Higher Resolution

How can you be comfortable in the world when you feel like a stranger in your own skin?  Look deeper and aim higher:
 
No Body Is Wrong

 
January always settles in like the aftermath of a severe storm.  When the holiday lights come down, the emotional dissonance that was always lurking beneath the glitter is illuminated.  Maybe we are coming off our first holiday season after the loss of a loved one.  Maybe there are lingering resentments toward loved ones still among the living, about slights real or imagined.  Did someone not appreciate the effort we made?  Did someone else not make enough of an effort?  Like a child who sees that tree coming down without ever receiving their most-hoped-for gift, we are all managing emotional vacancies of different kinds and sizes.  But at least it’s over, right?  At least we can start picking up the pieces.
 
Not so fast.  December was rough, but at least then we had the distraction of the glitter.  We may not have liked what someone said at a party, but it was still a party and we had to get through it.  We may have been missing someone ourselves, but we had to put our game-face on to cheer up someone else.  There was always something pulling our attention in another direction.  And while we are now left facing whatever aches and pains the holidays had distracted us from, January has one more to pile on and it’s a doozie: the dreaded and inescapable new year’s resolution.  Because why wouldn’t we take this moment in time, when we may be at our most vulnerable, to torment ourselves even further with the burden of exacting expectations and punishing demands?  It’s about as good an idea as bringing an alcoholic to their first AA meeting while they are still in the throes of a painful hangover (which, from other personal experience, I can confirm is not a good idea at all).  Make no mistake, we are not in the aftermath of the storm.  We are in its eye.       
 
This is perhaps especially true for the millions of Americans like me who suffer from eating disorders.  According to a global consumer survey by online data platform statista.com, each of the top three new year’s resolutions made by Americans in 2022 revolved around our bodies: exercising more, eating healthier, and losing weight.  Bringing up the rear were spending more time with family and friends (fourth place) and saving more money (fifth).  Good to know we have our priorities straight.    
 
Yes, for those of us with eating disorders new year’s resolutions are like an annual celebration of our secret torture; when the demons we usually suffer with in silence get trotted out in public disguised as inspiration.  These resolutions are the ultimate lines in the sand separating our ideas of what’s good and bad, what’s beautiful and ugly, who has the most value and who has none.  We draw those lines for ourselves every day, and then we keep moving them.  Our sand becomes quicksand.  Like any addict, no low is too low and no high quite high enough.  I’m going to stop eating after one more pop tart.  My leg is starting to hurt but I know I can squeeze one more mile out of this run.  We already expend so much of our energy criticizing ourselves and judging our bodies that every day feels like its own set of resolutions, when what we really want is to be free of them.  What I really want is to go meet a friend for dinner without worrying the whole way there about what I’m going to order.  What I really want is to be able to look at myself in the mirror – no, not even – I want to just be able to walk past my reflection in a store window without stopping to consider if I look too fat.  In a bulky coat.  In the dead of winter.   
 
In my mid-40s, after finally getting more honest in therapy, I was diagnosed with Binge Eating Disorder (BED) with bulimic tendencies.  BED is defined as recurrent binge eating episodes characterized by a loss of control and marked distress, but usually without a subsequent purging phase.  That’s where my bulimic-tendency qualifier comes in.  While my binging dates back to childhood and I never purged by vomiting my food, as an adult I started practicing the abusive arts of other purging activities: an overuse of laxatives and enemas, obsessively tracking and hyper-restricting my caloric intake, and taxing my body with punishing periods of over-exercise; all to be followed by still more binges.  This endless rat wheel (hamster wheel feels far too gentle) has caused my weight to fluctuate by as much as 40 pounds in either direction, which is a lot by any standard let alone for someone like me whose height falls just short of 5 foot 5.    
 
