So Sad Today

by Melissa Broder

  I lasted a year at Electric Yoni. After that I got an internship at a hipster magazine in San Francisco, but any sense of workplace boundaries I may have possessed had been decimated. Two weeks into the internship I was let go for hugging the publisher, instead of shaking hands, in front of a primary advertiser. The publisher never explicitly told me what I had done wrong, but as soon as I came out of the embrace I knew it was bad. I judged myself for it.

  Shortly thereafter I returned to the East Coast, where I continued to fuck around for the next year and a half, before getting sober. I blacked out in stairwells and taxis, tried to have sex with gay men, woke up with strangers and mysterious blood on the wall—just as I had done in San Francisco. I was still melting down. But New York—unlike San Francisco—had a stable ground on which to hit bottom.

  I Want to Be a Whole Person but Really Thin

  I AM AN EATER OF numbers. I prefer packaged foods, foods with a bar code, because they make the math simpler in counting calories and that gives me a sense of peace. It’s just an illusion of control, really, but that illusion is everything. It makes me feel safe. It gives me a stillness in my mind. All I’ve ever wanted is peace.

  I am a vanity eater, a machinelike eater, a suppresser-of-feels eater. I save the bulk of my calories for the end of the day so that I have something sweet and seemingly unlimited to look forward to. I do not trust the universe to provide enough of anything to fill my apparently bottomless hunger. That’s the case with my consumption of a whole pint of diet ice cream with six packets of Equal poured into it every single night. It’s a way of offering myself something cloyingly saccharine and seemingly infinite. I don’t believe that the world, or god, will give me that sweetness. So I am giving it to myself. I am going to bed full of sweetness that the day may not have provided. And I am defeating the laws of nature by doing this with diet ice cream. Most nights I would rather curl up with the diet ice cream than be in the world.

  I am an eater who enjoys structured magic. I don’t feel courageous enough to let myself eat whatever I want, because I don’t want to face the wrath of what my mind will do to me after. I have a vested interest in keeping things under control, because when I lose my illusions of control I get very scared. The world is scary enough as it is. Just let me have this way of life. Let me continue to live under these self-imposed systems of diet ice cream, where I can have some of what I enjoy about binge eating—just without my mind destroying me after.

  I am an eater who doesn’t trust herself. I am a bad mommy to myself and a poor steward of my body. I am an eater of rituals and a ritualistic eater, an eater who knows better but sees no impetus to get better because this kind of works and I feel more secure in my body at this weight.

  I am an eater who is playing a game that mostly exists in my head but has also been curated by various social cues, including those from my mother.

  I am an eater who was born two weeks late, in a higher weight range than my height range. My mother was terrified that I was going to be fat (her parents were both obese, though she herself is of “normal” weight). She restricted and controlled all morsels that I put in my mouth when in her presence. She threatened to ask teachers and camp counselors what I was eating. She asked, Do you want to be a chubbette or do you want boys to like you?

  I am an eater who was not allowed cake at birthday parties. I attended Hebrew school, but the religion of the household was food. My father aided in the sneaking of food. He took me to the park as a toddler and snuck me my first giant cookie. A Canadian goose stole it out of my hand. He took my sister and me on trips without my mother and packed the backseat of the car full of junk food. My grandmom Eve took us for weekends and fed us the whole time: mini bagels, pigs in a blanket, candy cigarettes, licorice pipes. I stole food from other kids’ lunches, then tried to trade them their own food for more food.

  I am an eater who binge ate regularly as a child. One favorite was a bagel with mayonnaise or cream cheese and then cheese melted on top. I stole change from my mother’s “library fund” (she was an inner-city school librarian) and used it to order pizzas and sandwiches. I bought candy at the gas station near school: Milky Way, 3 Musketeers, Twizzlers, Heath bars. I hoarded the wrappers, then tried to flush them down the toilet. They clogged the toilet and I was discovered.

  I am an eater who went away for the summer to a coed camp (up until this point I attended an all-girls school and a camp where boys were across the lake). It was easier to diet when there were boys around. The payoff was right there. So I restricted my food intake. I grew three inches. I got a tan. I was fourteen. A sixteen-year-old with vodka on his breath said I was beautiful. We Frenched and he touched my tits. He was my boyfriend. At night he fucked a counselor. A lot of boys got crushes on me. I dated five of them in a row. My parents came for visiting day and my mother freaked out with joy at how thin I was. I got my period. I got my boobs. Boys continued to like me. They came and went. I alternated between restricting and bingeing heavily on food.

  I am an eater who got into a car accident with my father’s car because I was pouring artificial sweetener into a container of cottage cheese and ran a red light. The air bags exploded and I broke my arm. I was sixteen and began heavily restricting my food intake. I went on a fat-free-muffin diet: one muffin in the morning, one muffin in the afternoon, chicken for dinner. I got the boyfriend of my dreams.

  Over time, I became severely anorexic. The muffins turned into apples. I was five foot five and weighed 101 pounds. I stopped getting my period. I froze. I grew fur. My father felt he couldn’t say anything. My teachers were concerned. My mother thought I was fine until I told her I stopped getting my period. This scared her (she wanted grandchildren someday). She sent me to a nutritionist and a therapist. It didn’t really work. I only ate packaged foods so that I knew the caloric content. I began adding calories and slowly recovered physically.

