If you don't take care of your body, where will you live?

O r i s t h a t t h e w h o l e f u c k i n g p o i n t ?

Reflecting - on my 31st birthday - (current thoughts and photos follow...)

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I feel odd. In several ways Anorexia is still a big part of my world... it's a fat part really - as that is how Anorexia ultimately feels... it is sad, though, that "fat" is a bad word... "fat" is associated with unpleasant, undesireable, sticky emotions... so much so that even though it is NOT a feeling, if someone were to say "I feel fat'" it would be understood what that person was talking about to all around them. Was that always true? For my time on the planet, the past 31 years, it has meant uglyness of some kind.

And similarly, "thin" has been eternally linked, weilded shut even, with all that is good - pretty, successful, charmed... and if someone dare utter "I feel thin" it is a moment of great triumph, for really NO good reason. As far as I can see at this point in world history, we have people dying for thinness who are more often praised than questioned. Most of those bodies you see regularly photographed and shown and published in our society are unnaturally thin (via some means- they smoke like crazy, they exercise for rigid hours only, they manipulate their food, they get surgery, hire expensive advice and assistance, use medication which is the same thing as drugs, etc. etc.)... they do something to keep themselves thinner than they are naturally meant to be. So what is it we like about the unnatural? the sick? the underfed?

The Underfed, as they are, keep eating disorders in my life every day. I work with them and try whatever clever tricks, silly accents, art or therapy assignment I can think of to bring them back. Bring them away from the obsession of food-and-weight, food-and-weight, food-and-weight. I try to make their worlds bigger - their emotional, intellectural, spiritual and, yes definately, physical worlds bigger. And they teach me why there is nothing good waiting for me or anyone on the other side of Anorexia/Bulimia/Compulsive Eating. That no one is happy... No one is frolicing and flying and flaunting their bodies with joy... that all those promises about "thin" are not actually obtainable by getting thin (thinner, thinnest). A life that is good, pretty, successful, charmed... (and all those other things we associate with "thin") is not available by changing one's calories or cells or external shape.

My clients are Underfed, as they are Undernourished and Underloved. And when we "feed" something we are acknowledging that it is there, that it has needs and that it has our support to grow. Being acknowledged for who you are, having your needs be validated and met, and given support to grow - those treasures are not found in food or in dieting or in a change of clothing size, or in the toilet. (if you want, you can read more thoughts on the Underfed here)

I know this now and so I am trying to tell the thousands of adolescent guys and girls who have stumbled into the cave I once chose to hide in. And outside of work, Anorexia still floats through my life. It's different now, there is a pressure and a drive to stay in recovery. But I am not unblemished, I am a 31 year old woman in the world and I make an effort to stay thin (as I fall off my soapbox and coming crashing down, a mouth full of concrete). I do not take the risks I used to, I am grateful for that, actually, because I know first hand that a lof of those eating disorder "tricks" ironically slow down your metabolism (yea, stay off those fucking laxatives, I'm telling you, and don't skip meals or go long without eating). My drive behind wanting to be a slim adult female tastes much different now than it once did. It is not my focus, it is not my life, it is not an attempt to go backwards in time, and it doesn't fool me into thinking it is "helping" me with my problems.

But I do have to still watch it. Here's another reason not to get started on an eating disorder or to go get help before you get even one more day into this: Anorexia lingers.

I have better years than others, I sometimes have to watch my intake or be aware of my general size/weight. In my personal experience thus far, that eating disordered "voice" cannot be silenced by flipping a recovery switch.

And finally, there this site that keeps Anorexia in my life... a very much different role than it used to play... this site is full of irony and passion and strange expressions and frusration and hope - all in regards to Anorexia.

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And still, there are several ways Anorexia is not a part of my world. My friendships do not contain eating disorders any more. I have this utterly precious small group of close friends... and we have real connections that I can be present for (because I am not distracted anymore by food-and-weight, food-and-weight, food-and-weight). We have on-going jokes and nicknames and favorite things to do together. I swear to you it is more beautiful than a Size (insert your obbsessive number here) ever could be!

