Are you hungry?

On the female body not being allowed to be human.

The last thing I needed to heal when recovering from anorexia was the ability to say I am hungry. The words felt like an admission of weakness, like voluntarily laying on a stretcher.

Not just because of my malnourished body-obsessed brain. I am hungry felt like a crisis. Yes, because I was asking for food that I’d probably be given and probably eat and probably gain weight, but also because it felt like being human, and there is nothing more embarrassing than being human.

Hunger started becoming humiliating around elementary school when I learned girls are beautiful plastic creatures who do nothing loud or smelly and stay tiny all of the time. Hunger meant I had a body made of flesh that needed sustenance to survive. Hunger meant there was a crack in my feminine facade. Perfect girls weren’t hungry, they weren’t alive. They didn’t gain weight or get pimples or sweat or have tangled hair or get periods or grow body hair.

For a long time I could’ve sworn there was nothing that failed me more than my not-plastic body. My burgeoning belly and hips and thighs would be the death of me. I’d either die getting rid of them or die from the humiliation of keeping them.

Any past fat version of myself became public enemy #1. When I had lost weight I used to write long meandering letters to my old self. I promised vengeance and pain to her, her crime being putting me in a body that wasn’t perfect.

While a part of me hated my old fat body I think another part of me wanted to get back there. That body was the enemy to beauty but it was also allowed to eat and breathe. Beneath all of the anger was a desperation to exist again. To not be at war. To have a body that was not always incorrect.

But that’s not an offer given to women. Hunger is the ultimate defect. When you give into it you get bigger and stronger and faster and women like that do not make particularly good servants.

In that same vein hunger is the ultimate punishment that if resisted could elevate a woman into Perfection. This was the sort of elevation I was after, but the confines of my body prevented me. I hated myself for it. I hated that I couldn't be a frail, beautiful, chosen-by-everyone girl. I hated that my body was real.

Are you hungry? Am I? Do we know what it feels like? I’ve heard it’s a black canyon just above the sacral chakra. It screams. It insists upon being heard. If we feed it we become free, if we don’t we continue as we are – completely and entirely empty.