Читать книгу Starving In Search of Me - Marissa LaRocca - Страница 5

Foreword

I first met Marissa about ten years ago. I happened to be dating her twin sister Kristy at the time. We were all queer in our early twenties, each of us on an existential quest to understand ourselves in a world that was only beginning to unfold.

Marissa had an eating disorder back then. The first time I came to understand the severity of it was one Christmas when I accompanied Kristy and Marissa’s family to their Aunt and Uncle’s house. We all ate a good amount of food—first an array of appetizers, then an array of dinner options, and a colorful array of desserts. Soon after, I found Marissa locked in the bathroom in the basement and she confided in me that she was struggling with what she had consumed. I was able to identify because I’d gone through an eating disorder myself just a couple of years prior and was still very familiar with the urges. From then on it was something we would talk about every now and then, whenever we found ourselves on someone’s stoop smoking a cigarette after a few drinks.

Another memory comes to mind simply because there’s irony in it—I was lying on the beach with Kristy, reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Kristy and I were deeply interested in Buddhist philosophy. In the process of defining ourselves, and our relationship, we were drawn to the lessons presented by this book: All life is a series of present moments; Pain is the result of resisting things we cannot change; The ego is a powerful weapon that need not limit or define us—we can free ourselves from suffering by cultivating self-awareness and not judging our thoughts.

On this particular day, we invited Marissa to sit with us to read and watch the ocean but, instead, Marissa was revved up in her running shorts and sneakers, ready to burn calories by running laps around the beach. The irony was that Kristy and I were reading a book about surrendering to the present moment and Marissa was running, quite literally, away from it. She was running away from herself in the way so many young women do.

I was just nine years old when I first considered the relationship between food and my body. I had a ballet teacher pinch my love handle fat and say, “Don’t go telling your parents I called you fat.” By the age of eleven or twelve, there were weeks when all I’d eat were peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And into my teen years, I was primarily anorexic. I calculated every calorie that went into my body, consuming under five hundred calories some days. Of course, my dance teachers all praised my petite frame. I got cast in every lead role in every ballet show we put on. And the more attention I got, the more it reinforced this notion that starving myself was good. Starving myself was my ticket to opportunities and admiration I would not have otherwise received. Restricting my diet to such an extreme was difficult to keep up with, considering the amount of dancing I was doing, so I’d have “binge days,” which left me feeling indescribably horrible. I never purged; I just couldn’t bring myself to do that. But I definitely had days where I danced for four hours, ate very little, and completed an hour of Tae Bo before bed.

In a recent conversation, Marissa asked me, “Do you consider yourself fully healed from your eating disorder?” In my response I said, “I don’t think I can consider myself healed unless I considered myself broken before, and I never considered myself broken.” Mental disorders don’t define people or their state of being. They are just experiences we have along our journeys to learning who we are. Do I allow food to control me now? No. Do I starve myself? Definitely not; I consider nourishing my body to be one of my highest priorities. So, the simple answer would be, “Yes, I consider myself healed.” I consider myself happy and healthy. But do I still have moments? Days? Thoughts? Yes, of course. I relate my recovery to that of any addict. You can be an alcoholic and sober for years, but you’re still an alcoholic. The difference is you’ve learned to become stronger than your thoughts and get in touch with something deeper in yourself, or something bigger than you, which gives you a perspective that enables you to make healthier decisions for your own well-being. This is the closest thing to “healed” that I think I can be: focused on self-love and willing to surrender to one day at a time.

As a YouTube vlogger, plant-based advocate, and LGBTQ activist, I’ve had the privilege of touching the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. I receive hundreds of messages daily, mostly from girls thanking me for helping them in big or small ways just by being ME and sharing what I’ve been through. I say this in my videos constantly, but if I could send one message to young people today, it would be this: YOU ARE WORTHY. I truly believe in my heart that every single human being on this planet has purpose and massive potential, and too often it goes unrealized. Since “recovering” from my own addictions, I am able to see self-harm and self-hate as ways in which the negative energy in the world (or the dark sides within us) try to bring us down and shut off our light so we can’t shine. I say, be your own kind of beautiful. Speak out. Share who you really are. Prove society wrong.

I think Starving in Search of Me is a significant work of honesty that is going to provide company and hope to many who are struggling with the weight of a world that isn’t always easy to stand out in. Now more than ever before, I think that young people need courageous voices like Marissa’s to guide and reassure them that what makes them different is what makes them beautiful. And what makes us suffer makes us human—we are all connected to one another through shared experiences of triumph, failure, and vulnerability.

If you’ve ever struggled with an eating disorder, or any other form of self-harm or addiction, I am confident that what you are about to witness in the coming pages will resonate and gracefully navigate you toward hope, meaning, and light. In my opinion, Marissa has accomplished something pretty substantial here—she’s found a way to articulate in words the intangible depths of an experience that is hers, and all of ours.

About Kate 1

Also known as Kate Fruit Flowers, Kate is a popular influencer on YouTube, notable for LGBTQ and vegan-friendly content which garnered her 200,000 subscribers. She began studying the effects of a holistic plant-based approach in 2009.