Fasting, Love and A Girl From India

HELLO BEAUTIFUL PERSONS!

I say "persons" because I was talking to a friend the other day about the nature of language and how it can be restricting in so many ways.  My friend is taking a feminist studies class, and they have been discussing the propensity of English to impose masculinity onto our species with words like "MANkind" and "huMAN" and the like.  I find this concept to be fascinating.  We do indeed live in a very male-centric society.  So I'll try to say person as opposed to human more often.  Although I don't think it will be very easy to adhere to this.  Because I love persons.  Humans.  Men.  Women.  Children.  All. :-)

I'm in a writing mood this morning (I wrote this short piece on culture and technology earlier on tumblr), and I feel that I do some of my best writing in the morning.  So I want to respond to some questions that I recently received from a girl in India who has been reading my blogs.  First off, I want to say "hi" to her directly, and to tell you all how flattered I was at her remarks about my writing.  She proceeded to consume a lot of my writing all in one sitting upon discovering my blog, which really made my day! :-) Thank you, sister!

The questions she asked about were about my fasting, and about how I found myself in a state of loving all people.  I will adress those both here.  Let's get started, shall we?

Fasting

So for those of you who don't know me personally (which you should) or do not follow my tumblr or tweets (which you also should), I will tell you that I have been experimenting with fasting of late.  I haven't gotten too far into it yet.  I have only recently completed my second 24-hour fast.

Some background information about myself and the way I consume food would be prudent here.  I am a person who loves food.  ALmost all food.  Except for seafood, which makes me wretch, normally.  I am not a vegetarian, because I love meat.

All of this looks absolutely delicious to me.  I know... I know... I just blew away all of my feminist street cred'.  Fuck it though. Girl is bangin' hot.

  I even love fast food.

Don't judge me.  This food all tastes great.  It is, in fact, designed to taste great and be addictive, after all.

I love having expensive steak and sushi and I love love love anything my mom ever cooks (except for "Chicken Tetrazini" which is... just disgusting. My sister and I made her stop making it).

I love food so much that I used to eat it way way too much.  I also had a severely distorted perception about how my body looked, and so I was in something of a trap: how do I lose weight (I perceived myself to be obese when I was not) while simultaneously eating pounds of delicious food at a time?  (And I do mean pounds.)

I started purging in an attempt to control my weight at a young age.  I would say the first time I did it I was probably around the age of 14.  At that time, I was legitimately overweight, although I still perceived myself then to be more overweight than I actually was.  I began using the ol' "finger down the throat" trick.  Doing that, I was able to make myself vomit up meals that I had eaten for a while.  My gag reflex began to become less sensitive though, and I began needing to use various implements other than my finger to make myself puke.  I used the handles of toothbrushes, pens, long thin kitchen spoons, and other such items.  

I recall at one point (and I may have related this story before) that I was driving across the Rocky Mountains, and I stopped at a town on the way to get some Wendy's.  I ate two huge sandwiches (probably a Classic Double and a Spicy Chicken Fillet, my favorites there) in addition to a large fry and a big "Frosty."  Now, normally when I would engage in this sort of behavior, I wouldn't have the idea at the outset to eat and then make myself vomit.  I would tell myself "you can eat it this once, and then you will just stop eating unhealthy and lose weight from here on out."

But immediately after my compulsive and addictive consumption, there came incredible, overwhleming guilt and self hatred.  The feeling of all that salty, greasy, yummy food in my stomach made me crazy.  So as I was driving, I decided to stop and purge.  I stopped at a rest area along the continental divide and went in to puke.  I had a pen about like this:

I knelt down in a stall.  There was no one else at the rest area at the moment.  My car was the only one in the parking lot.  I bent over the toilet and shoved the pen down my throat, holding it from the cap.  I puked.  And puked.  And puked.  And I started to feel that twisted relief of having eaten and then puked.  I shoved the pen down my throat for one more hard purge, and then some bad shit happened....

Here's a drawing of me almost dying.

That's right.  The fucking pen cap came off and the main portion of the pen started sliding way way farther down my throat than I ever wanted anything aside from food to slide.  (Blow-job joke, anyone?)  

