"Violence is always already embodied. The violence, once inscribed on the body, is difficult to erase and, as such, may control the readings we do of ourselves, our experiences, and others."
—William Banks 25
As a result of being dismissed and disbelieved about having migraines, I fell into a depression. The idea of living with pain for the rest of my life was unbearable to me. I went back and forth between being frustrated that no one believed me when I felt this pain and feeling like I couldn't trust my own mind because if the doctors told me I wasn't really feeling pain, surely I was crazy for thinking that I did.
My relationship with my body broke sometime in high school. I hated this thing that caused me to hurt, to miss school, to feel such anxiety about my life. I stopped caring about what happened to it and became reckless and violent towards myself.
I stopped eating to feel more control over myself and my body. I embraced the hunger as a good pain, a pain I could control and manage. It became a ritual for me. I told my parents that I was going to eat breakfast at school. At lunch, I would tell my friends that I ate a big breakfast at home and so I wasn't hungry. I would pick at my dinner at night, my parents letting me, thinking that I was still full from lunch.
By focusing on this pain, I felt more control over everything. The pain I couldn't control felt less severe because I started seeing all of it as good, almost spiritual.
William Banks's quote that violence is already embodied and then, once inscribed, can control us, resonates with me here. My pain was already embodied—it was a thing out of my control. But when I was ignored by doctor after doctor, my reactions too became violent. I lashed out against myself, and in an effort to retake a control that had been wrested from me, I began systematically attacking my body.
In Wasted, Marya Hornbacher writes, "the convenience in having an eating disorder is that you believe, by definition, that our eating disorder cannot get out of control, because it is control. It is, you believe, your only means of control, so how could it possibly control you?" (ch. 2). This description of eating disorders as simultaneously control and out of control resonates with my own narrative. The disorder represents a moment in which I was so excessively, obsessively in control of my body that I become out of control of it.
I had no control over so many things in my life—my pain and my sexuality in particular—and the idea of regaining control by striking back at the thing that caused me these problems was so appealing. So my body became at once my enemy (it was ugly, it was disgusting, it was sinful, it was painful) and my canvas. By controlling the pain that I put onto it, I could repaint the picture that I had been given. My doctors called me naive? Fine, then I would learn what it was to be alive by flirting with death. They told me I needed to get used to pain? Okay. Then I would embrace it, love it, make it my own. They said that I was imagining it? Well, I wasn't imagining this pain, because I was making it happen.
It really was all about control.
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