25/11 writing again

I’ll be brutally honest: I write less when I start to gain weight.
There’s something achingly beautiful in the struggle, even though I avoid writing about my eating disorder. Knowing it’s there-lurking, familiar-has always felt like fuel. The only fuel I’ve ever trusted.

I know that mindset needs to shift. Maybe it started the day I passed out. I remember the cold of the kitchen floor, the way the room bent and blurred until even my name slipped away. Dissociation isn’t new to me, but this was different. Heavier. When my roommate searched frantically for something to raise my blood sugar, she found a bottle of full-fat Coke. I hadn’t touched that in years. The sight of it made me want to disappear again, sink back into that soft, smothering half-dream where nothing existed-not hunger, not fear, not me.

It was my second real oh shit moment.

The first was in school, sitting in the vice principal’s office as she told me she had noticed the weight loss. The walls shrank around me as she said she couldn’t keep it a secret. I remember thinking, The jig is up. People will know. I’ll lose control.
But of course, I didn’t stop. I got worse before I got better, then worse again. Now I’m getting better-again-and I know it won’t be the last time.

I like to think I’m always ahead of trends. When Ozempic and Monjaro started showing up everywhere, I remembered ordering diabetes medication from shady websites when I was a teenager. I didn’t care what it did to my body. If it made me smaller, that was good enough. If whatever was probably repackaged speed killed me, that also felt good enough. I’ve always wanted to be good enough.

But this recent oh shit wasn’t poetic. It was medical.
Telling the doctors my history, I started cataloging the quiet damage I’ve done-years of body-checking, tracking every intake, forcing every outtake. I ran my tongue across the empty space where a tooth used to be. It rotted a few years back. I never fixed it.

Oh shit, indeed.

I hesitate to write about any of this. Not because it’s triggering or “too much,” but because part of me feels undeserving-as if writing about an eating disorder while not fully consumed by it makes me a fraud. It feels like a situationship now: something I think about constantly, see occasionally, and feel completely overtaken by when the sun goes down.

I don’t know why I still feel the need to prove myself. Why I wear sunglasses on cloudy days, performing for no audience at all.
So here I am, writing with a stomach uncomfortably full from a bagel, reminding myself that adding weight to the body doesn’t remove weight from the words.

If only I could believe that about myself.

But right now, writing this-being here-that’s good enough.