I was alone.  I immediately thought I was going to die as I struggled against the reflex to swallow the pen farther down.  This was one of the most terrifying moments of my entire life.  It was by the grace of God herself that I was able to, in the end, barely snag the pen with my tumb and middle finger and drag it out before it disappeared all the way from my mouth and strangled me there alone kneeling before a toilet filled with puke and covered in someone else's piss.  Sad times, right?

Later on in life, I developed another means of purging myself, which was to take mad amounts of this:

Pretty messed up right?  Let me tell you that eating pounds of food in one sitting and then eating a quadruple dose of a stimulant laxative an hour later will really really give you a bad gut ache.  Later, I turned to this:

Milk of Magnesia

Milk of magnesia is non-stimulant, so there was a hope that it would do less damage to my sad abused body.  It turns out, though, that milk of magnesia is way way more effective as a laxative than stimulant laxatives such as Exlax.  I would drink like a quarter of a bottle of this shit at once, and soon enough, everything in my digestive system would come spraying out of my butt in a hurry.

I do mean spraying.  It was sometimes like a fire hose.  And it wasn't really normal poo.  More like greenish brown light soup of some kind.  Oddly enough, it never really gave me stomach cramps.  I just pooped a lot of fire hose liquid.  This is funny in retrospect.  Here's a video that kinda gives you an idea of what I was going through:

This was me, only I was less black and less funny. :-/

So needless to say, food and I have had an odd relationship over most of my life.  Generally speaking, I used food the same way I used alcohol and other mind-closing drugs: to numb myself.  I used the odd behavioral mechanism of purging to enhance my sense of control over myself.  

Which brings us to fasting.

When I was bulimic, I attempted frequently to be anorexic.  I would try to force myself to stop eating in order to lose weight because I thought that the reason I didn't have the proper life or the proper girls in my life were because I was disgusting to look at.  I was able to force myself to stop eating only very rarely, because food was an addiction to me.  I made it to a full twenty-four hours maybe once or twice in my vain attempts to control my issue.  I also had a few times where I didn't eat for some time due to intake of drugs like methamphetamine or cocaine.  But I don't think that any of that counts as fasting. 

This shit here will take away your appetite fast.  Not recommended.  A weak, mind-closing substance.   

Since earlier this spring when I realized that I didn't have to hate myself so much, I have easily ceased all bulimic or anorexic behavior, and obsessive thoughts about the way that I look have (finally) fallen by the way.  In the midst of my bizarre and surprising process of revelation, I realized a lot of other things about the world, and I realized that I might like to experiment with fasting.  The thought at the inception of this was my consideration of the fact that much of the world is hungry.  According to most figures that I have seen, the number of hungry humans in the world is about one billion.  That's a full seventh of the world.  This makes me genuinely very sad, when I consider the fact that we have the technology, the energy and the money to make this problem disappear in a matter of months.  I understand that global redistribution of wealth under current economic models is a difficult if not impossible task.  But I also think that current modes of economy are shit and should be abolished, and that the one billion hungry people (particularly the children in that number) ought to have at least enough food to sustain themselves.

Then I started thinking about the food that I consume, and how much it really costs.  On most days, now, and in most cases, I equate economic energy of any kind with calories, which are what a seventh of the world needs.  When I look at the way I used to eat, whether it was healthy or not, or whether the food came from a restaurant or I prepared it myself, I can see that there was a lot of potential calories being squandered in my diet.  As an American, I had a diet that consisted of a lot of meats and cheeses and highly processed foods.  Foods that are relatively expensive to produce and to transport.  Foods that were both bad for my health and gluttonous in the sense that I began to see myself as eating more than my fair share.

So I decided to try something different.  I started to eat things that were more economical.  One of the things I eat the most now are beans and rice.  Beans and rice are extremely economical.  I conserve my economic energy, which I equate to calories that can later be used to feed someone else, by eating beans and rice like this:

Yummy!

I frequently consume the beans and rice in burrito format as pictured below:

Shitty picture quality. Sorry. :-/

So as I began to reform the way that I ate, and as I began to minimize other portions of my life by ridding myself of excess, I was struck by the idea that maybe I could have something to gain from taking periods of time when I don't eat at all.

This quickly became a clear choice for me.  The following are the major factors that make fasting a clear choice for me:

1.  Fasting means not consuming, and not consuming means taking energy out of the hands of the American economy, which I believe to be an economy of death and war (see Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, East Timor and others).

