You are your
memories. Your memories define who you are, without them you aren’t really you.
You act the way you do because of what you were taught at a child. You grow on
the memories of what you were built on. But what happens when your mind stops
processing memories as a past event, and they become your present?
Having an eidetic memory means that I
remember everything that’s ever happened to me, but for some reason when I
recall a memory it isn’t in the past. This means that something that happened
17 years ago is just as vivid in my mind as something that happened 2 minutes
ago. I can’t decipher my past from my present, because in my mind my memories
are my present. In my mind, if a friend dies they aren’t really gone because I
can literally remember seeing them 2 minutes ago. If I go through a breakup,
how can I move on if my mind processes my memories of them as current events? How
can I make the pain of a horrific event stop if it never really ends for me?
When I was a kid I
wasn’t allowed to eat much. In orphanages there was always a shortage of food,
we rationed as if there was an impending war. There was always someone who
needed food more than I did, and since the orphans were family, we took care of
each other. If I was given bread but someone else was hungry, they would get my
bread. That was just the way things went. I don’t remember ever not being
hungry as a kid; I hardly slept because of hunger. “Safe homes” were never any
better. A form of torture every single family I was put with would use was
starvation. I was locked in rooms for days without food, usually until I passed
out from hunger. If I ate in an orphanage, it meant that somebody else would go
hungry and would potentially die. If I ate in a safe home, I was beaten because
hunger was a sign of weakness. Because of this, I always associated pain with
food.
I remember one time
in an orphanage when I was 8 years old there was a little girl, about 6, who
looked like one of those children you would see on an ad asking for money for
starving children in Africa. She couldn’t get out of her bed, her skin was
almost grey and her eyes the shade of blue you would only see after death. She hardly
ate because she had a younger sister she would feed instead of herself. She
gave all her food to her sister, except every second day when she would eat
half her share. 6 years old, and she was making sure someone other than herself
lived. I shared a room with her, my bed right beside hers. I could see her
staring at me every night; her dead eyes would pierce me. I was so hungry I
could barely function. I needed food. I stole food from the kitchen one night,
just one slice of bread. In the morning the officials discovered that one slice
of bread was missing, and as punishment they decided that nobody would eat that
day. That was the day she was supposed to have her half. She never woke up the
next morning.
When I went to
boarding school food was abundant. I could have anything I wanted and even as
much as I wanted. I couldn’t do it. I was afraid if someone saw me eating they
would think I was pathetic, worthless. If I ate, there wouldn’t be enough for
anybody else. If I ate, I would murder someone. I was a murderer.
I hardly ate at
school. I would eat enough to keep me on the brink of survival. I was
constantly made fun of for being so skinny but for me it was more of an…accomplishment.
I was proud of myself because I was conditioned to believe that not eating
meant strength. My weight was a medal I could wear 24/7 to prove that I was
stronger than everyone else.
As I got older I
had to stay in bed most of the day. I could barely lift my own head because I
was so weak. The only thing I would really ingest was my drugs, when I had them
I couldn’t even remember that I was hungry. I couldn’t remember that girl I
shared a room with. I was that girl I shared a room with. I was hospitalized 15 times in 4 months at one point. I was sent to a
mental hospital after mental hospital. I tried to kill myself because I took a
bite of an apple once.
Mental hospitals
specifically meant for eating disorders were the worst. I wasn’t usually
allowed to bring anything, so I was forced to walk around in a hospital gown
all day. At every meal I was forced to have two glasses of liquids, either
juice or milk. I wasn’t allowed napkins so I couldn’t hide food. No cutting up
food or drinking water between meals. Every morning I was forced to strip and
be weighed. I was under supervision 24/7. It was supposed to be a safe haven
for people with eating disorders, but realistically people just gossiped about each
other being fat or we shared weight loss tips. It may not seem that bad, but
honestly when you have anorexia it is like living a nightmare.
Through mental
hospitals I learned that I could trick people into believing that I was eating.
I could just throw my food up later. I don’t know how this fit into my
philosophy of not eating to help others, but I did it anyways. I would barely
eat a meal without throwing it up after. I would purge until I was throwing
up blood and chunks of my own flesh. My throat was ripped apart, my mouth
ripped apart, my hair falling out, my nails falling off. I was disgusting. I
was everything my “families” told me that I was. I was exactly where I thought
I needed to be.
I had a teacher who
absolutely hated me. She thought I had killed my family, and I deserved
everything that was coming to me. She recommended me to a mental hospital in
Romania. It was far away from “civilization”. This was the kind of place you
were sent when there was no hope for you. The kind of place people didn’t want
to be around because of fear that someone would escape. This wasn’t a place for
me.
