Trust

I think this one is a hard one for me. I'm realizing that Project 28 is really a project about trusting that my body will somehow get to where it needs to be.

Ten official days into my project, I decided to get on a scale. When I brainstormed this Project 28 initially, I thought that I would weigh myself just once a month to make sure things are on track, which is also something the nutritionist recommended doing (but no more than once every 2 weeks, because numbers fluctuate naturally).

But I found myself at the gym, feeling defeated, like I had been too lenient with myself, missing a few workouts, eating a few too many carbs. I felt my body (shoulders, neck, chest) tighten up as I got onto the gym scale and when I looked down at my hands, I noticed my fingers were crossed. It's funny how our body can respond without our knowing it. I looked around. I felt like I would get in trouble, like one of the clinic nurses would sneak up on me from behind and give me a lecture about how "numbers aren't important" and how I'm "derailing my trust in the program by looking at a scale".

This is the thing. I spent a lot of time in clinics in my early twenties, getting manipulated by patriarchal authority (I would say, as someone who theorizes disability and psychiatric history for a living, that mainstream eating disorder treatment, supported by organizations like NEDA, are the vestiges of psychiatric institutionalization--I'm sure I'll write more about this later), being taught not to trust my body or my own intuition, but to "trust the program". I remember my first meal in the clinic when I felt I couldn't fit a sandwich, my stomach tightening against my sides, acid searing my esophagus, the director of the clinic saying, "You can't trust your body. You've trained your body to be too unhealthy. Trust the program." Trusting the program meant trusting him, trusting a treatment model designed for anoretics by insurance companies statistically designing how to pay the least amount of money. I wasn't an anoretic. I didn't need to gain weight. And I did need, because of my internal bleeding near my aortic artery, to not have heartburn. I involuntarily threw up, blood, minutes after that meal. Perhaps the heartburn should have told me something--told the treatment team something. That solid food was not what my body needed. That I had nearly no digestive system. Perhaps my cardiac arythmias, what I felt so intimately alone in my dorm room, what eventually scared me enough to get into treatment in the first place, should have been the thing "trusted".

But of course, my body was sick.
My intellect and intuition could not be trusted.
Someone else must watch me, bathroom door open.
Someone else must keep track of my "numbers", to be reported every day to an insurance company (weight, electrolytes, ekg) so that they could decide when treatment was done.

What I'm learning is that this Project 28 cannot be determined by numbers. It must be determined by trust. And trust is not a science.

Needless to say, despite the oreos, pizza, and general stress of moving, the scale told me I am right on track. And knowing that renewed my trust.