Lost thoughts: competitive pain

I deleted the pictures of the food I made in first year at some point this year. They were in my hidden folder anyway, so it wasn’t like anyone else could see them, but I could. And I knew they were they, and I used to look at them. I think it was a form of gratification, look where you’ve come from, where you are now. I was justifying I was better, I was healed.

No I wasn’t. I was saying don’t forget this part of you, you’re still here, you haven’t left the obsessive compulsive behaviour. Being ill had become part of my identity and routine. I needed these pictures as much as the skinny whip bars and low caliore hot chocolate, they justified what had happened to why life, why I had disappeared from being present. Having them was a defence for me dipping out of my life, one no one could argue with as being ill is not a choice. But yet this illness was I think, I didn’t want to let go of what had defined me for a year. I needed the pictures to prove I wasn’t well. Because some people will doubt you, they’ll believe you were just being rude, that you actively didn’t want to see them.

The truth was you didn’t want to see anyone including yourself, it’s a numb feeling in short.

Now I have let go. The pictures of me looking sad are still there, and hopefully like other pictures I’ll distance myself metaphorically and physically from the girl and the feelings captured in front of the lens in those stills. One day I’ll let go the pictures, letting them slip out my life like an old friend who’s grown distant. For now they’re still there, I need them but not the food pictures sometimes.

However, I now see it’s not the best answer for public figures to post pictures of their smaller suffering selves. Yes it does show smaller bodies aren’t healthy, they aren’t achievable unless you’re ill. But they also subtly say I don’t let go, so you shouldn’t either. Being bigger or smaller doesn’t change a problem or an illness, a mindset or an attitude, it’s simply a vessel that your bodies in. We’re all different shapes and that’s normal, look at the pots and Tupperware in your cupboard. They’re different shapes, have different roles and jobs and purposes, and that’s what we are. We don’t need to see pictures of your body to see what someone who is sick looks like.