content warning - eating disorders
I have treated my own body, my own home, with little care. Considering its flaws and failures, I have planned to tailor it through discipline and meticulous attention; other times, I have dreamt to place a pair of scissors against my abdomen, wishing to simply cut away the skin and fat. I have stared at women turned to art, lingered at paintings of the smooth Venus and her graceful Gratiae, drifting towards sculptures of the supple Aphrodite and her gentle Charites; I saw beauty and wished for pain, sculpting and carving and chiselling until my body was unrecognisable, unhospitable.
One time, these dreams nearly felt within reach. On a Thursday morning one December, I wandered amongst sculptured goddesses and statuesque women, breathing in the dry air and gazing at idealised bodies. On a Thursday evening that same December, I was hospitalised with threats of a heart infection, breathing in the sterilised air of infirmaries and gazing at deteriorating bodies. My fingertips turned blue and then black, before bursting with angry sparks of colour, blisters the shade of deep red and dark purple.
My mother warned me that my ideals were imprisonments, captivating my mind and confining my life.
I imagined carving away at the marble of my flesh until Venus appeared, soft and round yet hard and sharp, the simulacrum of beauty even with a pouched stomach and large thighs.
My body warned me that its faithfulness was faltering, that the changes I brought were charging towards the irreversible.
I imagined carving away at the marble until only a core of ivory rock remains, polished and pure, the dispensable and expendable pieces left behind.
My doctor warned me that this dysmorphic dream has lethal consequences; eating disorders battle only opioid addiction for the highest mortality rates amongst any and all psychiatric diagnoses, and I was soon to join the demographic.
I imagined carving away at the marble until it crumbles entirely, only shards of rock left around my feet, my self finally free from the restraint of my body, the horror of my home.
It was not a heart infection. It was my body crying, gasping, begging for a break from the great war. My disgusting and discoloured fingers were a warning shot that this body could not take me through another winter, that my body could not keep me warm. I still get frostbites every winter. I wear two pairs of gloves, even in the spring. It is my body reminding me of what I have done, punishing me for what I put it through; warning me that while it may be my only home, it is not as dependent on me as I am on it. I cannot wreak havoc and expect a warm welcome.
There is a duality at play, a tug of war between your sanity and your desire, both gripping strenuously at your rope of life, fighting viciously for supremacy with your body at stake. The incessant wrenching drains you, and yet the depletion draws out your collarbones and paints your skin a ghastly pale and pronounces your hollow cheeks. How Bella-Hadid-wearing-Versace-esque, how Victorian-child-with-tuberculosis-akin. How thin, how harmful, how gothic, how good.
Starvation becomes a gothic charm, sunken eyes and pale skin, a mirror of the dedication to thinness that brings you to the brink of death. The gaunt and macerated body becomes ethereal when we see a wounded woman and turn her into a goddess; this is what Leslie Jameson warns us of, when she depicts our obsession with thinness, come sickness come starvation, as the romanticising of an illness and the idealisation of suffering. Purposely starving yourself is suffering, and it is ill; to long for sickly coloured skin as long as prominent ribs follow; to view hunger as a cure and not the camouflage of your disorder. It is also deceivingly and destructively empowering, to fight the instinctive urge to survive. It is power to an extent unlike any other; the power of controlling our bodies, our biology, our womanhood.
My body reversed to the years before I turned thirteen, erasing the womanhood I had entered. My sides were left with hues of blue and green from the incessant nagging of my hip bones pressing into the mattress in the night; the hips that meant to signify my ability to bear a child became a hollow curvature. There were no longer puddles of blood by my feet every month in the bath; now I huddled over the sink, sobbing as the peaks of foam from the toothpaste turned scarlet and not even the strongest mint flavour could erase the taste of copper. I romanticised my suffering, I idealised my struggling; all in the name of a deified body; a place of worship and of glory; a home worthy so that I may too be worthy.
Katrine Lindén is currently undertaking her master's degree in English at the University of Copenhagen, where she has dedicated her time to both fiction and non-fiction courses. Her primary focus is literary depictions of women, with a thesis underway focusing on monstrous female metamorphosis. Katrine is 26 years old and lives with her husband in Copenhagen.
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