Down With The Sickness

"Darling, thin is in! Skinny is the new black!
Trust me, everyone is going to thank you."

It seems that all that is good has died 
and is decaying in me


Open up your hate
and let it flow into me


~ System Of A Down



I don’t write much on my blog anymore. I know why, of course, but instead of dealing with it, I like to snort drugs instead.

Haha! Just kidding.

I like to starve myself.

Whoa! Just kidding, just kidding.

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..............not funny? Why not?

Anyhoo, it’s time to deal, so I can start writing again. I’m sick of this shit. I’m sick of being stuck here alone with myself, with no outlet, no escape.

Here’s what happened. When I was in hop-sital last year, I hurt people with my writing. Badly. Two people who really didn’t deserve to be hurt. And though I like to think that I don’t care about anyone and I tried hard to pretend that it didn’t bother me, it did bother me. It bothered me a lot. I bothered me so much that I stopped writing.

What I had written was cruel; I likened one girl to a concentration camp victim, and said that another had the self esteem of a battered blowup doll. And then I let them read it.

In my defense, I thought that they didn’t have internet access in hop-sital, and that I would have time change what I had written into something kinder. I actually liked these two girls, and wanted to write kind, encouraging things about them. I thought that I would have time to change what I had previously written, which had been my first impressions of them, when I didn’t know them. Scathing remarks about the living parts of my scenery in hop-sital, a couple of strangers I didn’t want to know. I never intended to like them or care about them. It was an accident.

I still cringe with shame and turn away from my writing whenever I think of them. I am appalled that what I love so much could do so much damage to someone else.

Then in the spring, I got a taste of my own medicine, I guess, when I tried stepping out of my comfort zone and finally writing some honest shit. I wasn’t doing very well with my eating disorder, and I decided to admit that on my blog, hoping it would help shake me out of my complacency.

I hadn’t written about my eating disorder since the last time I had been in hop-sital, after what I did to those two girls. For some readers who didn’t know my past, I guess it came out of nowhere. One former reader, whom I had also corresponded with by email and text occasionally, read what I wrote and became very angry with me. He wrote me a long email, condemning me for taking anorexia so lightly and for making jokes about it. Didn’t I know how serious anorexia was, that it could kill?

I retreated into the shadows again, hurt and betrayed. I had bared my soul and been condemned for it. I can accept now that he prolly didn’t know my history, he had a right to his opinions, and all the rest of it. But at the time, I felt like my writing had betrayed me. I was embarrassed and ashamed, of myself and my disease and my apparent inability to communicate my suffering, and once again I became unable to write. Every attempt to start again felt dirty and wrong, or cheap and false.

So I became obsessed with books instead. Other people’s words, I decided, were safer than my own. And in true Kagey fashion, I ran this method of escape into the ground, ensuring once again that I don’t have to feel anything.

But while I love reading, and never go anywhere without a couple of books to keep me company, it has not been able to fill the void. I miss the obsession, the complete and total consumption of my soul that writing afforded me. When I wrote, it was okay to let some of those emotions out. That’s what made for good writing, right? And the only obsession of comparable power has always been my eating disorder. My writing and my eating disorder are both huge, all-consuming life forces that do not allow for anything else. You belong to them; you quite literally eat, breathe, sleep and shit an eating disorder, and for me the compulsion to write is just as powerful.

I realized when I started writing a couple of years ago in hop-sital that I could not have both; I had to choose. Writing or eating disorder.

  For the past several months, I have chosen eating disorder. This way, I figured, no one gets hurt. Not even me.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

  And now, I want to claw my way back out, I want to immerse myself with words and typing and pencil editing and printouts and all the other little miracles from my lover, but I can’t. I am trapped. I made my choice, and now I can’t change my mind. The proof that I have made the wrong choice, that I have gone too far, was presented to me on a silver platter this weekend, in the form of an email to my agent, from a client:

“What happened to Victoria Beckons? She used to have such a hot body and great tits. Now she looks cracked out and skeletal, a concentration camp victim with no ass.”

And though that should really bother me, it doesn’t. I am kept warm, safe and protected by my eating disorder. Good Job! it tells me. Look how well you’ve done.

There is a logical part of me trying desperately to be heard, that screams for attention, and I want desperately to listen to it.

  But the truth is, I am drowning. I am too far gone to help myself, and must once again reach out to others to help save me from myself, even though I HATE that. But I am desperate.

  In fact, I am so desperate, I wrote this blog post.

  I want to get better. I think. And unfortunately, that means that YOU are gonna have to hear about it.



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