Pink.
Fruit.
As I write this, I am taking bites of grapefruit.
It is 9:35am and I have not had a cup of coffee yet.
I am not at work.
It is still raining.
I am not dead.
These are good things.
At least, I'm in a better place than I was last night, and I can look at them that way now.
I don't remember the last time I ate before ten in the morning.
I ALWAYS skip breakfast.
I OFTEN skip lunch.
I USUALLY don't eat until after three or four in the afternoon on my days off.
At work, since I'm up earlier, I give in to hunger pangs by one.
Ten years ago, when I restricted, I used to eat breakfast every day.
The same thing.
A quarter of a cup of grapenuts.
A teaspoon of jam.
6 ounces of hot soy milk poured over.
A small apple.
It amounted to about 275-300 calories.
I ate it at 8am every morning, by myself in the cafeteria at school. I read while I ate, but I took at least a half an hour to chew, swallow, masticate, and breathe.
My best habits somehow thrown in and slathered up with my worst.
I then wouldn't eat again until five in the evening.
I took a coffee at 2pm. It was a soy latte with no sugar.
At five, my stomach had already been groaning audibly for an hour.
I would race to the dining hall and fill a bowl with raw veggies and cubes of cold, gelatinous tofu.
I dumped salt and pepper and balsamic vinegar over the whole thing until it was barely recognizable. Then I went to the toaster and got a single slice of multigrain bread, which I toasted, and ate dry.
The whole thing usually amounted to about 300-400 calories.
Then I would allow myself a small portion of whatever the cafeteria was serving for dessert.
It didn't matter what it was, just a small serving, I told myself, to keep from feeling like I was denied the finer things.
At the end of the day, I clocked in between 900-1100 calories.
I called those good days.
On bad days, I would give in to my rumbling stomach at 9pm. I would eat fistfuls of popcorn, chocolate, and nuts until my stomach hurt.
I would then punish myself with horrendous hateful self talk.
I would refuse to eat any single thing until five o clock the next evening, when I would allow myself my regular dinner, and somehow, that allowed me to be forgiven, to assume that I was okay, and still in control.
Since I stopped being anorexic, I have never gotten the balance right.
I feel like any time I eat I am binging. I feel that way especially if I eat after eight at night.
For that reason, for ten years, I have started every single day punishing myself.
No breakfast.
You don't deserve it.
You fucked up last night.
No matter what I had done. Even on the days that I was re-triggered and didn't eat at all for an entire day (and I had three of those this spring), I would not allow myself to eat breakfast.
Breakfast eaters are weak, I told myself.
They're also more deserving than you.
They didn't inhale a whole container of cashews last night.
So today, after the darkest night I've had in a very long while, I wake up. I do some back friendly yoga to slowly, hopefully recuperate from this gnarly injury, and I cut up a grapefruit.
I am eating it slowly, savoring it, the gem like segments with their sweet and sour bright pink juice.
I am doing this because I need to make some changes to how I live my life right now, how I eat and breathe and work and sleep.
Because I am making myself miserable, and it has been going on for too long.
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