ugly, so that I wouldn't have to torture myself with the tantalising median of being kind of pretty but not gorgeous.
I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make, or if I even have a point at all. I wish there was a way I convince all the women that every second we bother about out looks instead of our hearts is a second we atrophy to a shell, that I could save myself and all my loved ones from the trap of physical perfection. Don't we all? I wonder, if I ocunted all the mseconds I'd spent on insecurity, how much tiem have I lost? What could I have done, had I put that time to something useful? God, I always stress myself out when I start writing about nothing. It always gets too profound.
In other better news, I finish my job soon. After that, I get a month to see all my friends, and then I go travelling. I can't wait. Two months of whatever the fuck I want. I'll explore, see all the ruins of beautiful things, things still beautiful. I'll get drunk and go dancing and not care how silly I look because nobody will know me. I'll make friends and have dinner and not care about whether I gain a fucking pound or two because I will be happy.
I hold onto the hope because I have no choice. I will enjoy my life, I have to. there's nothing else to do.
01-March-24
It's Mother's Day next week. With every shop I walk into and every banner about getting the perfect present for the perfect mum I want to smash it all up with sledgehammers. The day before I'm going to an event with my support group, which might make it easier. They're really nice, I've only been to one meeting but I feel very welcome, and it's nice to be around other women who understand what I'm going through.
The urge to blow my life up is getting stronger. I can't remember when exactly it started, but it's been there at least since I was a teenager. I want to neglect myself in pursuit of something. I want to be driven to decay by an obsession, be it art or research, paranoia or drugs. I want something to consume my soul and leave no space for my body. I want to forget to sleep because I cannot tear myself away, I want to stop eating because it never occurs to me, to neglect my relationships and shut myself away until it is perfect and all the pain becomes worth it. I do that sometimes, in a sense, with my coding and my writing and my video games, but never to the extent I dream about. My dream, when I consider it a dream, would be to dedicate myself to the creation of one thing, a magnum opus of undeniable genius, to pour everything I have into it and at the end it is shining and beautiful and I am dead, and people cannot even mourn me fully because if I had lived they would not have this magnificent thing I died for.
I think that's my issue. I want my pain to mean something, to be worth something. But it never is, it's just pain for nothing, and that makes me angrier than anything. Perhaps growing up Catholic gave me weird ideas about martyrism. I'd love to be a martyr, to die for something that carries me on. I've been thinking a lot about Aaron Bushnell, the air force guy who burned himself to death for Palestine. How I wished I cared enough about anything to do that, how it scares me that I don't, and that fundamentally, I think I'm a coward. Because to really be a martyr, you have to want to live, becuse what use is a sacrifice of something you don't care about? And I'm not sure if I do want to live. Of course I do, the animal body always wants to live, that's the point, but I think I've wanted to die because it's easier. Dying might hurt, but then it's over. You have to live all the time, and that's hard. But to give away a life you don't want isn't a sacrifice at all, it's just disposal. At the same time, however, I know I'm a coward, because I never actually killed myself. For all my posturing, I'm afraid to die. If I had to die tomorrow, I wouldn't be happy with what I've done. there's so much more out there.
I was trying to make this blog a little more genial. My girlfriend suggested I use this space to rant about work, but I know that's only because she wants to see the website and I haven't let her yet because I feel awkward having people I know see this stuff. It feels too personal, not just this page (though obviously also this page) but all of it. I work really hard on this website, I coded it all by hand and it's taken so many hours, and the thought that, even if they don't say it, my loved ones might think it's shit or cringe, that my writing is weird or pretentious or that anything here changes their perception of me, it's scary. And I can't help but turn everything into a confession.
It's also much easier to confess to strangers, because there are no consequences to it. What does it matter if a random number on a screen knows? They don't know who I am, I don't even exist to them. But for my friends, my partner and my family to know how easily I would throw myself away for the first thing I thought was worth it? Above all else it's embarrassing.
Maybe with my big confessions done, I'll be able to chill out a little. Wouldn't that be novel? I'm working on my Locked Tomb shrine atm, so expect that soon. Otherwise, see ya on the flip side.
09-Feb-24
I wonder if there will ever be a last time. I know, as we all do, that everything ends. That it must. But each time I experience something, go somewhere, see someone, I wonder if I will ever do it again.
I know it's probably part of the grief, to be reminded of how impermanent we are, but the world feels fleeting, ephermeral in a way it has not for a very long time.
I've started rewriting an old WIP about ghosts. I seem to rediscover and reinvent it every few years, and the story, the characters change as I do, become what I need them to be at that point in my life.
It's comforting, to have an outlet entirely within your control. Perhaps that's why I took up coding too. And video games. Grief has given me many new hobbies. Means of distraction that work until they don't and I cry again.
I wonder when people's sympathy will run out. When this period of grace, where my transgressions are excused, where nobody gets annoyed when I don't text back for days or even weeks, will end. I feel like a horrible person. I hate myself for making her death about me. I hate myself more for not being able to pull myself together when my girlfriend needs support. I hate feeling imbalanced in how we care for each other. Falling apart is exhausting.
I'm plauged again by that old urge to burn my life to the ground and start afresh. I go travelling in May, and a part of me wonders if I'll even bother coming back. It would be a terribly cruel thing to do to my loved ones, to my dad, to my girlfriend. Maybe I will become a cruel person. Time alone will tell.