I’ve gained weight. Should I k*ll myself?

I’m not coping well.

I’ve gained weight. Should I k*ll myself?

An all too familiar claw is snaking its way around my neck. I used to be this big. I used to be a bit bigger. Do I really want to do this again? Head down this road? Live in this horror named “ugly”?

Not really. Maybe I should starve or die or start cross country running or move cross country. I don’t know. I don’t think I want to be thin or die, I just want to not care.

There is something particularly torturous about knowing beauty and losing it. Being big, losing weight, gaining it back. It’s as if my bout as a pretty girl was all a hoax. My true destiny is something far more grotesque and I’m being sent back there now.

A part of me feels so embarrassed over these thoughts. I’m not being a very good body-positive feminist right now, but then again all I’ve ever had is the label of woman and it’s starving destiny.

In some ways, this doesn’t even feel like it’s about beauty. I am used to not being beautiful. I know what to do, where to go. I don’t actually desire beauty, the question is more so if I should. If I should be a good woman and hate myself.

The most exhausted I’ve ever been was when I tried to be beautiful. I’ve since lived a few years of a quiet life. My mind quieted and I learned to paint. But now jeans I bought six months ago won’t fit and all the self-love mantras I’ve collected over the years are being put to the test.

I don’t have to do it. I can stay big, I can not care. I don’t have to be tired and dizzy all the time. I don’t need to throw up and be anxious. I could keep myself from these things but then again, that means I’d stay this big. And staying big means I really am a bad woman.

I think I need to move. I think this house is killing me. I think I’ve thought about this body on this couch for too long.

I need a city. I was thinking LA or New York or Paris. “Everywhere you go, there you are” is probably true but then again, I’ve never tried to be somewhere else. Maybe it’s not true for me. Maybe I’ll go somewhere else and find a me that is sexy and happy and fun.

Maybe that’s been my problem all along. I’ve been trying to run away from the curse of my birth. Maybe this life of self-hate, healing then self-hate again is the unbreakable cycle.

Maybe I am thinking too hard. Maybe staring at the same walls is killing me. I’d like to think that’s the problem but I don't see a place where I won’t sink back to this.

In the question of weight my womanhood is fulfilled. It seems any answer I give that is not rolling over and starving is a wrong one. And maybe most of all, I no longer want to be wrong.