A Letter to My Eating Disorder: I Hate You

The texture of it is the shock between too hot and too cold. An uncomfortable burn that is numbing at times, in constant fluctuation and never progressing. A torture device used to make every moment a rebellion or a loathing, so goddamn powerful that sometimes you look in the mirror and don’t even know that it’s you, so you look to others to define it— and they always get it wrong.

That’s what it’s like for me to hate my body.

I’ve walked down the street and felt like I was in water. But not the calm kind of water where you find peace, the pressurized kind that pricks your skin in a way that makes you always want to squirm.

I’ve exhausted myself to the point where air feels like fire, and there is no longer a safe place to hide.

In the moments of clarity I do have, it is beautiful. I am me, and I am strong and loved and whole. I can do all the things I want and it is the perfect balance of unexciting and undisappointing. But when the panic kicks in- I feel like I would rather drown than fight the day. Its times like these when I tell myself it is the anxiety that is the poison inside me that makes me think this way. Anxiety is invading my body and taking my light, my soul, my spirit, my person-hood, my autonomy. I no longer want my limbs attached. I want to be numb and for a day to be without this body that houses too much angst for one 100 pound human trying to fucking LIVE.

In the depression, life has become the battle of surviving rather than the joy of living.

In the anxiety, life has become the fear that the will never end.

But in the joy, there is the hope and the strength that all these “forces” as I call them, will learn to live as one.

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Note From the Author:
 "I met Kacey on the train coming home from work. She was wearing a bad ass pink Gender Traitor shirt and I complimented it. Little did I know, she was the women who designed the shirt and was just beginning to start Gender Traitor. Thank you for giving us this platform to explore, struggle, express, celebrate, and plainly be ourselves (and some pretty amazing shirts to do it all in as well.)"

-Elizabeth Levi