Everyone in this “hospital”
seemed to be drugged to the point where they didn’t know who they were. They
would just…wander the halls…going nowhere in particular; I doubt they even had
thoughts at that point. Their hair was falling out, and they had that same,
unblinking dead look as that little girl from my room. Doctors never tried to cure anyone. They just
sedated them if they went out of their wandering routine. It was like I was
living in the house of the dead, and I was the only one alive.
At this point my
schizophrenia had begun to manifest into something…beyond schizophrenia. I was delusional
because I wasn’t eating. My memories were coming to life. I was alone, all the time;
I had nothing to remember and therefore nothing to grow upon. I was nothing, I
was nobody. Even now my schizophrenic delusions are just my memory recreating
things and bringing them to life, but this was different.
Every time I tried to eat something that little girl would
appear. I wanted to go home. I wanted to prove that I wasn’t….dead. I wasn’t
like the others. Every time I would bring food to my mouth there she was. Her
eyes were just big black holes. Her skin was rotting. Her hair was grey straw.
It was like she was falling apart…all because of me. When I would put something
in my mouth all I could hear was an echo of “What about me?” When I tried to
throw up, there she would be, staring at me. She would scream at me and cry,
telling me to die and that I deserved to starve just like she did. She was
everywhere. She was in every room I went into. When I tried to sleep, her
rotting self would just stand at the foot of my bed and stare at me. I was
torturing myself by not eating, and she would torture me if I tried to eat.
One day I got a
roommate at the hospital. She was an old blind woman. She hadn’t talked for ten
years. She never did anything…just laid there. Dead like the rest of them. I
decided to start talking to her since I was so lonely and she was the only
physical thing there. For about a week I made her my real life imaginary
friend. I told her about the guys, about Sunny. That was until she finally
talked back to me. She was panicking, telling me that I had to start. I had to
make “her” go away, that she would never go away unless I started. I still have
no idea what it means, but because I was losing my mind I took it to be about
my situation. I ate enough to get out because I was so scared.
It was better for a
little while. Of course, this became a memory. My schizophrenic delusions are
my reality. I don’t see them apart from my real day to day life; they are my
day to day life. Therefore every memory I have includes my delusions. This
means that every single time I see food; I go back to the hospital and see that
little girl screaming at me. It’s like she’s haunting everything I eat and I
can’t make it stop. That little girl made me never want to eat again.
At the same time I
saw that old lady screaming at me to start. Since I associated “start eating”
with that memory, that’s what I feel like I have to do every time. That makes
me start eating, then throw it up again. Eventually it got to the point where I
would throw up even if I didn’t want to. My natural response to food was to
throw it up. I literally couldn’t eat, even if I wanted to.
For two years when
I started university I had to be tube fed. I literally had a tube sticking out
of my stomach that I had to feed myself with. When I fed myself through the
tube I didn’t gain weight, and I didn’t see the girl because I wasn’t
technically eating. I didn’t really mind it as long as I didn’t have to take my
shirt off. I ended up ruining it for myself when I tried to shove pills down
the tube one too many times in a suicide attempt, and my stomach cancer ended
up making it almost impossible to get any nutrients from it anyways.
Last year when I had
stomach cancer I never actually wanted to remove the tumor. The tumor sucked up
my nutrients and made me feel better about eating…like it was okay. I think I
was more heartbroken about that when I had it taken out than anything I was
dealing with in recovery. It’s still kind of…nice…to not be able to eat much/
eat certain foods because of it.
I still struggle with my eating disorder, only because of
memories. I’m 6’9, meaning that I should weigh around 210 pounds. Instead I
weigh about 116 pounds. I plan my meals months in advance so I eat less than 1000 calories a day. I don't get pleasure out of eating, I don't like food. I pass out constantly if I do too much in one day. When
I look in the mirror, I see myself disgusting and skinny, but when I look back
at the memory of me looking in the mirror I’ll get it mixed up with a memory
from another time when I weighed more and then I feel like I need to lose even
more weight. When I try to eat I hear everyone yelling at me that I’m ugly or
worthless, because in my mind they were saying that to me two minutes ago, not
15 years ago. I see myself eating that one last piece of bread every time I
eat. It’s almost like I’m traveling through time, suddenly going back to a
moment in my past when I couldn’t eat.
I don’t have
memories because I’m still living them in my current life, so am I really me?
March 2013 diet
