Saturn, Dreaming of Mercury (pt 2)

I grew up with an eating disorder.

I didn’t know it at the time. Wouldn’t know it until I was in my late 20s. I kept having moments where suddenly I didn’t know how I ended up by the fridge eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the middle of the afternoon. Wasn’t I taking a nap? And why was I eating? I started recovery, and in digging into the roots of this disorder, my psyche blew wide the door of memory.

As a young girl, I hid in closets. It was a way to make myself quiet—to allow myself to disappear. By the time I was seven, I’d experienced enough to know that it was best if I stayed as invisible as possible. So I turned to books and immersed myself in story. What was left was my body attempting to process in real time what I was seeing and connecting. Eventually, I just shut her down completely because it hurt too much. I had migraines. My stomach would hurt at random moments where I knew something wasn’t right. I learned the alphabet in sign language, and in moments of anxiety would sign the words, my fingers flying at the speed of light, trying to keep up with the words bouncing around in my brain. My peers saw this and would laugh at me and I would shrug it off, pretending their biting remarks didn’t hurt. When that didn’t abate their teasing, I took to writing the words down with my finger on my clothes, an invisible poem no one could see.

The story was always trying to get out—she never let me go. She gnawed at my edges and thrashed at her cage. Even still, I tried to ignore it for as long as I possibly could until eventually, I disconnected from my body all-together. She wasn’t mine to own anyway, I knew this by the way she was treated. I walked around like a girl made out of air, not knowing that I was allowing for myself to be erased.

So I hit in closets.

My closet.
My mother’s closet.
The pantry.

I would shut myself in our pantry at home and eat spoonfuls of peanut butter, pieces of bread, cookies, tortillas—anything I could shove into my mouth in a short amount of time.

One day, I was in the living room watching television and crying. At school, the girls were talking about how disgusting it is to have rolls of flesh and my thirteen year old self didn’t realize that almost everyone has rolls when they lean over and slouch. That morning, as I was watching television, I looked down and saw a small roll of skin on my stomach and immediately felt their words wash over me.

Disgusting.
Gross.
Ugly.

My mom walked into the room and stopped short at my tears.

“Why are you crying?”

Seeing my mom, I began to cry even harder, aching for comfort.

“I’m fat.” I sputtered.

She looked away for the briefest of moment before turning back and walking past me.

“Then don’t eat the pies in the freezer.” she responded.

The dismissal felt like a knife, and the pain cut deep.

Later that day, I grabbed one of the pies in the freezer and let the cherry sauce sink into my tongue, a wave of pleasure rolling through me. Don’t eat the pies in the freezer, my mom had warned—but the tartness of the cherries mixed with the sweet fried dough begged a different story. It told me that it would cushion the sharp edges of others’ words and hands.

It was a rebellion. A way for me to fight back at becoming the girl made out of air. And in the same breath, it was a way for me to become more invisible.

I didn’t realize it then, but these moments of binging, of finding solace in food, wasn’t just a means to lessen the pointy edges of grief. It was a method of disassociation. The message was clear that if I wasn’t thin, I wasn’t desirable, and by that time my body had felt the hands of multiple people without my consent. It became a double edged sword, because from the time I was a young girl my appearance was scrutinized. Whether it was making comments on my developing frame, showing me the secrets of calorie counting and multiplication necessary to determine whether food was healthy or not, lecturing me about being careful because we just look at food and gain weight, telling me I would be beautiful if I lost weight, or using a trip with friends as a reward if I got smaller—my body was never my own. My purpose was clear: be as small as possible. Do not expand. Do not own yourself.

So I hated anything to do with her. Any moment of recognition. Any attention. My body told me secrets and these secrets brought pain and so in every moment I could I would shut her down or ignore the messages she was trying to send.

Eating became my comfort because for a moment, I felt joy. For a moment, I could quiet the ancestral intuition coursing through my veins that something was very, very wrong.

//

The trickster starts off hungry.

I read this in Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World. Something clicks internally, and a path drops in front of me. Hyde says that this hunger initiates a spark within the trickster that feeds creative fire—a cunning, wise, sideways glance at how to keep their belly full. Fiction is the truth, slanted, I write in the margins next to this paragraph. I’m thinking of Emily Dickinson. I’m thinking of myself. I’m thinking of all of the ways writing and story have saved me again and again and again.

I’m thinking of the hunger that comes from making yourself invisible.

