Beauty and the Beast

Unsurprisingly, this is a post on beauty; and Beauty and I have a rather strained relationship.

I can be beautiful, I know that - I can make myself so, I can pull myself together, I can focus my mind and I can seem that way to others, if I just focus enough, if I'm having a good day.

Beauty is an effort I make, a mask I put on, but it is not my natural state.

I feel like a monster underneath, hideous, inappropriate, crudely sensual in all its repulsive glory and glorious repulsiveness.

I feel that if I'm not careful, if I relaxed too much, that natural state would come through, would break its way out to the exterior.

I feel that sometimes, when I don't look into a mirror for a while, my features begin to shift without my constant scrutiny - the edges sharpened and the angles blunted, the brows protruding and the chin receding, the eyes sinking deep into their sockets - and then, when by chance I catch a glimpse of myself in a darkened window after nightfall, I look like a Gargoyle, I have turned into something dangerously close to what nature intended me to be.

It's in my body and my mind - the monster is inside, but it would also be outside if it got even the slightest chance.

My body seems to be straining, constantly, to transform itself into that monstrous form against my desperate and ever-more-exhausted attempts to restrain it.

My limbs, my fingers, my feet, seem straining constantly to develop in a crude and gangly fashion, to stand off at odd angles and curl up into themselves, my joints are straining to grow gnarly and repulsively swollen, my back is straining beyond belief to arch itself into a hunched and croony form.

My skin is straining constantly to break out into festering pustules and ulcerous pimples all over my body, to grow hair that will cover me whole, to hold on to any kind of filth and stain that might come its way.

My flesh is straining to expand, to break out in masses of fatty tissue obscuring the form of my skeletal frame underneath.

That would be me, I feel, if I wasn't careful, if I didn't take any pains to hide it - a monster, winged and horned, with huge gluttonous lips smacking in delight over a greasy, pimpled chin.

And every day I try to make believe, I bathe, I shower, I scrub, I shave, I run, I restrict, I clean, I push; I do my hair and I treat my skin, I cover with makeup any pimples or redness, I dress my body to hide the fat that is pushing to the surface, I push my body to its limit in order to burn it, I paint my lashes, adorn myself with jewelry and a false smile, I open my eyes wide and I purse my lips in an appealing fashion.

I do everything to hold onto the last vestiges of self-control, to become prim and proper and clean and neat and pretty, everything that society smiles upon and would wish a human being to be.

While in truth - I am meant to be a monster, I am fit to live in a cave and scare away small children with my unashamed hideousness; heck, I am probably fit to eat them.

I don't want to feel like this all the time, on the verge of breaking into ugliness befitting a creature of gruesome legend, of gluttony and hideousness meant to be cited in cautionary tales.

I don't want to go through the motions everyday, straining to make myself appear as if I had any business at all in the realm of beauty.

Still I do, because the alternative seems ever more terrible, and I am not ready yet to let the Beast win - despite the monstrosity that I feel underneath, I am not willing to give up on beauty.

Goals

To update; I did finally manage to calm down last night, although it took forever.
Blogging proved to be quite cathartic though, and major thanks to Ancora and Athanasy for your helpful and supportive comments, love you guys to bits! <3

Despite no sleep and feeling utterly shitty, I also passed an oral exam today - but it was rather gruesomely embarrassing, I only just made it by a narrow margin.
Did I feel relieved when it was done with, anyway?

Let me put it like this - say you spend several months being brutally tortured in a dungeon by some absolutely merciless abomination straight from the depths of hell; you might rightfully abound in joy when you are finally freed and the entire ordeal is over.
Much more likely though, you will be too scarred and traumatised by the experience to feel any relief at all - and that was what that exam felt like.

(obligatory PC addendum: I am not a complete moron, and I do realize no actual real-life torture experience compares to something as trite and mundane as an exam. I'm doing this for comedic hyperbole, obviously - and because, in my crazy pathetic mind, it really felt THAT bad to get another chance to show myself just how much of a worthless worthless loser I really am.)

Anyway, I digress, so on the topic of goals:

I want to be carful about setting them weight-wise - disappointment is already a major theme in my wretched little brain, and I don't want to set myself up for more of the same.

Still, there is this:
In less than a month, less than three weeks really, I will be attending a concert of a band I adore.
I happen to have reasonable cause to suspect, nay fear, that this concert might also be attended by The Coward, the Boy That I Still Long For Despite Knowing That I REALLY Shouldn't.

And his new girlfriend, of course.

From what I hear through mutual friends, they never do anything separately anymore.
So if either of them is there, the other will be.

And then I will be meeting a personalized nightmare of loss and rejection in double force, instead of enjoying a relaxing evening where I shut everything out of my brain except for the music.

The thing is (and I use that phrase way too often lately), that I know weight is pretty much the one issue where I can get to her.

