Monday, February 24, 2014

NEDA Awareness Week

It's NEDA Awareness Week!

I try to avoid talking about eating disorders, the walk I don't talk much about sexual assault, because my experience of these things is not that of everyone affected by them. I do think that it would be terrific if there were effective options for eating disorder treatment available, if we could embrace primary and secondary interventions for these disorders, if our society did not create such a perfect storm of eating-disorder-enabling attitudes, practices, and priorities, beginning with the incredible obligation women (at least) feel to make their bodies look a specific way for the sexual and aesthetic gratification of any man they encounter.


I think it's important to recognize as both damaging and stupid the way capitalizing on looking ways that men like women to look has become so visible a means of survival/existence/achievement. I am not young, and even for my age, I have a startlingly blank slate when it comes to popular culture -- but still, were I to list the women I know, they'd mostly be actresses and cultural figures whose bodies are both excessively overwritten and, often the most interesting thing about them. I know barely any female athletes, scientists, activists, writers, engineers, inventors, political figures.  And what happens when that is the case, is that when I think about how to be myself, the most immediate priority is inevitably: don't get fat. 

I refuse to try to be attractive, because my time is precious to me and I just won't give any more of it over to choosing clothes that "flatter my frame" or toning my body so it is "bikini ready" or figuring out how to manage whatever it is that supposedly goes wrong with one's hair after thirty. You know what happens to mens' hair after thirty? It falls out. You know how many magazine spreads are devoted to the "best hairstyles" for these men? Me, neither, because no one cares, because by thirty, the men I know are completing surgical residencies, practicing law, winning Grammys, writing for Variety and The New York Times. 

But: I will waste hours of my life now, and potentially years of my future life, in the pursuit of being thin. The things I have accomplished -- completing two widely different colleges degrees, the community programs I've run, the hundreds of hours of volunteer service, the dream job obtained, the child I grew in my body and keep alive despite daily efforts to know more intimately the mechanics of moving vehicles -- these things obtain for me the right to weight more than one hundred pound, to have bad teeth, not wear makeup, refuse contacts, and "tame" my eyebrows and body hair sporadically, at best. They do not buy me the right to to be fat. 

To me, that's what an eating disorder means. That I could have been a doctor and travelled the world, but instead, I am thin. That where I was once the stocky gifted ten year old, reading at a twelfth grade level, writing novels in my spare time, planning on being an ER doctor by night and a teacher by day, I now have an ordinary life, a life in which, as my baffled husband often reassures me, when people describe me, the first thing they'd think of is "thin". 

This is a much smaller loss than those many people with eating disorders suffer, and it's certainly a smaller loss than what people with lots of other problems experience. But it is a loss, and it's the common kind that probably affects the majority of individuals with these diseases, and, I think, lots and lots of people who don't develop full-blown disorders. The substitution of goals that matter, of goals whose pursuit can actually constitute a life, and whose accomplishment can make the world a richer place, with another goddamned juice cleanse, another inane tweet about how many calories burned on one's last run or how much weight one has lost since giving up gluten. 

This is tedious, people. And while I think there's legitimate work to be done politically and socially to  reduce the incidence of eating disorders, and to provide those who already have them with more accessible, more effective treatment, I would like to promote the awareness of not having an eating disorder. That it is possible. That you do not have to earn the right to live in your body exactly as it is; that you don't have to be Hilary effing Clinton or Melissa McCarthy or any other wildly accomplished super-person to be fat, and also valuable -- especially when "fat" is, apparently, the catch all term for any body that cannot fit comfortably into clothes made for teenagers. 

If I had world enough and time for regrets about the choices I made at sixteen and twenty six, I'd regret the time I wasted feeling beholden to anyone to make my body "right" -- let alone this faceless audience whose interests are so at the heart of every fucking issue of every "women's" magazine I've ever read. As it is, this NEDA week, let's all be aware of the incredible quickness with which our lives will be over, and the sad, hollow feeling that is your prize for making sure you never, ever can be accused of having cankles. 

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