"I'm just careful, that's all. I just want my surgery to be a success! I'm middle-aged, after all."
"Okay, so maybe I have been restricting a little, but I'm not in any real trouble. It's just not ideal"
long, drawn sigh
"I have been good for more than twenty years! Why?"
...
"Why now?"
...
You can have more than one hobgoblin
As I wrote about in my last blog post here about three weeks ago, I have to be honest: I think I'm dealing with (exhales) anorexia again.
Not to the depths that I did in 2003-04 and I know that I can pull myself out of it, but the restricting, the guilt, the substitution of normal thoughts and eating with imagining the things I want to eat and make and looking up recipes... it's all coming together.
While it's never the time, it's most definitely not the time now: my surgery has been booked for June 1 (yay! finally!) and I want everything just right. To give myself the best possible chances at quick and successful healing.
Leading up to this surgery, I have had to keep periodic track of my height and weight in advance. In doing so, I have been quickly reminded why regular access to a scale is not something I've had since being in recovery the first time. Those metrics can be pretty seductive (number go down!) and quickly displace any more rounded logic.
I won't put any numbers here, but I will say that the last weigh-in saw me very close to crossing into a problematic zone on a certain flawed-but-nevertheless-widely-used index.
And frankly, you didn't need that figure to know what I've been doing, of course. It shows in my body, my face, and until recently, my colouring.
Dysphoria doesn't know anything
I would be lying if I said that it had nothing to do with dysphoric feelings (it's fuel in an ready tank), but it's also true that undernourishment often works at cross-purposes with advancing transition.
- Am I a member of the IBTC because of genes? (Looks at family tree) or because I'm not getting enough? (Looks at family tree again)
- Is me not getting enough doing anything for my figure? It doesn't seem to be.
- Is me not getting enough doing anything about my ribcage? No. It can't anyway, but in concert with the above, it's making its proportions all the more obvious.
- Is my not getting enough doing anything about my face? No. I feel worse about it as things get increasingly angular and I feel like a certain late-80s fast food advertising campaign.
- Is not getting enough doing anything about my voice? No. That's silly. In fact, it may make it worse, as I get more acid-y, leaving me with a rougher-sounding voice.
The thing is that it's not getting me any closer to my goals and I'm just now largely paranoid that if I start regaining a little (as I really ought to), that it will accrue in all the wrong places.
Which it may!
That's a risk.
But it also may not and hormones ought to help at the very least.
Why make it public like this?
In my decades of experience, eating disorders really like the metaphorical cover of night to do their best work. A conspiracy of silence really allows it to blossom and grow. At my expense.
It may come, it may go, but it never really leaves.
Naming it and putting it out there, I have generally found, allows me separate myself from it and work to pull away from it.
April 26, 2026