Eat, Drink, and Be Merry...

... For Tomorrow We Die.


I think this echos within the walls of my empty little head whenever I get into binge mode. "Eat now, you'll never get to again." Everything tastes a little bit more intense, flavorful, rich. I get fuller, faster but that doesn't stop me. Tomorrow I repent my sins and absolve myself with fasting, or exercise, or laxatives, or some new restricting plan.

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I've mentioned that I have several tattoos. One of them is the phrase "Memento Mori" scrawled across me in antique handwriting. There's a lot of complicated reasons for getting this, but I want to share the history of Memento Mori that led me to thinking about it in the first place.

The phrase is Latin basically meaning some variation of "Be Mindful of Death," or "Remember You Will Die," or "You are mortal." Blah blah. It's influenced a lot of artistic (or what we call art) movements spanning from Medieval sketches of Plague times--with skeletons depicted along with live or dying people--to Victorian society where families would have posed photograph portraits taken of their recently deceased loved ones, especially babies (it was popular to have portraits taken of dead babies because many times this would be the only photograph the family would ever have of the child. The mother usually wore a locket with this photograph inside). It's not a movement bounded temporally or culturally, as death is one of the few human universals across the globe.


(I couldn't bring myself to put up a picture of any dead people, despite my morbid fascination with death, but "Memento Mori Photography" is very googlable and I promise there's no gore. This is a piece from an art installation by Susan Seubert/>)

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Sometimes I wake up and want to recover. Other times I feel like this drive for control-perfection, my ED, is the only thing I have and if I lose it, what will I be? No one should be forced into recovery or continue hanging onto a mental illness if they desperately want help. Live, because you will die. I don't have to seize the day, but I do check in with myself now and then to make sure all aspects within my life are how I really want to be conducting myself. Though I wasn't thinking about Memento Mori as it relates here when I got my tattoo and I'm not going to appropriate its meaning, I do think that the over all concept of "Carpe Diem" "Memento Mori" and all that Latin Bullshit can apply to those of us struggling.

It's about living your life the way you want to, because at some point, we will all die and I hope that every one of my friends (online and in the real world) will have lived the way they intended, not going through motions for someone else. Or worse, mentally torn as to how to live. Waxing philosophical.



Ending this entry on a completely non-eerie final word note, I recently started email following a blog that's gives me my dose of creepy/morbid... so if you're into that: Morbid Anatomy.