eating disorders and recover: residue of a former life

Sometimes, I'm astonished by the amount of things in my life that are still influenced by my eating disorder. Two and a half years into recovery, and it's still there. Anything that was in your life for close to a decade is bound to leave residue on you, like a ring around the bathtub.

My ring is made up of drinking obscene amounts of water (formerly attempts to make purging easier or to feel fuller during periods of restriction) and tooth decay and chewing lots of gum to trick my hunger center and conceal the smell of puke that clung to me like a bad perfume. My ring is made up of a small number of inflexible feelings and rules and discomfort around new foods or people commenting on my eating--a simple comment from Marvel of "Wow, you must be enjoying that" feels like a slap in the face and completely disrupts my meal and turns me into a pillar of silence and the refusal to have any more food pass my lips. It's made up of a personality based on control and anxiety and OCD about my schedule and using my time effectively to be THE WORLD'S BEST AND MOST PRODUCTIVE AND MOST LOVED.

These are things that may never fully dissolve. And maybe that's okay. If nine years of a mental illness left my personality completely untouched, it'd be a bit sad. But I am incredibly glad that it's no longer my entire personality.

Much love,
The Sheriff

okccupid and the sheriff: adventures in online dating

Last fall, while visiting my best friend of a thousand years in New Orleans, tipsy on wine and togetherness, we decided to create an online dating profile for me on OkCupid. Like lots of young people used to being surrounded in college by thousands of our datebale, fuckable peers, I struggled to find someone to date once I was released into the Real World. Plenty of people to just bone, since that's kinda all the bar scene offers, but I wanted something more substantial than that. OkCupid seemed like a reasonable and fun way to meet my needs.

First of all, no one warned me for how addicting it would be. OkCupid allows you to see who looks at you, when, and obviously, as a moderately attractive female with interest in men, I received a TON of attention. Within the first ten minutes of creating a profile, I had three messages. All of them turned out to be duds, but still! Attention is addicting, and so is harmless flirting.

Drawbacks of OkCupid include: MEAT MARKET. Wow. I got many messages from people seeking strictly sex, and because I was listed as bi, I also got a lot of messages from couples looking for the third wheel in their bedroom experiences. Additionally, I saw/received messages from many people I knew in real life, and some of whom I'd even dated! But this was kind of nice and humanizing: I wasn't the only person who, despite being wholly awesome, couldn't manage to meet people in the traditional way.

People, of course, also present themselves differently online. I had one date with a man who turned out to be a helluva lot older looking in person than I'd anticipated, and it was just awkward. It was like Liz Lemon on the date with the hot coffee guy who turned out to be 19 and she was 40 (sidebar: enjoy this. And this), where he kept making dated cultural references. I know I'll be there in a few years, but hey, I'm young and hot now, so I can say these things.

But it did make things easier in some sense: I could weed a person out if they said something like, "my biggest pet peeve is def angry feminists" or "I don't really read books." It can be harder to get people to say those things out loud when they're actively trying to impress you. Also, it's free and open to people who like their same gender, which is not true of all dating sites by a long shot.

Overall? I'd say it's worth a shot. Dating as a feminist is always hard because the whole world is dedicated to maintaining traditional gender norms and oppression and all that other crap. Online dating makes it a bit easier to weed out those people who you fundamentally disagree with. And I did wind up meeting someone wonderful, with whom I had a four hour conversation on our first date, and who I enjoyed talking to and boning long after that.

Have you given online dating a shot? Any luck with it?

Friday links

How do you take care of yourself?

What is self-objectification? Watch and learn.

Models without makeup...enlightening!

A woman with my first name with a podcast about fucking while feminist...soul mates?

AMY POEHLER AND WILL ARNETT ARE SEPARATING. Love very well may be dead. 

A logical analysis of how bleak things would be if we each only have one real soul mate.

Much love,
The Sheriff

updates from the road of celibacy

Celibacy is, so far, not terrible. It's also not a ton of fun...yet. Does it ever get to be fun? The Sheriff is used to getting it in pretty regularly, so given that it's only been about two weeks without sex in my life, whining to my friends about it is just pathetic. Two weeks is hardly real deprivation, but as anyone who has ever tried to break a habit (nail biting, drinking soda, cursing) knows, two weeks can feel like forever.

