There’s a kind of girl I want to be. Weightless. Beyond needing anything at all. Food ruins that fantasy.
It’s control. It’s about sculpting myself into something that doesn’t hunger, that doesn’t need. There’s something sacred in the idea of being empty, of resisting the body’s calls. Like if I could just say no long enough, I’d ascend into something cleaner, lighter—something untouchable.
But I’m not. I’m flesh. I eat. And when I do, I feel like I’ve failed. This body has never felt like mine.
It grew around me like a shell, and I’ve never known how to live in it. So I try to control it. Starve it quiet. Maybe if I hollow it out enough, I’ll find a self beneath the skin.
The boundary between myself and everything else dissolves, and I hate how porous I am.
I fantasize about a version of myself that never needed food. A girl who is cool to the touch. Glass-skinned. Hollow-boned. A girl whose stomach is not a furnace but a sealed room. Beautiful and unreachable, because she never hungered for anything. Not even love.
There’s something shameful about wanting. And eating is the most visceral form of wanting.
So I sip my coffee. Smoke instead of chew. Stay lightheaded enough to feel distant from the filth of wanting. It’s the only kind of control I have now that I don’t carve my skin.
I’ve been told that until I was eight or nine months old, I would throw up almost everything I ate. Even at just three months old, I refused the bottle. When my mother returned to work, I hadn’t even fully transitioned to solid foods yet. I would spend the whole day hungry, refusing to eat, vomiting what little I did consume. It was a total rejection. It’s like my body decided early on that food was wrong, that accepting nourishment meant surrender. I don’t think I ever felt safe while being fed. I think, even then, I felt intruded upon.
Now, as an adult, eating still doesn’t feel normal. It doesn’t feel like something I do for myself—it feels like something happening to me. I feel like I give in to something when I eat and I can’t fucking believe it. feel watched, even when I’m alone. Like I’ve opened a part of myself I usually keep sealed off.
Food forces me into my body in a way I don’t want. And I’ve spent most of my life trying to stay just far enough outside of it to feel safe.
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