Dear Body….

Katie Draisey - 2 Mar 18

Dear Body,

I don’t know how to start this, so I guess a good place is “I’m sorry”. I’m sorry I hated you for so long. I’m sorry I compared you to others, both real and fake. I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry I abused you and punched you repeatedly when I got angry or upset or just felt that hate for you.

I never thought of myself as someone who self-harmed. In my head, the term “self-harm” was saved for those who REALLY cut themselves, the sort of cuts that were deep enough to leave a scar. In my head, if there was no lasting proof, it wasn’t self-harm. But now I realise it was.

I punched you in the stomach and thighs until you bruised. Not as a one off, but regularly.  I wish I could say it was always in moments of anger. But sometimes I was perfectly calm and it was pure hatred for you. I remember it making me feel better. Like you deserved it somehow.

I remember the shop I worked in as a teenager. They sold Swiss Army Knives. You can see where this is going can’t you? “I would never cut myself”, I hear myself say. But I did. I just remember wanting to know what the blade felt like against my skin. The cold metal, wondering how hard I needed to press to firstly mark my skin, and then break the skin. I remember being careful to keep to scratches and not full cuts, in the hope that no one would notice. Not that they would as I would always wear a hoody to cover my arms.

I still can’t believe I actually did that. Why did I do that to you? Did I really have that little respect for you that I thought it was OK to actively hurt you? Did I really hate you that much?

And before all of that came the anorexia. Me, the girl who loves food, starving herself in order to control and punish you, my body. But you’d done nothing wrong.

I know there are people who have anorexia worse. And I guess for that reason I still feel I can’t truly claim the diagnosis, despite the fact that that’s what it was. But there are people who literally don’t eat. I still ate, even if it wasn’t much. I made you eat the tiniest breakfasts and lunches, the bare minimum in the hope that no one would question it. Meticulously measuring out portions to ensure I didn’t go a calorie over what I was allowing myself. The same applied to dinner, if I ate it.

My fear of vomiting protected me from bulimia, and for some reason I thought this meant I was OK. As though starving myself was somehow preferable to vomiting.

What I did eat I ate SO slowly. I made sure to eat slowly because I once read somewhere that the slower you eat, the sooner you feel full, so this seemed a perfect way to eat as little as possible. FYI, this is NOT advice on how to be anorexic. Please don’t follow it. I made the mistake of telling my Mum this fact, and to this day she’s the slowest eater I know. The result? A lot of frustrated family around the dinner table and guilt from me. Don’t do it.

There was the odd occasion where I would binge eat and absolutely hate myself after. My punishment was to get up even earlier the next morning to do even more exercise than I usually did, and to eat even less the next day. My poor body. I actually punished you for eating. I’m so sorry.

I knew the calorie content of pretty much every food. I kept track of it so I wouldn’t go over my limit of 800 calories per day. In the early days, when I considered myself to just be ‘on a diet’ I allowed myself 1000 calories. But then I realised I could do better. So 800 calories it was. If I came in under 800 calories, even better; 500-600 calories was a real win. If it was more than 800, then that alarm was set for even earlier the next morning so I could burn those extra calories.

The craziest part? I actually counted my daily Diet Coke in my calorie count. All 0.4 calories of it. And I controlled how quickly I was allowed to drink it.. It had to take me a full 40 minutes to drink or I was convinced I’d gain weight somehow. I froze my fat free yoghurts so that they would take longer to eat. How fucked up is that?

I remember looking at you, my poor innocent body, and thinking how you still weren’t as skinny as you could be. I thought I couldn’t possibly be anorexic, because anorexics have, like, 22″ waists and mine was 26″ at best. I felt I was clearly too fat to be classed as an anorexic. I felt like to claim that label made me a fraud.

So the pattern continued. I ate the bare minimum while obsessively measuring my food and counting calories. Fat in my diet was simply not allowed except for the occasional binge. I woke up by 6am every morning (earlier if I needed to punish myself for a binge) to do all the exercise I felt I needed to do to make up for the eating the day before, including hundreds and hundreds of sit ups and crunches. No wonder the midwife commented on my strong abdominal muscles when I was pregnant! Yet I still remember laughing when she said that because I still considered my belly to be fat underneath that perfect bump.

The weird thing is the awareness I had of myself when I was starving myself. I knew I was eating significantly less than everyone else. I knew that everyone else seemed to be eating the food they loved and enjoying it and not getting fat. But I truly believed that if I ate like that I would be fat. I remember lying in the bath, starting at my body, genuinely thinking I was the same size, if not bigger, than my friends. They probably weighed 8-8.5 stone. I weighed less than 6 stone (at my lightest I was 5st 10lbs).

I’m so sorry body. I don’t know how many more times I can say it. I wish I could have seen that you were simply a teenage body, developing into that of a young woman. But I couldn’t see that, and for that I hurt you and I still bear some of the results today.

I wish I could say that my punishing you ended there, but I’ve already mentioned the punching and cutting. Even as an adult, who is even more aware of her issues, the cracked, bleeding hands I suffer from the OCD can at times feel like something I deserve. My hands are bleeding and hurt like hell with everything I do, but on some level I feel like I deserve to be in pain and almost take comfort in it.

Dear Body, you deserve better than that treatment. You give me everything I need. I have two legs and two feet that allow me to walk, run and keep up with my boys. I have two arms and two hands that allow me to hug them, cook for them, care for them (and me). Everything seems to work how it should. Not only did you grow my babies and keep them safe inside you, you also kept them alive by feeding them after they were born.

You allow me to talk, read, write, draw, and think. To sing, dance, run, jump, sleep. To hug, laugh, smile, cry and SO much more. You allow me to do everything, to feel everything. You don’t deserve to be punished. You deserve to be celebrated for the wonder that you are. We may have some tough times ahead, as we have in the past, but I have no doubt that you will fight whatever comes your way because you are strong. You are powerful. And for that I thank you. Without you I couldn’t exist.

It’s taken nearly 34 years to get here, but I can honestly say I love you body. You are more than good enough. You’re perfectly imperfect. I may still have my bad days where I look at you and judge you, but I promise I’m working hard to stop doing that. It just takes time to rewire my brain against the expectations I’ve grown up with. I will get there. Because you and I need to work together to make this life amazing. So let’s do this. After all, if I can’t love and respect you, how can I expect anyone else to?

xx

Katie Draisey

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