Asylum

I come to this black void and instead of emptiness, there are all of these brilliant colors, like music that I can taste and hear-

I distract myself with the familiar until the words form beneath my fingertips...

My mind flashes back to the “crazy dream.” I’m locked up in an asylum, sensing the depressant quality of being over medicated, with a tenuous grasp on reality. I’m not sure why I return to the texture of this dream-feeling trapped, misunderstood, and denied of comfort and care...it’s a worn out theme.

Eating disorders are like an asylum. Even in recovery, it’s presence looms-black and white, colorless and empty, and even in my sleep, I can feel my body, the weight and density, a liquid mass -trapped.

The Asylum: a place I would like to escape to; where I could be crazy and at the same time a hostage of my body. I would be free to rattle the chains of my own misery, completely abandoned by the outside world. A nightmare or a wish?

I’m in recovery. I eat the food, sometimes without much thought, and at times agonizingly; mouthful by mouthful. 

These are the reasons I eat: my family, my dog, my job. I love those reasons, and more often than not, it’s enough. 

My weight fluctuates depending on my manipulations. I can’t quite seem to leave it alone. I do not trust my body, and have difficulty being neutral, although I try. “I have a body.” That is the goal, even though mostly I’m disgusted by having a body. That disgust transitions on a scale from extreme to tolerable...I have come to accept that the disgust doesn’t have much to do with my weight, and yet the manipulation continues...

Yes, I know it’s a worn out theme. It’s mind numbingly boring, and I despise weight and diet talk. It takes up enough chatter in my own head, and so the distraction is the eating disorder; A cunning asylum, with locked doors, and sometimes thin walls of glass I can see through. 

Angela Minard©