According to the National Eating Disorders Association, 9% of the U.S. population (close to 29 million Americans) will suffer from an eating disorder at some point in their lives.  Studies demonstrate how those with such disorders are at amplified risk of virtually every health condition imaginable, both physical and mental.  These ultimately include mortality, not only by illness but by suicide.  And while research remains limited, several studies show that members of the LGBTQ+ community are even more likely than the general population to suffer from eating disorders.  The Duke Center for Eating Disorders acknowledges the need for more research particularly for those members of the community who identify as transgender or nonbinary, citing a recent study which demonstrated that an extremely high proportion of such individuals answered questions in a way that revealed patterns of disordered eating.  For clarity, disordered eating is a behavior while an eating disorder is a medical diagnosis.  And while a behavior does not necessarily lead to a diagnosis, it is an indicator of greater risk.       
 
Duke points to the prevalence of gender dysphoria among the transgender and nonbinary population.  Gender dysphoria, for which I also received a later-in-life diagnosis, impacts transgender and nonbinary individuals (I identify as the latter) who suffer significant distress due to an incongruence between their assigned sex and their gender identity.  The connection between gender dysphoria and eating disorders is that both often involve an unhealthy relationship with our bodies and a resulting obsession with our appearance, including our weight.  If my alcohol issues kicked in at 14, shortly after puberty had left me confused (or perhaps clear) about my sexuality; I can trace my body issues back much earlier when I first became aware on some level that I was at least confused about my gender.  From a very young age and for so much of my life, I have felt allergic to my own skin.    
 
I had been a skinny kid until around the third grade, but I can remember already indulging in food binges.  There were two large drawers in the cabinetry of our kitchen, both of which for some reason were called “breadboxes” even though you would only find bread in the first one.  The second was where my parents stashed “the sweets”; boxes of whatever store-bought pastries and desserts had been picked up during the week’s food shopping.  I could always tell which of them had been to the store based on what I found there.  My mom would pick up the more expensive brands like Hostess (cupcakes and twinkies), Drake’s (yodels and ring dings), and Entenmann’s (donuts and cookies).  My dad was more economical and so I knew it was him if I opened the drawer to find Tastykake or Little Debbie products (which had cheaper versions of all of those).  While my preference was for the former, I didn’t discriminate against the latter.  We didn’t have a cookie jar, but I was often caught with my finger in that breadbox.  I was too embarrassed to bring them out of the kitchen and eat them in plain sight, and so I would instead stand directly over the breadbox and shove as many in my mouth as I could until I heard someone coming.            
 
Clothes shopping as a child was both a fascination and a nightmare.  From my youngest memories of it I would linger in the girls’ section where my sisters were shopping, letting my hands brush the soft fabrics of dresses and skirts with longing and envy while hoping nobody noticed.  But inevitably my mom would march us to the boys’ department when it was my turn.  And once I had started gaining weight in the third grade, it only got worse.  I can remember bursting into tears more than once when a saleswoman would respectfully approach my mother and politely direct us to the “huskies” section.  Yes, that’s what larger sizes for boys were called (and to my horror what they are still called to this day by several major retail chains).  Without understanding it, I was already upset and confused that I had to be in the boys’ department at all.  But to be a husky boy?  Just how much was I expected to take?  And my mom would pile on the shame by harshly telling me it was my own fault and too late to cry about it now.  She suggested I would be better off crying at home instead of eating, and that then maybe next year I could shop in the “regular” section.  

In fairness to my mom, I of course understand now that she was trying to help me with what she thought was tough love.  But I don’t think a child’s emotional intelligence is developed enough to comprehend the two simultaneous and conflicting motivations that are wrapped up in tough love; I know mine could compute only one.  When it came to my body, she may have been sending tough love, but I was receiving all of the tough and none of the love.  “Husky” became part of her vocabulary for fat-shaming me whenever she thought I was eating too much: “I guess you want to be back in the huskies section next year too, so don’t cry about it then.”  It’s hard enough being called fat at school or in a store; it hurts more when it happens in your own home.  When I felt fat, it wasn’t just that I didn’t want to leave the house.  I didn’t want to leave my room.  My family would get upset if I didn’t come downstairs when we had company, but I felt paralyzed even if the guests were close relatives.  I just didn’t feel like I deserved to be seen at all.           
 
