deoridhe | Dismantling Myths

I have spent the last year dismantling a myth, and I'm finally beginning to see some progress.

I call it a myth because it is something that is not based on literal truth but which has the power to change my behavior. I consider myths the truths that are not literal, or are beyond literal, which inform and alter my life. This is a particularly personal myth, and one that has made my life more difficult for the last decade, at least, and possibly the last decade and a half.

Chocolate (and sugar) make me happy.

I picked up this myth between the ages of eight and twelve. Those of you who know me now would not have recognized me before; I was a skinny, active child with incredibly strong and present emotions. I ran everywhere, loved being around people, and once an emotion was experienced it was gone again. I did not hold grudges and affection came easily to me. I was particularly affectionate toward the sad, and had several people I would adopt and try to be friends with simply because they seemed sad or lonely. I was an endless fount of energy.

When I was eight, my parents separated, and every other weekend I went to my father's. He was usually at work or not around. I spent my allowance on candy from the seven eleven in the parking lot of his apartment complex, and after a while - when I ran out of allowance - I started to steal from my father. He either never noticed or never cared. When my father was around, we'd make throw-ins, which were pasta dishes made with cheese and whatever else we could find in the kitchen. The neighborhood he lived in had no playgrounds and no other children. I spent my weekends watching television and eating and stopped caring what my body or clothing looked like.

When I was eleven or twelve, my father married his girlfriend. At the time, I loved her. I got drunk on champaign because I didn't realize it was alcohol and they wouldn't bring me any soda. At some point soon after, she told me I could no longer wrap my father around my little finger.

I spent every other weekend eating and watching television. I started timing when I slept and was awake to when as few people as possible would be around. I could never tell if I would be treated well or abused, so I was careful. I developed a fear of entering a room with people in it, and became good at placing people in the house so I wouldn't walk in on them when I wasn't on guard. One night, while drunk, my stepmother woke me up to scream obscenities at me, then hit my brother. People didn't speak to me very much, and listened to me even less. The first summer I spent at my father's house, I came back silent, depressed, and twenty five pounds heavier. My mom tells me it took me months to get me to offer up topics of conversation or even answer questions. I had tuned out of the world.

I descended into a fantasy world of adventures - almost always Cinderella-esque. I learned to fake being interested and to smile when I didn't want to. I learned how to leave a room so no one would notice. My best friend of the time came with me one weekend, but my father lost his temper and started screaming and slamming things because he was hungry, and she never came back. I got used to being alone every other weekend, and being unable to join anything because I had to go there. I got used to not existing while I was there. I began to wonder if, after long enough, I would disappear. My stepmother, angry because I didn't want to wear pants, fitted me out in shorts and layered polo tops in the preppy style. I was told I was fat and that bicycle gears could be greased with my hair (most likely true, in retrospect).

I was over identified with my mother and told I was greedy, and bitchy, and manipulative like her. I picked a best friend who would try to seduce any boy who showed interest in me, up to an including kissing or having sex with many of them. I became obsessed with random, empty people. In the afternoon, I would go home and sit around and eat. My only exercise was walking home after I got into a fight on the bus after school and almost attacked a boy in my school. My mom put me into counseling, and tried me in a diet program (weekly exercise and food advice), but I would go to my father's every other weekend and eat and eat and eat.

Sometimes I think I ate to make myself bigger so that people would have to notice me. Sometimes I think I ate because I had nothing else to do. Sometimes I think I ate because of the full feeling it would give me. Ultimately, the original reasons are really unimportant; I walked away from that decade with two myths: 1) I don't really exist and 2) chocolate (and sugar) make me happy.

The first myth I tackled first. Quite frankly, it's the more damaging of the two from a universal point of view. After all, it doesn't much matter whether chocolate makes me happy or not if I don't really exist. The second has more recently become an issue because, you see, I'm tired of being fat. In order to stop being fat I have to build in new myths that will motivate me to exercise and eat healthy food, and dismantle old myths that keep me sedentary and eating unhealthy food.

I'm finally seeing progress, after two years of noting how food made me feel and what I felt after eating different things. I now know that a little chocolate tastes good, but more than a little starts to make me fill ill and a lot makes me feel very ill. I know that I tend to reach and stuff and not pay attention to what I'm eating. I know that I go to the kitchen when I'm bored, even if I'm not hungary, and that if I don't eat I start to feel sick. I know that I need variety in my food, or I don't want to eat it, and that if I eat some sweets I want to eat more, but if I stop eating them I start to want to eat them less. I know that exercise makes me bouncy and helps me sleep better as long as it's several hours before bed. I know that stretching makes me feel good, and that my posture is decent but I need more torso strength to have it be really good.

It's an oddly empowering thing, dismantling myths. I'm rather enjoying it.