makes me wonder about motivation. Could all this stuff — the anxiety, twitching, nightmares, drinking, scratching, revulsion to men — be a complex form of attention seeking? I decide no, because I am thrifty, too, and can’t imagine my need for the spotlight extending to my wallet, to $85 an hour.
Food
The little I do know is very connected to my body. I became a Type 1 diabetic at age 16, a time when I was very conscious of the shape my body took. This, in part, to the ever-more-pervasive American fetish for thin, but also in response to my mother’s obsession with her size. Running, fasting, counting calories and pressing her palm to her abdomen — pressing in, pressing hard, silently mouthing the word “flat,” willing herself to slightness.
She won’t recall this. She will talk about a healthy relationship with food. She will talk about toxins and purification and running, and I will remember a house where eating was always a central focus — the having or not having. The stealing money to buy candy. The stealing. The sneaking cake and blaming it on my sister, who was heavier than I. The food stamps. The hidden wrappers and crumbs on the sheets. The babysitting at age 11 so I could buy Funions, Little Debbie snack cakes, Snickers.
I ran track, was semi-popular and did not gain weight for a while. I had already gone through a chunky stage as a tween and the damage was done. Now, at my thinnest, 120 pounds and with a blood sugar of 600 (normal is below 100), I was officially a Type 1 diabetic — my pancreas, wasted real estate in my body. I was told sugar was the enemy, no more sugar. No more lady locks and chocolate chips, birthday cake and ice cream sundaes. No more binging.
Love
It’s hard to remember whether I started throwing up before or after the diabetes, but it was certainly more complicated after. My idea of diabetes came from my father, who also had Type 1. At 26, his pancreas shut down and all of my memories of him involve his eating lots of sugar and staying very thin. I did not know that was his body eating itself alive. High blood sugar, or hyperglycemia, means there is not enough insulin in the body to break down glucose into energy, so the body starts breaking