One of the big changes I've noticed has been the increased laziness in regards to my sexualized appearance. Thanks to a childhood trauma of one of my brother's friends pointing out my pubic hair in a bathing suit WHEN I WAS TEN, I've been pretty devoted to my razor. A few times a year, I try to grow my hair out just to see what it's like and because of my strong feminist sensibilities that remind me how silly it is to spend all this money, time, and energy removing something that occurs on my body naturally, but then it just gets itchy and weird and inappropriate scratching in public becomes necessary. So I cave and shave.

But given that work has started up again for me and that I usually wear pants and tights, that level of maintenance is fading. And that has brought about my first celibacy related epiphany: to be sexualized appears to be all appearance based. And not just that, but it's also artificial levels of appearances, as in removing body hair. At least, so far it is.

What do you think? Does your maintenance tend to fall off when sex is not a regularity? Or are you one of those brave people who doesn't bother with the razor?

Much love,
The Sheriff

the (stupid) terror of moving up a size

There is something especially demeaning about dressing rooms. The three-dimensional mirrors combined with the fluorescent lighting that shows every dimple and pore and the particularly horrible vision of seeing yourself half-bent over trying to squeeze jeans over your hips...it's horrible. Simply, utterly, effing horrible.

And it's made all the worse when you have to bump up a size in clothes.

source

Having endured the trauma of jeans shopping in Target about a month ago (seriously, do they standardize their sizes at all?) and finding all of the pants just wrong (too big, too small, too long), this has been on my mind lately. Sizing down is a huge self-esteem boost, at least for me--there's a frolicking, feeling-light-and-svelte sensation about finding your normal size is just a bit too big. But sizing up? It's a gut-dropping, oy-vey-I'm-disgusting type of feeling.

I think this comes from the fact that we get invested into this idea of who we are that's partially tied to our clothing size (thanks, anti-lady marketing!). When I was thinner, I felt like a lithe and graceful size X, and now that I'm a bit bigger, I feel like a bootylicious size Y.  Because we've been conditioned and bought into this myth, it makes that moment of finding that you fit into the higher size more solidly a bit traumatic and disturbing. It disrupts this false sense of who you are that you've been sold.

However. As I've realized, the bumping up in size can also plainly just mean this: you've gained weight. Which often signals a change of sorts anyway (in lifestyle, eating habits, stress, upheaval, babies, what have you), and that's also hard to cope with, even without the fact that your clothes may not fit you properly. And that's okay. The changes, good and bad, lovely and disastrous, in your life are the important thing here. The bigger pants are just the physical proof of it. That's what I try to tell myself, anyway.

How do you deal with these kinds of moments? Do you keep fat clothes on hand for this, so as not to have to endure the pain of trying on new clothes?

Much love,
The Sheriff

friday links

Did you know that the Williams sisters kick ass? Yup. They do.

The GOP really makes it rain, according to Tampa area strippers. 

Some interesting reflections on balance.

This is a bit old now but so so good: rape fatigue and when there's just no anger left. 

This is horrible--woman told not to breastfeed at work because it's nasty and she might spew everywhere.

Much love,
The Sheriff

a new chapter for the sheriff: celibacy

Sex has often been a space of empowerment for me, as you may have gathered from this here lil blog. It's not something I've had much shame or embarrassment about, and something I love to advise people on.

And for now, it's something I'm taking a wee break from for a while. Four months, precisely.

Why would I deprive myself of something that I truly enjoy and that I find an empowering experience? Why does anyone deprive themselves of something they enjoy? To grow and be a better person and to have new things to bitch about to their friends.

Because of changes in my relationship status that are (hopefully!) temporary, I've decided I'm going to stay celibate for four months. This also means no phone number getting and text flirting and all that malarkey. My objective here is to keep things from making my life excessively murky and crowded with people in a way that is not really fun or fulfilling to me right now, but also because I need mental space and time--there's no need to bring dick into the picture.

I'm particularly curious about how this impacts my relationship to my body and myself, given that sex has been a pretty large part of my life throughout my entire adolescence and young adulthood so far, and I want to use this blog as a space to explore that and discuss it and see what changes occur. I'm excited about this. Because I'm doing this as a choice and not because of shame or guilt or in pursuit of some fucked up notion of purity, there's a sense of freedom in this commitment and that's where I'm at with it right now. We'll see if things change.

But don't worry. I won't be going anywhere, despite the planned lack of fornicating. I might even wind up blogging more than normal because of the deprivation!

 Have you ever pursued a self-imposed break from sex? Or has a drought had some surprising side effects?

Much love,
The Sheriff