In the first memory I have of hating my body I am ten years old. I am ten years old and wearing a swimsuit I’ve had for a few years and complaining to my mom that it’s digging in between my legs. She tells me it’s because I’m overweight. I start comparing the size of my legs to the size of other girls’ legs shortly after that exchange. A couple of years later I start counting calories. I am a very smart child; I can retain information about how many calories are in most foods, and I can do math in my head.
Eventually I’ll stop eating entirely. I don’t want anyone to notice and am surprised each time no one does. If I have to eat, to keep up appearances, I go to the bathroom after I do and vomit. No one ever notices that either. I play soccer and do ballet, and I am never thin enough to ring alarm bells, but most days I’m likely netting around 500 calories.
Later, I am a very smart young adult. Because I am very smart I know I am killing myself. Because I know I am killing myself, I know I have to stop doing this. I will try all kinds of stuff to climb out of the hole I have dug myself into: vegetarianism, using an app to track macros, “clean” eating, throwing away my scale. Some of it helps. But the damage is done; years of starving myself have led to near-death, I realize in the fetal position on the bathroom floor at work. Something is wrong, so wrong, so wrong but no one believes me at the hospital; they say it’s indigestion. It’s not. It’s a biliary colic, a ruptured gallbladder, a bursting pancreas, a failing liver. I will have emergency surgery; I will be fine but not before a surgeon tells me I should be dead.
I hated my body so much it almost killed me. I do not hate my body anymore, but sometimes the hate offers itself to me again. I call it my brainworms. Most of the time they’re manageable. I’ve been to therapy; I have the tools. Sometimes, though, the worms reproduce so quickly they consume the entirety of my brain, and that’s all there is. I stop being able to tell even what I look like; looking in the mirror is like trying to read a text except I’ve forgotten how to read.
I tore a small hole in a pair of leggings a few days ago, writhing around on the floor of my bedroom when my knee discovered a nail sticking ever so slightly up out of a floorboard. I was listening to Big Thief’s “Shoulders,” from their 2019 album Two Hands, the first song in a pair I think is the angry heart of the record, the other half being the song “Not.” Adrianne Lenker spits out a shocking chorus: “and the blood of the man who killed my mother with his hands / is in me / it’s in me / in my veins.”
There is so much I never meant to be, so much that could kill. In me. In my veins.