2.  Fasting means reducing the amount of calories I consume in a world of finite resources where many people are starving.  

3.  Experiencing hunger (albeit highly controlled hunger) gives me a greater sense of empathy for that segment of the globe's population that is truly hungry and not in control of their hunger.

4.  Many of the major world religions endorse one form of fasting or another, which I believe to be some indication that fasting can lead to an increase in spiritual satiation.

5.  A study I read once showed that people who experience periods of brief famine in their lives tend to live longer.  It has something to do with the cell-death-clock.  Don't quote me on this.

6.  Fasting saves me money, and I am a debt slave for the time being so I need quite a bit of money before I can be free of that slavery.

7.  Fasting alters the way the brain works, and I believe that at some point, if I am able to extend my fasts to a certain point, I will be able to have alterations in consciousness due to altered body metabolism.

8.  Fasting requires a large amount of self-control, for me, because I love food and think about Qdoba and pizza every single day.  For me, self-control is a learned behavior that I acquire through practice, and I believe that fasting improves my skill with self-control, which is something I seek.

9.  Fasting brings a greater appreciation for delicious food when I do eat it.

10.  Fasting is something fun to blog about.

So, that's it.

I have completed two twenty-four hour fasts so far, and I believe I will try another one this coming week.  The first one was much harder than the second one, and the third one will likely be easier than the second was.  Once I become comfortable with the twenty-four hour timetable, I will be interested in pushing it up to thirty-six hours and then perhaps to forty-eight hours.  I do not feel compelled by these goals though, and as per usual, everything in my life is subject to immediate change upon my receiving new self-awareness.  So I don't know how long I will experiment with fasting or how far I will push it. But I am going to keep doing it and telling you awesome people about it while I do. :-)

How I Came to Love All Persons

This one is trickier.

I am going to be brief here, in fact.  

I found universal love by relinquishing self hate.

How the fuck did I come to wake up one morning with my own self hatred simply lifted from me?  I struggle to find a word besides "miracle" to describe it.  But when my hatred for myself withered, my love for all other persons was allowed to blossom.

I think the key to finding universal love is to realize, as I have said before, that morality and human behavior are very subjective.  The best example I believe people have of this is not outside but within themselves.  I looked at all the times I had "messed up" in life, and became finally aware, at some deep level, that, despite the fact that, with objective retrospection, I could see that my actions had often given me terrible outcomes, I never thought at the exact moment I did any action that I was doing the worst possible thing.  In fact, truth be told, I had both consciously and sub-consciously weighed out the facts and come to the conclusion that the action was indeed the best action to take at the time, despite the fact that I frequently knew there could be some negative consequences beforehand.  

My experience and knowledge of the world simply showed me that doing the action was better than not doing it.  This applies to every single sober action I ever took.  (If I drank, I don't think I any longer had the ability to make these kinds of decisions.)

If this is true for all of my actions (even my very worst ones) then it must, really, be true for all healthy-brained sober humans.  I realized that behavior is subjective and that no person ever wakes up in the morning and says: "man, I can't wait to deliberately fuck the world up today to my own detriment or to the detriment of others just for detriment's sake."

Since no person ever says this, then, really, my judgment of others ceased to matter.  All became forgivable to me when I forgave myself.  Everything is circumstantial.  Poor behavior results from indoctrination by culture and from lack of education about the nature of the world.  That's it.  Therefore, I came to see myself as equal with all other persons for the first time in my life.  When I found that, I realized that all I truly wanted was love.  When I realized that that is all I truly, deeply wanted, then I made this simple connection:

to get love, I had only to give it.

I love the entire world and everyone on it because it is absolutely the most effective means possible to fill my own cup of love up until it runneth over.

And I mean to tell you, friends: the cup runneth the fuck OVER!!!! :-)

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This was all for my friend in India.  I hope she enjoyed this and that it answered her questions.  I love you, Pakhi, and am glad you find my writing intriguing! Thank you for connecting with me.

Also: look forward to my first public writing weighing in on the #OccupyWallStreet movement, which will be appearing at the Tsaritsa's blog sometime in the next few days, I hope, depending on when I finish writing it and when she decides to post it.  She's a B.I.L.F.  I'll let you figure the meaning of that out for yourself. ;-)

Love.