Try This at Home, Kids!

Try this at home, kids:
Take a deep breath.
Hold it for a week.
Record observations if still alive.

What happens when you try stopping an unconscious habit for a week? One tends to lose their shit, that's what.

They say that stopping will let you in on why you do it in the first place; you can't know why you need it unless you stop. What they don't say is that the noise in your head will get a lot louder, that you won't be able to hear anything else, and that other habits will play understudy, contaminating your supposedly purely scientific experiment in abstinence.

The other kicker is that while you're conducting said experiment and losing your shit, you can't actually tell anyone you're climbing the walls because you're supposed to be done with this crap. You feel like screaming when your family says "you're doing so well!" because what they really mean is "we haven't had to commit you in years!" So you see, you can't tell them diddly squat. So you don't.

If Your Car is Broken, Don't Fuel It

It's lonely broadcasting to no one. However, it creates an odd sense of quiet, like you can whisper things into vacant space, things that no one knows, and hear them echoed back to you in reassurance that you're still here.

I'm still here.

Nothing has been figured out yet, and I wonder - not for the first time - whether food and I were ever meant to be buddies. For 8 and 1/2 years I have railed against it and rejected it, regimented it, mutilated and decimated it. Now it rejects me, refusing to stay. The game has changed: where once I felt mastery over it, it now ravages the body and turns it into a shell. It would not be so bad if the shell had been carved out by me; I would have felt a sense of control and accomplishment at reducing the amount of space it took up and the pressures it exerted on other people. Instead I feel cheated. I played no part in this alteration, and feel like saying, "fuck it."

If your car is broken, don't fuel it.

This is different from bulimia - needing fuel, one gorges and then gives it back - and anorexia - despite needing fuel, one refuses to fill the tank. This is different because there is a degree of agency within those entities - ultimately one chooses what to do. Here, there is absence of agency. Things have simply stopped working and food is the enemy not because I deem it to be so, but because the body is rejecting it all on its own. If there ever was a case for dualism, it's here: the brain and body behaving independently of one another, not on speaking terms and refusing to reconcile.