My life is easy. I get good grades, I have a lot of friends, loving parents, a roof over my head and food on my plate. And yet, I find myself ungrateful often. It isn’t like I’m necessarily trying not to care; more like I’m caring too much. I get good grades, sure, but they could be better; that ninety-three percent would be a lot more appealing if it was a ninety-eight percent.
I have a lot of friends, all wonderful and kind people who—though they would never think ill of me—I can’t help but hear whispering and see glances where there aren’t. I have loving parents: a mother who, though she can be rude and oblivious, has never abandoned me, and a father who, regardless of the fact that he rarely speaks to me outside of shouting or exhausted mutters between shifts and sleep, is smart and admirable. I have a roof over my head. A roof which is loud and judgmental or silent and empty.
I have food on my plate, which may be the root of my issues: jealousy, hatred, and inferiority. See, bread is one of my favorite things to snack on. Bread is a carb though, and carbs make you fat. Being fat is ugly, and being fat is hatred, and being fat is inferiority, and being fat is jealousy, and being fat is beautiful on everyone but me.
Nights I have spent in front of the mirror blur with nights I have spent with my index and middle finger halfway to my throat, and those mix into nights of eating far too much, and then those end up back on the bathroom floor, hunched over the toilet. My gums bleed easily from all of the scrubbing.
“Bulimia,” mentions my older,mature friend.
I do not have Bulimia. I am not sick.
I have found though, that I would rather be hungry than full, even in a house with a roof over my head and lots of friends and loving parents and food on my plate—which is the most sickening to me.
I feel sick, yet I am not sick. I do not belong with crazy people and suicidal people and homicidal people and psychopaths and sociopaths, because I am not sick.
The summer is worse. School motivated me to keep into my cookie-cutter shape, and frankly I’ve been slacking with my free time. It’s become easier to instead skip meals entirely. I sleep late into the afternoon, say that I ate while my parents were at work, and wait until they look away to scrape the last half of my plate into the trash. It doesn’t work. I always end up in the same place: staring blankly at discarded packages of junk foods and eaten-away-at leftovers and the biscuits I made for some reason, even though the thought of them made me nauseous; staring blankly at the stack of plates in the cabinet.
The difference is that I am not sick.
No, I am not sick, because my hips and my arms have been scabbed over for years. I have healed. I am just gross and fat and jealous and hateful and inferior and an issue. I know that I am not nice to look at, and that only makes the pit at the bottom of my stomach wider. It is being self aware that is my largest flaw and most favored trait. I know that I am gross, but I also know that I am quite the overreactor. I’m a woman after all; it must just be hormones or my period. To summarize, to clarify, to finalize, and to promise: I am not sick.
Author’s Note:
This was originally a backstory for my DnD character Trinket. I later condensed it down for the sack of the DM who didn’t want to read eighty pages of backstory.
Kenma Caddel | 14 | Georgia, USA
