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???.::o is for obsession::. _ ___
************************************************************************* ‘Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.’
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I always was obsessed with something; I think that if I wasn’t then I would feel my life to have no meaning. But I didn’t like being obsessed, I hated the way that my mind would keep returning to the same thing when I wanted to think about other things. I would often cut when the obsessions got too much, when I couldn’t stop thinking about it and going round in circles. Anything to distract myself from the constant pressure inside of my head. I think that some of my obsessions were also dangerous. I thought about death so much and planned my suicide so much that I wanted to get the thing over with to save thinking about it all the time. By constantly considering death I was gradually convincing myself that I wanted to die, particularly as it always confused me and I wanted control over how and when I died. I was at a time obsessed by food, always working out when I could next eat, bargaining with myself. Or deciding how I intended to avoid food that evening. I became quite good at mental arithmetic as a result of all the calculations constantly whirring around in my head. Every spare moment I would be calculating how many calories I must have had that day. I burnt one kilocalorie per kilogram per hour so every hour I would subtract the appropriate figure from the total, a total often already in the negative region. Every time I walked anywhere I would calculate how many calories I must have used for that. I would at first drastically underestimate, then drastically overestimate and then give a more sensible figure, just so that I could spend all my time working it out, even while I was in lessons and couldn’t move more than to bounce my knees up and down constantly. Did I have 0.3 calories of diet coke or 0.4? Better count it as it 0.5 to be safe. At the same time I was also obsessed by my weight. I would weigh myself after any slight change might, potentially, have occurred. So every time I ate drank, threw up, went to the toilet, washed, brushed my teeth... anything. I became convinced that toothpaste made me put weight on so I stuck to putting only water on my toothbrush after that. Until I stopped brushing them altogether. I recorded my morning and night weights on my graph so that I could keep track of how I was getting on. I had obsessions in the way that I ate, having to eat certain foods according to rules. Like yoghurt: when I was anorexic yoghurt was a food I particularly favoured. I ate it with my little blue plastic baby spoon, dipping it in before wiping the yoghurt off again. I would then rest the spoon my tongue, letting it absorb the yoghurt from the back of the spoon. This obsession soon stopped when I developed bulimia and drank the stuff to make throwing up easier, but I would always go back to it when I felt anxious. I would also get obsessed with particular people as I became dependent on them and was terrified of losing them. Something funny was my obsession with Hannibal Lector. I would get quite upset that he wasn’t real, that I couldn’t live with him as does Clarice Starling in Thomas Harris’ books. Everyone who witnessed my outburst following an insult about him thought I was sick for liking him but I was quite in love with him, a fictitious serial killer, although he would have never loved me back. Perhaps it was because he is so clever and I just wanted someone to understand me, to rescue me. Or perhaps I wanted someone to control me, make decisions for me and look after me. |
