Fasting after anorexia

with a recipe for detox dhal soup

I don’t know what age I was when I said, ‘I could never be anorexic because I like my food too much’, but whatever age it was I spoke too soon. The demon that is anorexia closed its claws around my brainstem and dragged me down to its subterranean abode. At first I didn’t mind it there. It was cool and dark and there wasn’t any of the bustle of this above ground place. No Christmas lights, or shopping centres, or roads. But after a time I started to smell the stench of rotting bodies, of mass graves and of land fill, and felt the dig of exploratory probes. And I realised that even here I couldn’t escape the detritus of civilisation. So I looked for a way out.

Its difficult, finding your way out of an anorexia demon’s den. The way out is not the same as the way in. There are underground pathways to navigate, hidden cracks and crevices that mostly lead further in and further down. The further in and further down I went the darker and hotter it got until I thought I might suffocate. And then I did suffocate. All the breath was sucked out of me and I saw that my body was not my body after all. It was amorphous, like mud.

Eventually I did get out. I found an upwards leaning crevice and traversed it all the way to the light, filling my lungs with the fiery heat of daytime. Still, sometimes I find myself wanting to return to those underground kingdoms, seeking that experience of being removed for a time from all the ills of this world. Of finding my body again dissolved. And fasting is one way to do this.

I am walking along Brunswick St towards the city in the early evening. An older man wearing a hat stops me and tells me I am beautiful and asks if I will sit for him. He’s a sculptor and thinks I would make a good subject. I don’t know how to answer. I am thin but no longer emaciated. And I am still on my downwards trajectory, trying to find a way out of the subterranean kingdoms of the demon that dragged me down. I don’t know what he means by ‘beautiful’. I’m scared that he thinks that my beauty is only skin deep. And his proposal arouses an inner conflict between the part of me that wants to be celebrated, in the way that all of life ought to be celebrated — for the beauty of its ferocious, clever, unnecessary, ridiculous strangeness — and those parts of me that want to die, that feel the closing over of death as a release from something worse than death — consumerism, the blankness of life without beauty, the pressures and values of an extractive, colonialist way of being that see something shiny and think it beautiful and want more, and more, and more, and more, and more. I take his card but do not contact him and instead I write an essay on beauty which I subsequently loose.

Before and after

Before, I used words to make the world more beautiful

to take its crevices and fill them up with sentences

to make structures in the emptiness of sky

Now I let that emptiness enter and inhabit my being

I search the crevices for light

With my words I wonder and describe

the incredible beauty of what is

Would it be frivolous of me to say that beauty kept me alive? In writing this I searched my computer for that original piece of writing and couldn’t find it. Instead I found my brainstorm for an essay competition run by the Uniting Church called, ‘The theology of beauty’. I began my unfinished work with reference to Saddam Hussein’s use of nitrate on the northern regions of Iraq — Iraqi Kurdistan. And to the writer, William Saroyan, whom I must have thought was Kurdish at the time. And somehow, the contrast of these two sums up everything there is to say about theology and beauty, that beauty exists in ways and forms that are hard to see and harder to decipher and it takes the eye of the artist or the language of a poet to translate it for us so that we can see it too. I also wrote this: Beauty is elusive, like sunlight captured in a jar, and brought home to look at when it is overcast.

For many years, the shadow of capitalism and human greed, and the monotony of a life lived for new curtains and specific makes of car, fell on my little jar of sunlight and the only beauty I could see or feel was that of chickens dumped over the front fence in an old church house in Coburg, and desperate lonely homeless derelict drug-addicted people who seemed to be the only real people to me. They embodied the state of the earth, the state of our deprivation, the state of our non-loving of that which sustains us, and I respected them for it and still do. And so I became one of them in the only way that seemed safe, by depriving myself of food.

Fasting after anorexia sets up a different set of challenges to fasting without it as a frame of reference. My body is attuned to receiving positive feedback from under-eating, and is overly familiar with ecstatic states brought on by starvation. Instead of asking, ‘How will I make it through?’, my questions were: ‘Will my organs cope with another period of food deprivation?’, ‘Will my heart fail?’, ‘Will the re-introduction of food trigger my anxiety and set me off again along that narrow winding path to the den of the demon?’