From 4^th grade on, gym class was a nightmare of bullying.  Tough love being a theme in my household, I remember almost being happy the few times my father took the toughness with his belt too far.  Awful as that was, I knew my mom would at least have to write a note excusing me from gym class as Catholic school gym uniforms in the late 1970s and early 1980s included absurdly revealing shorts that would have showcased the welts as much as my flab.  Not that my parents needed to worry about being reported to child services, as would be required of any school today.  The nun who was our principal was more likely to have called my parents and congratulated them for their commitment to discipline.  No, it was more about keeping family business in the family, which became a new rat wheel of shame that isolated me even further.  I couldn’t talk to anyone at school about what was happening at home, and I couldn’t talk at home about what was happening at school.  If I said I was bulled for being fat, I already knew I’d just be told that I was and to lose weight.  And if I said I was bullied for being gay?  Something I didn’t even really yet understand other than that it couldn’t be anything good?  I could never, and back then I don’t know if anybody did.  After all, what if someone asked if it were true? 
 
Things would get even worse in high school.  By then I guess I had gotten a little too old for my dad’s belt, and so it was up to me to fake whatever illnesses I could think of to get out of gym or just miss school completely.  I would carefully calculate the number of classes I could miss without failing.  Bullying is not the right word for some of the experiences I endured in that school and especially in the gym locker room.  The most extreme of those would now be classified as assaults, as gay bashings, as hate crimes.  But this was the 1980s and just as nonbinary had not yet worked its way into the mainstream consciousness and conversation, nor had the concept that violence against gay students could be anything more than ‘kids will be kids’ bullying.  I walked through the halls a rigid collection of exposed nerves, my body in a constant state of tension to better absorb whatever blows might be coming from the front, the side, or the back (or more rarely but even worse, the coordinated attacks that involved all three and for which I at least had to give them credit for their planning).  The knots in my stomach, the tightness in my shoulders, and worst of all that awful feeling you get lodged in your forehead when you are refusing to let yourself cry.  That hollow burning behind the eyes was the worst feeling of all, because what that devolved into was the absence of any feeling at all.   

I learned to completely disassociate my body from my feelings just to survive.  Alcohol and closeted sex, which I discovered in sophomore and junior years respectively, ultimately only abused my body further and left me more confused about it.  But, like the rush I got from my food binges, at least they provided some new anesthesia to soothe the constant pain of surgically separating my physical and emotional selves.  I started staying up late at night and getting by on less and less sleep.  I told myself I was just being a night owl who enjoyed the peace after the rest of my family had gone to bed and when I finally had some quiet hours to myself.  While there may have been some truth to that, even more true was that I spent those hours in a constant state of anxiety over what was waiting for me when the morning alarm went off.  Sleep deprivation creates an odd high of its own; there is the sensation of being exhausted and wired at the same time.  It became something else I learned to weaponize against my body, and it’s an issue I still struggle with today.            
 
When I think back to those years, I genuinely harbor no ill will toward any of the other kids at school or in the neighborhood.  I understand as an adult that abusive kids are often also abused kids.  I am less kind in my assessment of the school administrators and teachers who let it all happen by looking the other way, or sometimes even smirking to give a subtle stamp of approval.  One history teacher would periodically collect our notebooks to read over our assignments and then return them with his comments.  He was one of those teachers who would always hang out with the popular kids.  I can’t remember if he actually coached any teams or not, but there were always assorted jocks and cheerleaders hanging around his office during their free periods and after school.  I got back my notebook one day but the comment that struck me wasn’t one he had written inside about my work, but rather one I found scrawled across the back cover.  The writing had been lightly crossed out, but it was still very easy to make out my name followed by the words “is a fat fag.”  Clearly one of the kids hanging around his office had written it, and of course I was accustomed to being called that and worse to my face.  I remember what hurt more was the way the teacher had so lightly crossed it out; a fake gesture to spare my feelings that was in fact a genuine effort to hurt them.  He could have easily blacked the comment out entirely with a dark ink marker.  He could have just ripped the back cover off completely and told me he spilled coffee on it.  But he wanted me to see it.  And all these years later, I can still see it.  And I can also remember being uncertain about which of those “f” words inflicted more pain and shame.  Was it worse to be a fag or to be fat, I wondered.  I could only conclude that worst of all was to be both.      
 