Outside of Anorexia, aside from a skeleton or two, I am more and more known as "the Hallowe'en Queen" as I love this holiday... and I decorate the places I work, the place I live, the places where people I love live (I snuck into my sister's place and decorated every room before she came home to find her home all a-hallowe'en-glow)... and I have a ever expanding Spooky Town collection (this is a Hallowe'en village, much like a Santa's Village porcelian colletion someone might have on their mantle, except is has haunted houses, graveyards, black lights, glowing pumpkins, moving ghosts, animated creeks & thunder... go to Michaels to see it) and I always have an elaborate costume to wear all Hallowe'en day (examples are Gothic Fairy and 18th Century Vampire). I've managed to make it mandatory at my workplace that staff dress up. Beyond the festivities, I am drawn to the meanings of it. Ever since I was thirteen, I've found the universe of the "dark", of the underground, to be enchanting and a-live-ly. I am certain the Anorexia fed on this part of me ("shadow self" is the psycho-babble term) at one point, as romantic as any destruction can be... but I have shifted and I can romantize the flowers as they look at night, I can love spiders and black cats, talk to the Moon and worship the sea fog and it's better, it's satisfying, it's real, it's not that fake romantized-ultra-lost-destruction drama that partially feels completely fake right then when you are in it... the way smoking ciggarettes can feel, starving while others eat, purging 'til there's blood, eating everything you can in a bloodlust you can't even understand...

There is a way to embrace your "shadow" without reckless risk. Now I can float inside deeper music without wanting to die. It's better. Every Body will get their Death experience. No one will be denied. Each of us one day Die. No one will take my Death experience from me... but what about this whole Life experience in the mean time?? What? Spend it dieting?!! Spend it hating myself? Spend it never taking credit, never being good enough, forever pushing to please people, criticize every move that I make and every thing that I say? No thanks.

When I was intrenched in Anorexia there was little room for All Hallow's in my life... Really if all your world is an eating disorder, ask yourself:

"So, what's the plan?"

Is this how you are going to spend your teenagehood/adulthood? How does it end? Do you have money and insurance and time and support in the future in case you want to address it later? Do you carry out the dramatic movie for all to see (and eventually tire of) and squeeze yourself into a miserable place until, gasp!, finally you die thin, at peace?

I guess my Anorexia story (movie, soap opera, or one long commercial) ends with me here. I don't have it severely, aside from those seven long years, I don't fight it constantly... but it's still in my life. Right here.

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Today, as I turn "Hallowe'en" (31) I sit here, still trying to do something, say something that will catch your ear and you'll stop, come to a dead halt and be able to turn life around - you'll walk away from Anorexia/Bulimia/Compulsive Eating and never, not once, ever peak back.

And I sit here, at the same time, trying to welcome and join you who are already infected. And tell you we can overcome this, we can move through and past it - maybe inside our spiritual selves, maybe from the inner child and the children inside us - maybe there is a healing to be done, a mass public ritual where we cast out the "thin" and "fat" spells...

That's what I want to do. I want to take the kids I'm working with now:

the 17 year old boy whose Anorexia is his manifested existential angst... the angry, beautiful, way-too-street-smart, never-had-a-chance-to-be-her-age 15 year old girl whose used to spending her precious free time eating full of self hate followed by purging again and again until her body would shake... the 16 year old boy with a heart of gold, who can rap about his pain but has as low of a self esteem as his half-his-size-eating-disordered-counter-parts... and all the girls, beautiful, ridiculously kind, good hearted girls who are convinced they do not deserve things and believe the cultural Lie that who they are matters less than how they look... the kids I have from out-of-state... out-of-country... the abundance of young Hispanics who's trudge through Eating Disorder Land is seen completely differently by those watching... the straight guys who everyone assumed was gay... the growing amount of Revege Anorexia sufferers, adolescents who were heavy as kids, teased for being fat, and developed an overcompensating self-destructing diet, in hopes of magically making the pain of being teased go away... the group who knew they were to thin but couldn't stop anyway... the bunch who deny their problem, deny their pain, because they aren't "emaciated enough yet" to have earned a right to complain... the girls and boys with Bulimia, whose lives are sometimes even more at stake, who criticize their suffering and their shape, all the while knowing that low enough postassium is all the body can take... my precious loving souls overrun by Compulsive Eating, scared, often made to feel ashamed...

I want to take all the kids and adults I've worked with/will work with, I want to take them and cast a super sized spell that will travel from here, my dim-lit Hallowe'en decorated living room, and expand outwards, traveling through censor's smoke, to there - where ever and when ever this healing needs to be. And I want there to be a mighty Eating Disorder Land Earthquake that shifts all of us, and we then allow our nature, our true self & instinct, to take Life and re-direct.

So Mote It Be.

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It is my 31st birthday today, and there's a time change here in L.A., leaving me with an extra hour to celebrate!

October 26th 2003 - Lisa Arndt - The Hallowe'en Queen

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