I'm taking these probiotics lately to help combat the antibiotics I was on. The doctor explained it to me like this, "there is a war going on inside your tummy", she said rubbing her stomach with open palms and pouting her bottom lip, "the antibiotics are killing the bad guys and the good guys. Probiotics are good guys and you need to take them so the bad guys don't take over your body." At first I was insulted by her offensively unsophisticated and childlike metaphor but quickly realized that in addition to her hand movements, her good guy bad guy speech is the only reason I understand the necessity of probiotics. I even bought a probiotic drink to wash down the pills, an idea I'm now regretting, because it has a similar effect on the body as chasing a bottle of laxatives with battery acid. As a result in taking these probiotics, I've lost 4 pounds.
I've been wanting to loose 4 pounds for a while, not that I need to loose weight, if fact I might even be considered underweight. But the idea of loosing weight never looses it's luster when you are either, 1.) a recovering anorexic, or 2.) a single gay man. I am a disciplined guarantor of both 1 and 2. Being single now, I have become once more, irrevocably obsessive about my body weight, specifically the part of my stomach that gets bigger when I eat. I swear to God, I could eat a mustard seed and you could see it's bulge in my stomach, which I think means I'm skinny, but in my mind it makes me fat. Through this insecurity I have mastered the art of not breathing, or on the rare occasion that I do, my stomach does not elevate with the oxygen intake. I call this filter breathing because it mimics sponges who filter feed but never move. Take notes.
I am only comforted in my quest for an impossible body type that only a skewed mind can create, by the fact that most young gay men share this chase for intangible body mass. If you don't believe me, go to dinner with a bunch of queers, and listen to the self damnation and ridicule that spews out of their mouth every time something enters it. I once went on a date with a body-dysmorphic named Andy, who after dinner did push-ups against the hood of his car while I smoked two cigarettes and sucked in my stomach so hard I could have puked. Andy and I didn't work out.
I am at a coffee shop right now, I just ordered a tall cappuccino and sat down. Next to the register sits a full length mirror, which I was fixated on the entire time I waited on my coffee. In this mirror I caught myself not sucking in my gut, a mistake that was quickly corrected by me nestling my stomach against my spine. I looked around to see if anyone noticed that I had forgotten, for a moment, to suck my stomach in. Further, I looked around to see if anyone noticed the transformation of someone who was letting it all hang out to someone who was so self conscious that they nearly had a panic attack while waiting for a cappuccino. I have days like this often. Days when my ribs appear to be rolls. Days when I walk into a room and everyone is staring at my stomach and thinking to themselves how I could be more attractive if I lost a few more pounds. Rationally, I know I'm irrational in thinking this, but can't for the life of me use my rationale to convince myself that my rationality is irrational. This, is the mindset of an anorexic.
It makes me think of my days in middle school when I had to eat school lunch in the counselor's office. It had caught on to the entire staff at Westridge Middle School that I had stopped eating. I'm not sure if it was the 20 pounds I dropped in about a week, or the fact that I passed out in gym class during stretches on a regular basis, but it became painfully apparent that I had a massive eating disorder. There was only one picture taken of me during this time that spanned over a year. My mother took it. I'm sitting in a doctors office in Colorado, playing with blocks. My face is sunken in, the florescent light incapable of reaching the insides of my cheeks. My wrists were thin. When I look at this picture now, I wonder what my problem was, but as I look at myself in the mirror now, I know the problem never left. I just control it now.
My personal counselor was named Ms. Cunch. She is the one who made me eat my lunch in front of her every single day. She watched every bite, every chew, and every swallow, while I avoided eye contact and read her motivational posters plastered on her office walls. She never took her eyes off me for a second, trying anything and everything to get me to eat. Once, she actually pretended a spoon full of corn was an air plane and told me my mouth was the runway. "Ryan, the people in the plane are scared, they need to land before it crashes," she said while Kamikaze bombing my mouth with cold corn. She was only half joking when she said that, but I still couldn't help but feel slightly degraded.
After I was fed like a horse with a feeding bag attached to its face, I would be set free to my seminar class. This meant that I went straight to the downstairs bathroom where no one ever went, and stood in front of the full length mirror for my entire study hall. I would look at my body from every angle in the unflattering dim light refracting off of yellow wall tiles. I searched for even the slightest bit of imperfection, when I couldn't see any I would make them up, and blame Ms. Cunch for turning me into a water buffalo. I tried throwing up a few times, but as it turns out, middle school cafeteria food tastes even worse coming out as it does going in.
Ms. Cunch worked with me everyday for an entire school year, trying to help me love myself and trying to figure out why in the world at 90 pounds I thought I was a disgusting blob of bacon fat. I'm sure the cause for my body image was my deteriorating home life coupled with the normal self loathing existence of a homosexual eighth grader, but at the time I really thought I was a cow. Eventually I was told that if I got down to 80 pounds that I would have to be hospitalized and treated in the anorexia ward. I ate a bagel that day. Through years of therapy I started eating less like the Olson Twins and more like a normal teenager. I gained weight slowly until I got to a healthy body weight. But things like anorexia never leave a person, every day since then I still go into the bathroom after I eat and inspect my body, searching for imperfections.
I'm always searching for imperfections, in everything but mostly myself and I'm not sure why. I feel like I'm falling apart, sometimes I think I've been falling apart since birth. I look around at my family, friends, co-workers, and see that everyone is falling apart in some way, even if it's just the slow tattering of age.
Everyone is a harsh spectator of themselves and everyone is just as scared as I am. Perhaps it's not everyone. Perhaps it's just the people I surround myself with, But i don't think it's too much of an overstatement to say everyone. So while searching for imperfections in myself I also search for someone who isn't so scared so that I may achieve at least some stability. And while I rationally know that I am responsible for my own security, I can't seem to end it. I can't seem to end the search for someone to help me land.
Maybe Ms. Cunch was on to something. "Ryan, the people in the plane are scared, they need to land before it crashes."
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