Bulimia is SO '87...

Or, in my case, '95. In any event, it's Father's Day, 2010...a perfect summer evening, low 70s with a light breeze, and I'm sitting on the porch with my coffee after a busy, awesome weekend with my family. Kickass, right?


You'd think that after a certain number of years...decades...you'd start to accept who you are, what you look like, and focus on the stuff that really matters (for example, everything I just mentioned, above). HOWEVER...some of us have some nasty old habits that simply don't wanna go away. And here's the regrettable situation in which I currently find myself: JEALOUS of the 25-year-old version of myself that was adept at starvation and an expert in "purging."


You read that correctly. I didn't type that by mistake. Seriously fucked up, innit?


And yet, there's this little piece of me - no, that's a lie...it's a bigger piece than I even want to admit to myself - that genuinely thinks, "wouldn't it be nice if I could have that kind of will power again, and be THAT skinny again?"


Really. I hate admitting it, but I'm going to. And I'm going to do it here, because then I have to own up to how genuinely fucked up it is that I think this way.


Now, anyone with a half an ounce of sanity knows that "will power" is really not the phrase for this. It's really not will power that propels a person to avoid family functions for fear of food (check out my alliterative skills, btw)...or, if forced to join in the fun, to eat the most tasteless and boring items available when surrounded by delicious stuff. It's not "strength" that drives a person to secretly barf 8 times a day in order to negate the fact that food was consumed. So I'm well aware that my old habits are nothing to admire or look back upon wistfully. If I'm being honest, those were some shit times.


Nonetheless, the price you pay for stopping that level of insanity is a normal body. And today is one of those days - I hate to admit there are many these days - when that simply won't do. If I'm not skinny anymore, and if my cheeks aren't sunken, then I'm an average size. Somewhere along the way, this became unacceptable.


But WHY????


I see people all around me, every single day, who are just beautiful. Some of them are smaller than I am, some of them are bigger. Some of them are pretty much just like me. I judge none of them the way I judge myself. I don't view them with the hatred and loathing I apply to myself. I don't think they're disgusting, I don't think they should stop eating for 6 months, I don't calculate the number of pounds they should immediately drop in order to be "acceptable."


No, I save ALL that good shit for myself. Every day. All day. 


Dudes, here's one thing I DO want to quit. I don't know when it'll happen, or if it will. Maybe it's a lofty enough goal to try to decrease the amount of time I spend thinking these thoughts about myself. I've never NOT done it, and now that I'm getting a little older and my body is changing in the normal ways that bodies do over time, these thoughts are getting louder again. Shit. Not cool. This is one thing I will be happy to quit, if only I can.