How to Love Claire Mason

Starving Your Feelings

It is a silent protest, a cry for help, an expression of the feelings that are bursting within me now; popping like firecrackers inside my gut, exploding at the most random of times.

I call it starving your feelings. Some people eat their feelings. I don't. I just stop eating. I haven't skipped a meal in what seems like years. As a "recovered" anorexic, behaviors like that aren't supposed to exist in my life anymore. And they didn't, for a while at least.

I was a good little girl who ate all her three meals a day and always cleaned her plate, never leaving a scrap of food. It was a behavior I'd learned in the hospital. They force you to finish every last bite there, in the eating disorder unit. Every calorie counts. But there was so many, it made me ill to attempt to add them all up, to calculate how much exercise I'd need (but never would get) to burn it off.

Sometimes I'd get so nauseous from all the food that I'd start to feel bile rising up in my throat and I'd say, "Nurse, I really need to vomit," without thinking about how wrong that was to say while in the eating disorder unit. It really sets them off, they get crazily overbearing and watch you like hawks, put you on strict bed rest if they catch you vomiting. I didn't mean it like that though. I was never bulimic. People are so fucking stereotypical. Eating disorders don't mean you throw up. Anorexics don't vomit. I never did.

Still, they made me swallow the bile and keep eating the bony, gray chicken and giant, bruised russet potato that looked like a little rodent wrapped in tin foil. From my time in the hospital and on, it had almost been instinctive for me to eat everything on my plate, and then some. I even ate my feelings, having ice cream after break ups, and plenty of chocolate on days I was just plain sad. I was on my way to becoming "normal", in terms of food at least. That was the only "normal" they, the doctors, the therapists, wanted me to strive for. I couldn't achieve anything more.

But, lately, these feelings and words inside that are eating me are filling my stomach to the point that I can't bear to eat because there is simply no room for food. I'm never hungry anymore. Well, that is not an entire truth. Perhaps is just that I don't let myself feel the hunger it that I am still so adept at ignoring it.

I wrote that I never felt worthy of anything, like food, and maybe I worded in such a way that it sounded like a thing of the past, but it is exactly how I'm feeling now. The feelings are rushing back at me like a cyclone, a tornado of every emotion that was instilled in my heart and mind in those dark, dark times is charging at me at full speed, so fast I can barely see it, and I know it is so close, so close, to crashing into me, knocking me off my feet and onto the ground where I will lay helpless and defenseless and the thoughts and feelings and lies I tell myself will be able to invade my mind once again, to take over, to take me apart piece by boring piece, and break me down from the inside until it starts to show on the outside and I become thin and fragile and maybe, maybe this time I'll shatter completely. I know I have time to step aside, to escape, to get out of its way, but maybe, just maybe, I don't want to this time.

I haven't eaten breakfast or lunch since the last one left. I fill a cereal bowl with water, slip a spoon into it, a d set it in the sink to keep my parents from becoming suspicious. My stomach never stops churning, bile rises up in my throat when I think of him, and my chest aches with longing. Those are my excuses. That I tell myself, of course, because my parents are under the impression I eat like always. Stupid, stupid girl, they'd say. You are so stupid and shallow and pathetic Katie. How can you let one boy do this to you? How can you feel so low?

If they find out I'll be back in the hospital, back in weekly therapy sessions, locked down, watched, and force fed. It hurts how quick they are to assume I'm relapsing if I go for a jog or don't feel like eating one day. That's why I have to keep this to myself. Their level of trust in me is so low I have only the faint trust in myself to keep it together. To not go back to that place again.

I feel guilty, selfish, terrible for hiding this. But I know I'd feel worse if they knew. If they knew all hell would break loose and I'd lose it. Have I already lost it all? I can't help myself. How can I eat when the only reason, my only motivation for eating again has been stripped away time and time again? Call me Taylor Swift but I just fucking wanted to be wanted. To be needed and loved and felt for. But they feel nothing,not a thing, not the simplest emotions for me. All that I pursued is gone, gone, again.

The last one, he used to feed me at lunch. He knew about the anorexia too, and he did an irresistible thing. He cared, was concerned about it. And to me, that was love. No one had ever cared like that, cared for me, looked out for me, especially with something so painful and close to my heart. He was picking up my pieces. And for that I loved him more than anything. But that was before he forgot about the last of the shards of me and discarded the others as well, breaking them into ever smaller pieces. I cannot eat, I am numb. Seven times is too many. I can't keep telling myself I am still worth something. I don't love myself enough for that.

The feelings are taking over and I might as well let them.

"I don't miss you when you're gone," he said.

They won't miss me. I know it.

I can keep starving my feelings, but how long before I'm too far gone? I don't know.

I don't care.

They won't miss me.

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