If I was already experiencing confusion about my gender and my body, by now I had started the process of dividing up the rest of my identity in the way many teenagers did (and most certainly still do) regardless of their orientations and backgrounds.  I’m not saying that as teens we have split personalities, exactly; more that we learn to bifurcate the full personality we each should be developing into different divisions of possibility and impossibility.  For me some of those buckets were: I can be smart, but I can’t be strong.  I can be creative, but I can’t be attractive.  I can be a good student, but I can’t be an athlete.  And even this one: I can be an alcoholic, just not a popular one.  We learn to limit ourselves at the very time in our lives when we should be feeling our most limitless.       
 
While my younger self – the husky – had only binged, by college I had already started adding some cyclical purging behavior.  At first these would mostly consist of crash dieting: Nutri-System.  Weight Watchers.  I tried them all and would start each one obsessively; dropping a lot of weight quickly only to gain it all back (and often more) just as quickly.  My drinking also worsened, and that often added a bloated appearance to whatever my actual weight was.  After college, and living on my own, I discovered more purging activities.  Laxatives and enemas became usual items on my shopping list.  I even shifted the foods I binged on to cookies and ice-cream with sugar substitutes like sorbitol and mannitol, once I discovered that these often carried warnings in their ingredient list that excess consumption may have a laxative effect.  They may not have tasted as good but, just like I had done as a kid at the kitchen breadbox, I was still shoving it all down my throat so quickly that the taste often didn’t register much anyway.  To find foods I could binge that were effectively also laxatives?  That felt like a win-win.  I discovered an even more dangerous win-win when a freak accident resulted in a first painkiller prescription.  About ten or fifteen minutes after taking the first pill, that familiar anesthetic feeling came over me.  It was as though I had discovered vodka without calories.                  
 
I soon added compulsive exercise to my behaviors and started spending most of my vacation and entertainment budgets on personal trainers.  I remember and have genuine respect for all of them, many of whom whipped me into incredible shape.  It’s not their fault that much of what I was using them for was as a buffer between myself and the gym because, aside from the cardio machines (I was always good at running), I still had an almost pathological fear of navigating the gym floor on my own.  I was still disassociating myself from my body; lifting whatever weights and doing as many reps as the trainers told me to without ever being fully mentally present and paying attention so that I could learn how to do any of it on my own.  They became the bodyguards I wished I had back in high school. 
 
The ironic thing is that sometimes the more muscular my body became, the more disconnected from it I felt.  My then-undiagnosed gender dysphoria had decided that a feminine aesthetic was thinner and more streamlined, and so I thought I looked my best when I was binging on the painkillers (or as I called them, appetite-killers) and hovering around what I know now was an unhealthily low weight.  When my body would get more muscular, I liked the attention it got me from other men and yet it felt out of place for myself.  Dating was also confusing.  Personal ads that included qualifiers like masc for masc only or no fats or femmes please felt unbearably cruel and yet perhaps no more so than I was being to myself.  By then I knew how to get myself out of being one of the fats, at least for periods of time, but the femmes (another vile “f” word)?  Giving up my place in their ranks wouldn’t be so easy, and I had tried.  I had tried to walk with a broader gate, to talk in a deeper voice.  None of it had ever worked and only further poisoned my relationship with my body as I became self-conscious about literally every move I made and every word I uttered.  I remember once dating someone for several months who always seemed to be running hot and cold with how interested he was in me, and so I finally asked him about it.  I couldn’t blame him for his answer necessarily, because in a way it captured all of my own internal confusion.  But his delivery and choice of words were hurtful nonetheless: “Look, I’m really into your body,” he said, “but then you open your mouth, and it’s like a purse falls out”.  Yes, this was someone I was dating.  I’ve learned that having a low opinion of yourself is a surefire way to attract others who’ll be more than happy to agree with you. 
 