The den of the demon. When I was deep in the thick of it I used to drawn a small hunched form I called, ‘The Watcher’. The Watcher always squatted. The Watcher had talons on hands and feet. His head was same height as his shins, and his eyes took up most of it — two large, saucer-like moons, black as bitumen. His limbs were emaciated, the joints bulging just like mine. He was not the enemy and he was certainly not my friend but he was always there, watching.

Earlier this year I revisited a favourite book of mine called, ‘The spirit catches you and you fall down.’ Its about a Hmong girl living with her family in Merced, California. Lia is epileptic and in her culture her illness marks her out as someone who may become a txiv neeb. I was discussing the term with my teacher, mentor and friend, Bianca. In the book its translated into English as ‘a person with a healing spirit’. Anne Fadiman the author writes, ‘An established txiv neeb, summoned to diagnose the problem, may conclude from these symptoms that the person (who is usually but not always male) has been chosen to be the host of a healing spirit, a neeb. It is an offer that the sick person cannot refuse, since if he rejects his vocation, he will die. In any case, few Hmong would choose to decline. Although shamanism is an arduous calling that requires years of training with a master in order to learn the ritual techniques and chants, it confers an enormous amount of social status in the community and publicly marks the txiv neeb as a person of moral character, since a healing spirit would never choose a no-account host. Even if an epileptic turns out not to be elected to host a neeb, his illness, with its thrilling aura of the supra mundane, singles him out as a person of consequence.’ She uses ‘shaman’ and txiv neeb interchangeably, but shaman is a Tungus term and denotes a certain type of healer or spirit intermediary. When I talked to Bianca about the term txiv neeb, though I am not Hmong or epileptic, she asked if maybe my watcher was a healing spirit come to wait and see if I would say yes — to life and my vocation — or whether I would die. I still don’t have an answer to that question.

On the first day of my fast I was cranky. All I wanted to do was eat. The broth that I was scheduled to drink five times a day tasted awful, even though when I wasn’t fasting its flavour was good. I rested in bed for the most part and in the afternoon took the dog for a walk because I was intolerable to be with at home. Walking was challenging. My mind was anxious to remember what could or might be if I kept going down this path of not eating, rifling through its storehouse of discarded maxims — all those shoulds and coulds, and rules of conduct, all that needing to be less — trying them on my current state of mind. It was jockeying a fear that one of them might still fit. One tiny little sentence or frame of reference that had gone unnoticed, untested, for if even one of them fitted, then it would be my undoing.

For years I have told myself that there is nothing left from that time of self inflicted starvation, nothing of the hegemony of the mind and its unceasing need to count food and monitor every ounce of energy, used or unused. Twice now I have had periods of grief where I have been reluctant to eat and not pressured myself, and come good again after a few days. But to structure in a fast, without a corresponding experience that makes it natural for the body to want less, was ambiguous terrain. It required a mental discipline that bordered on anorexic ways of being. To make things easier I told myself I would break fast with a late lunch the next day. Circumstances pushed it back to late afternoon, by which time I was in the swing of things and did not feel a need to break fast, which is why I did.

Last week I had a car accident which was entirely my fault. Like the only other serious accident I have had, time slowed down. I pulled out to cross a busy road, I saw the car that had not been there a second before, I knew I couldn’t go back and slowed and saw him slow and knew there was no chance of the threads of our paths not entangling. He seemed to hit me twice. There was a double impact and then we were both still. Its good to be still after a thing like that. In the afternoon, my daughter who was in the car at the time went to her room and cried. She was overtired, doubtless still feeling the shock of the impact, and needing release. In the evening I went to a dance class. I didn’t want to talk to anyone in the room. I took a spot in the back of the room, attempted to follow a series of proscribed moves to music, felt my body obey to a certain extent, the promptings of my mind, and as I walked out the door and along the footpath behind three strong women who had danced with me, I felt the grief. It wasn’t grief over the accident. It was grief over the fact that my period of fasting and eating in ways to clear the body of all its toxic buildup was over. I knew then that those sticky hands that had once held me, could not keep me anymore.

I have read that an anorexic person feels special because they don’t eat. Which is true to an extent. But that feeling of being special isn’t what it seems. There’s hope in it. Hope of a possibility of not being embodied. Hope of a possibility that my presence here will not add to the insurmountable piles of human debris. Hope of being entirely without blame for the way we move and breathe and live in our post-modern world. Hope for the earth. That feeling of being special is a feeling of being blameless, because of not being embodied in the same way as others. Because of eating less or only certain things. Because of stepping outside of the life-destroying ways that our lives are now characterised by — excessive consumption, dependency on large scale extraction, resource-driven, entirely without devotion.

