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April
26, 2006
Why I want to eat my own body
Someone just wrote to me and said, "...you
need to get a handle on the eating/drinking issues before you can
successfully move forward with other issues."
She makes it sound so easy. And this'll sound
whiny, but it's not like I haven't been trying to do that for as
long as I can remember.
I've had plenty of therapy, but I've always skirted my childhood issues.
But the work I'm doing now for my degree - delving deeply into the psych literature
and aggressively trying to understand what happened to me in my childhood...
It's opening doors that were closed before.
Like fear. I used to be afraid of reading for an audience, but lately
I'm talking to the audience directly, being funny and honest. For instance,
I've been thinking a lot lately about cannibalism. About hunger - for food
and alcohol and sex... for someone I can love... Part of me
wants to eat them alive, so I can love them and keep them inside
my body, or so I can crawl into their body so they can take care
of me.
I also think a lot about eating my own body,
and I think that's about incorporating my reviled body back into
my psyche... Ellie would hate the dualistic way that sounds...
But my head is starting to feel a little clearer, and more accepting
of my body. But it's still my fat, soft, lumpy, hated body.
There's
a birthing component that keeps coming up for me. I'd walk in the
woods and all I could think about was mothers and babies, and
sweet, soft baby's heads. At first I thought I might be feeling
regretful that I never had a baby. That maybe I wanted to try now,
at 49. But nah... for a lot of reasons, I knew it wasn't that.
Then I thought about it being my mother, and that got a little
closer, but it still didn't hit it on the head.
Then I wrote that long piece about wanting to squat
and give birth to that sweet little baby's head that I've been seeing
and feeling against my hands. Gretchen talked to me about it, and
she helped guide me toward what's really going on.
I
think I want to reprocess my body and give birth to it anew,
but in
a clean and beautiful form, so I can heal and nurture
and love it with all of my new thoughts and my new knowledge
and understanding.
Anyway, I've always been terrified by the concept of cannibalism,
so I read my ass off about it in the anthropology literature,
and I learned a lot, and lost most of my fear. So I wrote a couple
poems about cannibalism, and the other night I got up to read
them, but I ended up telling the audience what I've learned about
ectocannibalism, and endocannibalism, and how cannibalism was
mostly made up to make "other" people look bad, and
how it can actually be a form of veneration...
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