  I am an eater who went to college very underweight. I discovered weed and booze. I began bingeing and couldn’t stop. All the foods I hadn’t eaten throughout my anorexia were suddenly mine again: pancakes, pizza, Taco Bell, chocolates, gummy candies, General Tso’s chicken, cookies, ice cream with cereal on top, nachos. I gained fifty pounds.

  I am an eater who began taking amphetamines daily. Ecstasy, too. I ran and worked out a lot on ecstasy. I got into laxatives—the chocolate ones. My weight “regulated.” I moved to San Francisco, where I dieted during the week and took laxatives every day and binged on weekends. I couldn’t make myself throw up. I once tried ipecac syrup and puked martinis and Indian food all night. That night was a boyfriend’s going-away party. I didn’t show up or text.

  I am an eater who somehow became a normal eater from ages twenty-five to twenty-nine. I still thought about food and worried about weight a lot. A retired baseball player doesn’t stop thinking about the game. But it was the healthiest I had ever been. I think what made my eating more “normal” at this time was that I had just gotten clean and sober. I was no longer drunkenly bingeing on food. The munchies were gone. I was no longer using amphetamines to starve. The calories I’d ingested from alcohol in the past were now freed up for actual food.

  I also remember, having been fucked up every day for years, that the world seemed like such a novelty to me during my first few years sober. Like, I remember going through each of the seasons and the magic of rediscovering what it felt like to be in the world: going to a pumpkin patch on Halloween, getting a tree for Christmas. I felt excited by reality in a way that I never had before. I actually wanted to be alive. I wanted to sample what the world had to offer, and this included food.

  I am an eater who refuses to be the kind of woman who “lets herself go.” I got married at twenty-nine and noticed that I was gaining some weight. I panicked that I would soon become amorphous, lose my independence, sexual appeal, and maidenhood—like the weight that was accumulating on my belly and thighs was a symbol of the blurring of my identity. Where did I begin and end? Rather than asking m
yself these questions, I went on Weight Watchers.

  Weight Watchers points is a beautiful system for someone who is absentminded about food. They aren’t the greatest for someone who has had eating disorders all her life. The world became numbers to me and I was doing more math than I ever had before. I got off Weight Watchers and went back to just counting calories. The world became different kinds of numbers, the old, familiar kind. This is how I eat now. The world is still numbers, but it is algebra, not calculus.

  I am an eater who is a horrible feminist, probably. I dream of what I would eat if I identified as a man and it looks vastly different from what I eat as a woman. There would be so much pizza. The Mountain Dew would runneth over and it wouldn’t even be diet. If I do not believe that I as a woman deserve pizza, what does that say of my views of other women? If I do not love my body, how can I love the body of any other woman? I could say “I love my body” so that I appear to be a good feminist. But that only means pretending to love something I hate.

  But I am an eater who is a good feminist, maybe, because I am being honest with you now. I am telling you the truth: that I have not yet dismantled the many warped schemas that define the way I see my body and the bodies of other women. I am giving you permission to tell the truth about where you are in your process of dismantling your fucked-up schemas. I am not pressuring you to dismantle anything. I am saying let’s be here together, undismantled, and just accept that this is where we are. Let’s love each other right where we are, even as we compare ourselves to one another. I am saying, yes, baby, I know it’s hard.

  But I am an eater who is a hypocritical feminist. I lust the body I do not allow myself. I lust the zaftig female body. The women I am most sexually attracted to are considered obese by today’s (and yesterday’s) standards. I don’t watch a lot of porn, but a typical search term for me is “fat lesbians.” What a beautiful fantasy: to be accepted and embraced and adored as your biggest self, the most you, by a woman who is her fullest her. To gorge together, uncontrollably, with no need for limits—and then to devour one another—to lick and hump and rest in the acceptance of each other in your grandest isness. That, to me, is freedom. The ultimate letting go. It’s sexy as fuck. It really turns me on. I want to let go all the way, but it’s a freedom I cannot allow myself in my daily life. Is this feminism or is it just desire and objectification?

  But I am an eater who is the worst feminist, probably, because I objectify other women. I compare my body to the bodies of other women. Occasionally, I win. What does it mean to win? It means that my body fits more closely to the bodies of the models in magazines on which I grew up. It means that I am skinnier. It means that I am in some way beyond reproach, or further from reproach. I am terrified of reproach. But reproach from whom? Who is the voice of the reproacher? Does it even exist? Is anyone beyond reproach?

  I am an eater who feels safest at a place of very thin. I want to live in a body that is so far away from being fat that it has room to gain weight and still not even rub elbows with chubbiness. Fat, for me, in terms of my own body, represents terrible feelings: shame, disintegration, self-hatred. These are feelings that I experienced as a child and want to protect myself from feeling ever again (though that is, of course, impossible and I feel them every day in whatever body I have).

