Disconnect

It smells like skunk in my room. While I need to do a thorough scrubbing of the place (right now I'm cleaning out my email inbox) I think it's coming from the kitchen. I like to blame *that* place for most of the upsetting smells.

I've lost quite a bit, quite quickly on my citrus fast. Told myself I wouldn't mess around with laxatives and make myself more dehydrated than I already am.

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As I was cleaning out my inbox, I came across a mass email invite for some kind of symposium about obesity. I've never been obese. I've never even been overweight. But I, like many people who read this blog, am deathly afraid that I will one day have thighs that are bigger than some people's waists. That I won't be able to see my feet.

I asked myself, as I envisioned these things.... "Well, what's wrong with being fat? A lot of people are fat and healthy. A lot of people are happy that way."

This was my reply: "That is the worst thing that could ever happen."

Then I thought about this statement. I say that about a lot of things. Dropping out of school. Getting stuck in a remedial job. Having to cancel my wedding plans. Moving back home. Being less than perfect.

All of these things equate to one simple thing in my mind: Failure. Perceived Failure.

And external judgment. I got back on my American medications and I finally feel a bit normal again. I can do homework. Eat without going insane. Keep food in the house. Go to school. Not wind up in the hospital once a month. My academic adviser asked me how I got through last term in hindsight.

Easy. It was either die or succeed. Going home was not an option. With my shield or on it.

I think, at least for me, there's some sort of disconnect. You are perfect or you are a failure? That doesn't even remotely correspond. I don't even believe in binary opposition in other aspects of life or theoretical philosophy. Everything works on a spectrum. Or more likely, a Euclidean space with an x-y-z axis. Finely plotted out.

Nothing can be so starkly contrasted as to say: here or there, up or down. What about the betwixt and between?

But yet, here I am with some sort of missing link in my mind, knowing that when it comes to myself I am the expert on catastrophizing and control.

Someone recently posted this video on my facebook, and though it wasn't his intention, it made me wonder how this related to me and this community.

Are we like these "deranged" penguins? Disobeying our instinctual survival mechanisms to rebel against food, nourishment and natural order? Even though we are inundated with knowledge that this "choice" "lifestyle" "disease" is devastating our bodies, why do we continue on this path? We share a disconnect. Something missing. Disoriented.