But we never can, not entirely, step outside of these ways, not without giving up our families, our friends, our lives. The hope of being blameless comes from a frame of reference that puts me outside of the circle of things that feed life. Outside of nature. Its a false frame of reference. Its alienating and soul destroying, and arises out of a false binary — either we feed life or we destroy it. Its a way of thinking and being that only adds to the piles of human debris, of wasteful things.

The grief of ending a fast after anorexia is the grief of stepping back into an embodied way of being, into the crush of life-destroying ways that are our habit, our rite of passage as westerners and adults. We have inherited a vast ocean of pain from which there is no release, only a careful unpicking, which sometimes becomes a vast unravelling from which we then have to recover those stray golden threads from which to make something new.

And I realise now that its possible to love food too much and be anorexic. For the love of food is a love of the flesh and of material things and of having a body. And having a body means being enmeshed in ways of being that destroy land and water and sky. It means having a form on which to carry the weight of ancestral baggage — colonisation, dispossession, greed, concealment, violence. It means having gravity, which is mass, which is a kind of stickiness that things stick to, that aren’t always nice. And being anorexic was an attempt to rid myself of those things, by ridding myself of as much of my body as it was possible to get rid of without getting rid of myself. But then, it becomes its own thing, a demon, a watcher, a subterranean school in being.

There are things now to anchor me in the life-ways of our kind, in the power and beauty of being part of the ebb and flow of life, of currents that both create and destroy. Devotional activity. Bead-making. Writing. Plants, plants and more plants. If you want to learn how to be on this earth in ways that are life-giving, ask the plants, they know the way. They also know the ways of destruction — of feeding off and feeding on. And so we circle back around to Saddam, to nitrate gas and a rising death toll, to William Saroyan and the beauty of words on a page. To the jagged contrast of destruction and beauty, things that feed life and things that destroy. And it would seem that its impossible to untangle them. Like the trajectory of my car with the one that collided into my driver’s side wheel, putting my front end out so that my car needed to be towed. As I watched the other driver watching me after the accident, waiting for me to tell him what to do, I could see that he had not seen the beauty of those moments, those elongated seconds between the time I pulled out and the time that we collided and came to rest. For every micro second of those moments was filled with a sound, the sound of all becoming, within which all things might come to be. And that sound is what animates me, that sound that I hear when I’m dreaming, when I’m cooking, when I’m enveloped in music, when a feeling of intoxication overcomes me, when I am fasting and my mind has been released of its anxiety about what was and is and what might be. That sound cannot exist outside of a framework of tetheredness, of being embodied.

Its something of a paradox, that the anorexic mind with all its rules and regulations cannot fathom: that that sound exists within frameworks of predetermination, within patterns and cycles of action and inaction that are set out in advance. The anorexic mind wants one or the other, the sacred not the mundane, the life-giving not the life-destroying, the sound without the silence, the impossible endless moment not the time-bound severed one. It doesn’t realise that both things can be true simultaneously — we can live in ways that are life-destroying and life-giving at the same time, we can exist in moments of timelessness in which anything might be possible and at the same time be part of a tapestry of threads whose paths are time-bound and preordained, we can be mothers, friends, pet owners, drive cars and watch movies, and still play host to a watcher, who is perhaps a neeb. And its only in the present moment that these seemingly exclusive things can exist simultaneously. Only the present moment can hold this degree of complexity. And it is this complexity that enables us to simultaneously fully transcend and fully inhabit the body, to consume and be consumed.

detox dhal soup — a recipe from Bianca Patetl’s ‘Spring detox’

this recipe forms the bones of a two week period at the heart of the detox. mung are very detoxifying and should be eaten on the day of cooking, which is not always practical, so I don’t always do it.

- a cup of mung beans

- 3 cups of water

- diced carrot, celery

- fresh or dry powdered turmeric

- salt

boil mung with chopped vegetables and turmeric until tender, or until the beans are completely dissolved. add unrefined salt to taste and top with fresh coriander. eat.

Originally published at https://apeasantskitchen.substack.com on January 16, 2023.