Prostate cancer would feel like another betrayal by my body, but it ended up being a breakthrough.  The decisions that had to be made about my male body were the final catalyst for a painful but honest self-examination of my gender identity issues.  I did this first with my therapist, who then referred me to another who specialized in gender identity.  I slowly started unwinding years of tangled confusion, which I learned was part of gender dysphoria.  Was I transgender?  The therapist explained it as a spectrum with cisgender on one end and transgender on the other.  After several sessions we decided that I was pretty far along on the spectrum in the direction of transgender but perhaps not quite all the way there, and so we landed on nonbinary.  But he stressed that ultimately it was something only I could decide, and something I had the right to change my mind about.  As I was starting to feel some first glimpses of understanding in one area, my body obsession went into overdrive again.  The surgeon had entered through my abdominal area to remove my prostate, and it left a visible scar.  This surgery successfully rid my body of cancer, and I was upset because a scar was interfering with my attempt at a six-pack.  How vain, how small, how ungrateful could I be?  Or how sick.  All of that looped back to the dysphoria.  If I let my body hair grow longer, it covered the scar.  But then I felt more ‘masculine’.  If I shaved or closely trimmed the hair, I felt more comfortably ‘feminine’ but then the scar was visible again.  I had found yet another rat wheel.  Meanwhile I had gotten completely sober and kicked the painkillers, but my cycles of binging and purging food got worse again.  The old rat wheels were still there too.  

 

Last year, I finally checked myself into a treatment facility that had both an eating disorder specialist and a gender specialist in addition to other therapists for trauma and mood disorders.  I was so excited to be finally addressing all those different but painfully intertwined issues in an immersive and supportive environment.  Unfortunately, problems with my insurance company cut my stay disappointingly short, but I have been able to continue the work with my therapist and doctor back home.  I in fact had only one session with the rehab’s eating disorder specialist, but it was a meaningful one.  She started by dissecting and deconstructing the various tools those of us with eating disorders use to measure our self-worth and beat ourselves down:  Scales?  They are not calibrated the same (especially those that purport to generate an entire health profile because you step on it), and neither are cardio machines that spit out estimates of alleged calories burned.  Clothes?  The same size in clothing means something very different from brand to brand.  Calorie-tracking apps?  Even experts struggle to estimate calories with any accuracy, as studies asking licensed nutritionists to identify the caloric values of identical meals have yielded wildly varying responses.  It was all tough to argue, and the therapist seemed pleased when I offered that I had already stopped keeping a scale in my home.  But she shook her head when I followed that up by sharing that I had instead started taking numerous before and after photos of my body on my phone, which had invited even more constant comparisons and self-loathing than any numbers on a scale.  “Your mind made a healthy decision to get rid of the scale,” she said, “…but then your disease found another way.” 
 
I tried explaining all the ideas in my head about my weight, when my body was too fat or too thin, when it was too masculine or too feminine.  She quietly took it all in and just replied, "Wow.  That's a lot".  She then leaned in asked me a simple question: “What if your body was just your body?”  My initial thought was that in fact it was simple to the point of meaning nothing, and just as I was about to open my mouth and say so I felt a lightbulb turn on.  Far from simple, it was deeply profound.  What if my body is just the vehicle that is carrying the real me through the world?  What if all the energy I have put into my body all my life has just been distracting me from learning to love myself?  Not my body, but myself.     
 
This month I did start a new fitness program, but it was not a resolution.  Typical of someone who is body obsessed, I have followed many online fitness accounts on social media.  One always seemed to really go out of its way to discuss fitness more holistically instead of posting the usual photo barrage of hot trainers in speedos.  Part of their daily accountability process, in addition to workouts and food logs, is a gratitude list.  There are weekly weigh-ins and progress photos, which I discussed with my therapist in advance and which we agreed to try with certain parameters.  The new scale stays in the closet except for those 5 minutes once a week.  Instead of agonizing over photos, I take a quick video as I turn around in a circle, snap a few screenshots, and upload them to the platform before deleting everything from my phone.  Is my disease setting another trap?  Time will tell, but the advantages so far are that I have the benefit of guidance but not the buffer of a trainer.  There are demos of the exercises, but I am responsible for following them, executing the proper form, feeling out the appropriate weight per set, figuring out how to adjust the machines for my height, etc.  I am being mindful and staying present in my body rather than detaching from it.  I am navigating the gym floor for the first time without a bodyguard, and I am finally owning the part of myself that is – and always was – an athlete. 
 