I happen to know that she is equally messed up as I am in the food department, that weight and clothes sizes hold the same morbid appeal for her, and that she defines herself, much as I do, through the space that is or isn't visible between her thighs.

So of course, the petty bitter side of me dictates that I have to be super skinny, that I have to fuel her insecurities by nourishing my own, that I have to beat her at being thin at least if I can't beat her at winning his love.

If I have to run the risk of running into her, into them, then I would love for her to be shocked and envious at the sight of me.
I know that I am grasping for straws and that my attempt at physical superiority to her is petty; but that's what you would expect from a bitter person, it's the best I can do.

I am unsure what my goal for those three weeks should be though, how much I would want to have lost by then.
I'm out of touch with what is even realistic, what I am actually capable of achieving.

So, I think I'm going to give it a few more days, see how I'm doing and where I'm at, then try to decide what goal would be achievable and sufficient for my petty revenge.

Operation Skinny For The Wrong Reasons starts tomorrow... (There's always another reason to starve, isn't there? And right now I'm damn glad about it, I need incentive to stay on track; I could pretty much use incentive for a lot of things these days.)

Positive Thought of the Day:

I absolutely adore the girl I'm stealing for today's picture, her outlandish glamorousness, her almost inhumane body posture in that glittering suit - very David Bowie Ziggy-Stardust-era; also reminds me of the foam-spilling poise of his alien character in The Man Who Fell to Earth in a way.

(Bowie himself never seems to eat, does he? Certainly didn't during the seventies, when he lived on "red peppers, milk and cocaine"...
Alas, that doesn't really seem like a recommendable long-term plan either.... still, I wouldn't mind to posses the otherworldly razor-blade-ish grace of the Thin White Duke.)

Cal count standing at 550 and I'm actually going to bed now, because I feel like a walking trainwreck - so that's quite agreeable!

Eldritch Abomination

So... I sorta kinda majorly binged today.
It wasn't even just one giant binge, but continuous piling on of calories throughout the entire day in absolutely unnecessary amounts.
I had every intention to keep counting, though, so as to hold myself responsible.

I think the worst thing one does when bingeing is to get that feeling of complete abandon, like the world could end in a fiery blaze and it wouldn't matter, and fuck it, I'm not even counting the calories right now because the balance is so obviously shot to hell.

For me that's always a way to avoid feeling properly horrified, to avoid facing the consequences of my actions - I don't even want to know that devastating number in irrevocable precision; I do not want my head to spin at the exact account of what I have just devoured.
It's like a Lovecraftian Horror - the mere sight of it will make you go insane with frenzied despair.

So, I stop counting during a binge.
But , as we all know , sticking your head into the sand doesn't accomplish anything - I need to face up bravely to what I have done so that I can do better tomorrow.

... yeah, so far for theory.
In praxis, of course, I couldn't handle it.

I did have every intention to, but finally stopped in abject horror when I was starting to inch past 2000 and still could not bring myself to quit.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, the Eldritch Abomination that is my bingeing calorie intake wins again.

Basically, it adds up to me consuming a quantity of food that could have fed a small village of less idiotic individuals. (Much the same as a Cthulhu-ish monster would consume the village itself, ha. Bet that adds up to a lot of calories... not to mention that I totally feel as huge as Cthulhu right now.)

God, I shouldn't be joking about this.
It's gross. Utterly disgusting, despicable gluttony in its purest form, a real proper binge after not even 3 days of moderate restricting.

... which is, yeah, pretty fucking miserable.
I know I need to step away from this kind of behavior if I ever want to stop being cripplingly unhappy with myself again.

Yet I mustn't allow myself to wallow in my failure and be overwhelmed by self-hatred and despair. There's always a chance to do better tomorrow, and I need, no I WILL be focussing myself on that.

As a side effect since starting this blog, I have noticed that the general re-focussing on food avoidance and weightloss has served to pointedly alleviate the acuteness of my depression.
Maybe that's why I'm always happiest when I'm doing this, "getting skinny"... yeah, I know, revolutionary thought, that - the entire calorie-counting game is just something we do to keep our minds off of more unpleasant things anyway, big fucking surprise there.

I'm sorry, I'm a bit of the cheap-mouthed cynic right now due to my own (literally) enormous failure.
I'm feeling deplorably weak; I just wish I was one of these girls that simply don't eat without making a fuss about it, firm resolve and no bitching about the struggle and the slip-ups.

One "nice" thing that I binged on were frozen strawberries though, which was good because a) they barely make a dent in the calorie count obviously and b) sucking on frozen berries on a hot day is one of my favourite pastimes in general.

They also colour your hands a lovely shade of purple/red when you are grabbing them out of a cardboard box one by one, so you can look like you have just committed gruesome slaughter while walking along in the sunshine or sitting down in a park.

Mmpfh, wish I'd stuck to them...