//

In Alice, Through the Looking Glass, we see Alice back in Wonderland, having walked through a mirror to get there. She runs into her friends who immediately tell her that the Mad Hatter has not been himself lately. That he’s going on about something that is impossible at best and proof of his madness at worst. Concerned, she visits him.

“Are you you?” He asks her. It is the question she must answer before he lets her into his home. Others who have visited have come with mimics of their true nature, and you can see the exhaustion and suspicion on his face.

“Yes, yes I think I am.” She responds.

“Of course you are,” he clicks his tongue and sighs in relief. “I’d know you anywhere.”

You see, the Mad Hatter knows something. He saw something—stumbled upon it really—and ever since then he hasn’t been able to shake this knowing.

So he tells his friend, the one he met for the first time years ago and asked if she was mad.

“All the best ones are,” he says.

He tells Alice what he knows. What he cannot prove. How he is desperate for help.

She looks at him, grief filling her eyes.

“But…but it’s impossible. I’m sorry.”

She refuses his knowing. Dismisses it because it reaches across her own understanding of the world and falls off into the realm of this-cannot-be-true-and-therefore-will-be-forgotten. The Mad Hatter explodes with his own rage and grief, kicking her out of his home—but not before we see his bright eyes fade to black and the color on his face shift ever so slightly to a duller shade.

“You are not you!” He yells, but his voice is full of the rage only grief can grow.

//

I’ve always said that when I write, I know when I’ve hit the vein. I feel it. It’s a vibration, or a hum, that starts deep in my chest and snakes around my arms and up my neck into my throat. When I’ve hit the vein, when I know I’ve tapped into something Other in my words, I read them back and tears will immediately form in my eyes. Whatever essence I’ve managed to weave into my sentences bursts from the page or the screen and wraps itself around me in an energy that feels like Truth. Warm, comforting, grounding, protective.

There she is, I always think.

I’ve managed to walk through my own mirror, witnessing the pieces within begging for me to believe in their own impossibility.

I don’t always get there. Sometimes my mirror is cloudy. Sometimes, there are pieces of me who are furtive and quiet, hiding in a closet somewhere, believing that she is best protected if she cannot be seen.

The threads are sometimes loose, mangled, knotted. Sometimes I have to rub the edge of one in between my thumb and pointer, waiting for the release. Sometimes I have to wrap it around my heart, tightening it just so that it knows here, it’s safe. Here, I only exist to listen. Since that class with Dr Cole, I’ve never been one who doesn’t read over her words as she’s writing them. I know. I’m such a rebel. It’s the cardinal rule in book writing: Do Not Read Your Work Until You Are Done. However, I’m always plucking. Always re-reading. Always pulling the threads and organizing them so that I can hear them begin to vibrate against the story, hear that hum of Truth start to weave its way out into the world.

//

Earlier this week, I pulled 8 of Pentacles in my daily ritual. When I flipped the card over to see the energy of the day, I laughed out loud.

There, on the card, was a woman sitting at an easel. Sunshine burst through her windows. Coming out of her canvas, her own imagination breathed into life, was a fox.

//

Alice ends up doing the impossible.

And when she returns, when she goes to find her friend to tell him the good news, he is in bed. His skin has taken on a deathly hue. All of the color and vibrancy and life has been siphoned out of him. He is unresponsive. She leans over him, notices he’s barely breathing. She tells him that she did it. That she helped him. And then, she closes her eyes as a single tear falls down her cheek.

“I believe you, Hatter.” She says.

Slowly, then all at once, he wakes up.

He turns and looks at Alice, smiling. The color is already beginning to return. His hair is popping out of the sleeping cap he was wearing, the white bursting back into a fiery red.

“There you are,” he whispers.

//

The trickster starts off hungry.

When we are not heard—when our knowing is not acknowledged—we experience soul loss. The color vanishes. We shrink into ourselves. We turn ourselves into air.

I was hungry.
I was desperate for someone to believe me.
And yet, I didn’t even know how to explain what I did know—that something was very wrong—and so I said nothing. I continued to shrink. And also, I continued to do everything I could to quell the hunger within. I just had no idea it wasn’t physical.

//

I am Saturn, learning how to be Mercury.
I am the good girl, the rule follower, easing into this trickster skin.

I am no longer satisfied with hiding in the closets of my inner landscape.

My story is no longer thrashing against her cage. Instead, she’s the phoenix taking to the sky, more bird than woman, showing me how to spread these wings of my own.