My body is not wrong because it is too masculine or too feminine, or too fat or too thin.  My body is not wrong at all.  It’s also not right.  My body is just my body.  Even if I were to change my mind and decide that a gender transition is the right choice for me, it wouldn’t be because my body is wrong.  It would just be another journey my vehicle will take me through to arrive at a destination closer to my truer self.  And with all respect to the body positivity fans out there, for me I don’t have to love my body.  But I don’t have to hate it either.  I don’t have to think my body is beautiful, but I don’t get to call it ugly.  Basically, I don’t need to attach any qualitative descriptors or emotional values to it at all.  Because my body is just my body.  I need to respect and maintain it only because it transports all the parts of me that really are beautiful and allows me to share them with the rest of the world; the parts of me that are kind and loving and smart and, yes, strong.  That’s a big responsibility.  It’s true my body also carries some parts of me that are pretty ugly; the parts of me that can be fearful and negative and sometimes as judgmental of others as I have been of myself.  But that’s an important responsibility too.  I need those parts to stay safe so that I can keep improving them.  The better I maintain my body, the more time it will give me to work on those ugly parts and hopefully smooth them into the beautiful parts. 
 
My body is just my body.  Repeating that mantra, and believing it, is my higher resolution for 2023.  Nothing less and nothing more.  But if you’ve been punishing yourself with some other new year’s resolutions, the silver lining may be that you’re statistically likely to abandon them by early February and so the end is almost here.  Just don’t look at that as a failure; embrace it instead as the freedom from failure.  And then look into the deepest, most beautiful part of yourself – the part you won’t find reflected in a mirror or in a store’s glass window – and ask that part of you what will bring you joy.  Not results or outcomes, just joy.  Whatever answer comes back, that’s what you should dedicate more time to, not as a resolution or as some line in the sand but simply as a gift to your own soul.  That’s why I started writing again; that was the answer that came back for me.      
 
Since I shared about some of the misguided tough love I received from my parents as a child, I’ll end by sharing something they did that was just love.  They had a beautiful tradition on Three Kings Day, which for many Catholic households marks the close of the Christmas season every January 6^th.  Santa Claus would take away our tree and all the decorations overnight but, in their place, he left behind one final gift each for me and my siblings.  It always eased the sadness of Christmas ending and all that glitter fading.  Maybe that’s a way we can reframe the dreaded new year’s resolution.  Instead of drawing a line in the sand and catapulting ourselves out of the holidays and into some self-imposed punishment, what if we just gave ourselves one last gift?  One more wish?  Something that soothed our souls and eased us out of the holidays and into long-lasting joy.        
 
And if you are (or think you might be) someone struggling with an eating disorder or gender dysphoria, or for that matter any other physical or mental health challenge, give yourself a second gift and seek professional help.  Friends and family can be important sources of support, but they are out of their depth here and good intentions (like tough love) don’t always translate to good advice.  These are medical issues that require medical intervention.  If you don’t currently have a doctor or therapist, The National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) has a terrific website (nationaleatingdisorders.org) and helpline (1-800-931-2237) to start exploring resources and referrals.  Overeaters Anonymous has meetings that embrace not only overeating but the full spectrum of compulsive food behaviors (meetings can be searched online by zip code at oa.org).  If your city has an LGBTQ+ community center, most provide free or low-cost counseling either on site or through referrals.  If you don’t have one nearby, the LGBT National Help Center has a website (lgbthotline.org) and hotline (1-888-843-4564) to assist anyone of any age who has questions about sexual orientation or gender identity.  For anyone with general mental health questions or concerns, try The National Mental Health Hotline’s website (mentalhealthhotline.org) or their call center (1-866-903-3787).  I know that it can all be overwhelming, but we don’t have to suffer alone.  As someone who is learning to face these challenges relatively late in life, if nothing else I hope I am an example that it’s never too late to choose love over fear.      
 
No body is ever wrong, but sometimes everybody needs help.