  I am an eater who still longs, sometimes, for the full binge. There were moments in my life when I was mid-binge that felt like some beautiful return to self. I would be so caught up in the flow of the action, the pure pleasure of no restrictions and uncontainability, that I felt as though I had entered a silence that existed before words. But the words always returned. They were in my head and they yelled at me.

  What was that silence? Was it the spiritual space of true freedom? Or was it simply another coping mechanism—food as a drug—to block out the world? Is it my true self to eat until my stomach can hold no more and I am repulsed by the sight of any more food and I cannot do anything but lie in the fetal position and groan? Or is that a reaction to restrictions that were placed—first by others, then by me—on some other true self? Is there a part of me that knows how to feed herself enough, only what she loves and what nourishes her, and never feel shame or fear if she overindulges a little, because it tastes so good? Did that part of me never exist and must be manifested? Or did it always exist, as it does for the animals, but along the way got buried? How would I even begin to uncover it?

  I am an eater who knows, intellectually, that control is an illusion. I know it experientially and spiritually, through peak experiences and gentle experiences and love and sudden pain and tragedy. But asking the mind to give up control and the mind actually obeying is another animal.

  I am an eater whose mind says no.

  I am an eater who knows that ultimately you are responsible for yourself, an eater who doesn’t want to take responsibility for herself other than to seek the feeling of safety.

  I am an eater who is scared to be so honest here, a disordered eater.

  I am a superficial woman of depth.

  Help Me Not Be a Human Being

  MY SEXUAL PREFERENCE IS ME. Actually, escaping me. In every obsession, Internet obsession, make-out, fuck, and actual relationship, I’ve embraced my fellow man (and woman) on the highway of low self-esteem in the hope that I could be convinced of my own okayness and/or disappear.

  What I have sought in love is a reprieve from the itch of consciousness—to transcend myself and my human imperfections—but this has yet to happen. What has happened, instead, is a lifetime of fictional love stories; fiction, in that I have perceived every new experience through the veil of my own insecurities. Here are some of those stories.

  I’m in love with you and you don’t want anything to do with me so I think we can make this work: a love story.

  Just saw two ants drown together in my bathtub and it reminded me of us: a love story.

  The saddest part of fucking you in that motel room was not when you took a shit in the bathroom before we fucked and not when I had to put on Tupac to mask the sound of you shitting and not when the smell leaked out into the hotel room and not when I licked behind your balls after you took that shit, even though you hadn’t showered (I don’t care, to be honest. I think that germs have kept me healthy and strong my whole life. It was only when I told my friend the story and she called me out on it that I realized my disregard for my own personal health might be indicative of a deep self-hatred.), but when I went into the bathroom an hour after you took the shit and there were still shit marks in the toilet bowl and I thought about how if it had been me who took the shit I would have absolutely gone into that toilet bowl with my bare hand and a piece of toilet paper and wiped it down and how maybe this particular brand of self-consciousness regarding shit marks is a developmental variation in response to the fundamental differences in expectations placed upon men vs. women in this society, though that’s probably too reductive: a love story.

  That’s not the clitoris: a love story.

  The anxiety of the sexual act is my sexual act: a love story.

  Definitely thought I was a lesbian until we dated and then I thought I might just be asexual, or not asexual, actually, but even more deeply fucked up than I ever knew: a love story.

  I never liked myself: a love story.

  Sorry I fell asleep while you were going down on me: a love story.

  One night I dreamt you had a gherkin instead of a penis and when I saw you at work the next day I thought I was in love with you (the thing about spending eight consecutive hours in a confined space with the same people day after day is there will always be that one person who appears more special and attractive than he or she actually is), so when we ended up having sex on three different occasions I said never again after each time, though when you licked my ass it felt so intimate that it made me want to buy you beautiful shirts, and when I asked you if you would ever want to be with me for real (if I didn’t already have a boyfriend) you said yes (but it’s easy to say yes
when the other person is already taken): a love story.

  I wanted to build a fire with our shadow selves and burn there or be erased by the narcotic of limerence when I turned your face into a fire: a love story.

  I don’t even masturbate to you anymore because it’s too sad: a love story.

  My therapist calls you pancake ass: a love story.

  It’s not that I’m shutting you out when we have sex, I just need to fantasize about obese women caring for one another’s vaginas to have a good orgasm and you’re a midsize man: a love story.

  Just because you have beautiful eyes doesn’t mean you’re deep: a love story.

  When you said, Don’t obsess, just feel the feelings, I said no: a love story.

  Sorry you are having a really good life and are contented by it: a love story.

  I don’t want to be older and wiser, I want to be younger and hotter: a love story.

  In the dark you looked so human in your skin that I called you human in my head and didn’t want you then and felt relieved: a love story.

  When you said that your sexual ideal is romantic sex where both partners say I love you as they are coming, and then do that with a different person every day, I totally agreed except I only wanted to do it with you: a love story.

  I feel like my life has a lot of caves and they are all filled with your hair: a love story.

  Let’s pretend you are capable of being who I think I need you to be: a love story.

  When you tweeted that the best you could ever arrive at is probably the leader of a sex cult, I guess I should have seen that as a red flag: a love story.