the letter you will never read

When you talk to me about your meal prepping and your quinoa and your bloating, I hear a legacy of hatred in between your breaths. You sound upbeat, even optimistic, about how these choices will change your life for the better. I could be part of it too if I give it a shot.

What you don’t seem to recognize is that I have already given that lifestyle a million chances. Eating clean is the same as eating less is the same as eating nothing is the same as gastric bypass is the same as intermittent fasting is the same as liposuction is the same as banging your head against a brick wall. I don’t need to try this new thing because it is not new at all.

Forcing myself to change because I’m a woman and our culture normalized hatred of women a long time ago and we haven’t gotten around to changing it outside of enfranchisement is not what I want to be doing with my life. It once was. If you can’t beat them, join them, right? The problem was that I could never join them. I never hated myself skinny enough or tan enough or talkative enough or sexy enough or witty enough or subdued enough. Humanity always betrayed the lie.

It is not about the vegetables. It is not about the exercise bike. It is about how the vegetables and the exercise bike are meant to define you. How you are good now because you ate this, not that. Then, you are bad because you ate that, not this. However, you can also be bad if you always eat this, not that, because that makes you unrelatable.

You’re better than this because everyone is better than this. Everyone is superior to listening to thousands of advertisements every single day because that is the only way to experience culture at this point.

I’ll tell you what should be more organic: our culture. We should grow it at home instead of outsourcing to a music industry that divorces sexuality from humanity, to a film industry that packages advertisement as art products, to a government that polices and marginalizes, and to a health industry that shames those it was once tasked with saving.

Instead, you buy more organic broccoli, snap a photo for your internet nutritionist, and count the calories like chalk on a prison wall. You cannot trick your body with gimmicks or micronutrients. You are here because our ancestors survived famine (by storing fat), survived pregnancy and childbirth (by storing fat), and trekked across the world (in search of food). You punish yourself for the gift you have received.

Why can’t you look like a photoshoot-ready corpse? I don’t know. Probably because your body is prepared to save your life over and over again even as you are hellbent to starve yourself into oblivion. If our ancestors looked like the idols the media forces down our throats, then we would all be dead. Emaciated, malnourished people generally do not survive famines or war or eighteenth-century ocean crossings.

The only words I have to say to my body today are thank you. I know that is not what you would say to my body, but my body has not saved you from the hell that has consumed me. In the past, I would have expressed more gratitude toward the family, classmates, and teachers that humiliated me than I would toward myself. Those days have come and gone.

I’d rather do anything else than starve myself today. I’d rather do anything else than look at pictures of soulless celebrities today. I’d rather do anything else than pay for my own torture.