What’s Her Name?
Photo by Fernando Rodrigues
The voice in my head. The one that tells me my body doesn’t look right. That says that the food I eat expands my waistband two sizes. The one that shames me when I don’t eat and then guilts me when I do - She is vile. She talks me down when I’m trying to climb up. She is the hand that pushes my head underwater while I’m trying to catch a breath of air. She is relentless in her attempt to ruin my image of myself.
If I’m honest, She has done it. She has accomplished what she set out to do.
Until now.
Her voice is loud and bold. She speaks in security, thinking that I will never escape from the cuffs She locked me in long ago. She is everything I never wanted to be, but all I have become.
Every bite of food is filled with guilt. It tears apart my mental state and has me restricting when all I want to do is eat. Every meal skipped is doused in not just mental pain but physical pain, but if I eat, getting it out is the priority. If I don’t sadness consumes me. It’s become a no-win situation.
This voice in my head is persistent.
This voice is rampant.
This voice has my mind locked in an escape room I can’t seem to riddle my way out of. The worst part is knowing that while I have my whole life ahead of me, time is fleeting.
(I don’t think She knows that includes her.)
Sometimes She gets quiet.
Which is nice.
But I don’t trust Her to be gone for long.
It’s like She is not just sitting in the shadows, silently watching, but She is the shadows. Waiting for me to puzzle my way out of one room so that the next is more difficult. She matches my growth in difficulty. She studies me while I heal, then chips at the glue until I feel ten steps backward.
Her eyes are black holes freckled in pain. Her figure is everything I am not. She glows in rejection and smells of desire. Her hair flows in waves of shame and guilt. Her voice sings out my deepest insecurities. She walks in strides leaving hopelessness behind her for the starved, desperate follower to consume. I see my leash as She leads. Everything She is bleeds off Her in unlimited supplies, dissolving into my energy field which is absorbed and redistributed throughout my mind.
She holds my power over my head and laughs while I try to get it back. Jumping to grab it, while She grows. My attempts to shut Her down, build Her up.
Then there are those moments when I ground into myself, and I find Her getting weak. I stop feeding into Her energy. She hates that, so she goes a little harder. Pushes a little deeper and either uproots my energy or starts to dissolve.
The disillusionment of Her presence leaves a gaping open space in my mind, my soul, and my body. A space I often forget to fill. A space She comes back to because it’s accidentally left open for Her.
She is nameless. She just is. She is the kind of power that exists only in a false reality. A reality that if broken would shatter my view of what I have allowed myself to become and the world I have chosen to live in. And then I wonder which is scarier: Living in a world that doesn’t exist or one where She doesn’t exist.
Love Always,
Riss
