Thinking back

I don't know why but I started to think of this random mannerism I h ad when I was 12, and I felt like posting it. Just to make me sound a bit more psycho... :)

It was a punishment of sorts, although I didn't have to do anything to deserve it. I just punished myself more if needed.

I have this desk chair in my room. I would be "doing my homework" in it and throw a pencil on the floor so that if my mom walked in I would tell her I was getting my pencil. What I was really doing is bending over the chair so that the edge of it would dig into my stomache. I would see how long I could stand putting all my weight into the sharp edge of the chair. I would j ust hang there..... blood rushing to my head. I still don't really understand why I did it. Maybe it was some inward way of showing how much I hated my body, or maybe I was even more psycho way back when than I am now, but I do know that I did it. I did it every day. Sometimes, i would wake up in the middle of the night and want to do it. I would be at school trying to push the desktop into my stomache w/o people noticing just to try and have that same feeling. Maybe it made me feel smaller. Maybe I just wanted to be reassured that there wasn't anything extra there. I wanted to feel my bones rubbing against the plastic.

Now, the reason I would be punishing myself is another story.

I would take my lunch to school every day (we had to pack lunches b/c the cafeteria just served ice cream and milk.), and my mom always packed certain things in it. My sandwich which I ate on occasion, a bag of chips which I normally gave a way to friends, yogurt/pudding/fruit which I would ball up in my napkin and throw away, and some sort of sweet. Now t he sweet was put back into my lunch box.

Every morning my mom forced me to drink Carnation Instant Breakfast. Not b/c she was a mean mom who wouldn't let me have anything else...... but b/c I refused to eat anything. During lunchtime, the sandwich was normally eaten, a lot of times my sister would come check on me to see if I had eaten it. When I got home from school I would go and take the sweet into my room and put it in my closent. I would do this for a few weeks and they w ould accumulate until I had a bad day. A bad day b/c I had a bad grade to be signed or something stupid like that. I wouldn't k now how to tell my parents and I would hide a way in my room right after getting home. I would close the door, lock it, put something in front of it, and then crawl into my very tiny closent and sit in the dark, quickly eating every l ittle debbie cake in there.

I can't believe how vivid my memory is about this. I can't remember half of what happened yesterday, but I remember feeling the urgency to shovel food into myself. As if, eating all those sweets that a normal kid would of already eaten, would make me, in fact, normal. And normal kids knew how to deal w/ their parents, right? Normal kids didn't wake u p in the middle of the night to undress and weigh themselves. Normal kids didn't punish themselves, but that's exactly what I did. After finishing the last one, I would make myself lay over that chair and stare at t he pencil until dinnertime.

Dinnertime is when I would tell my parents. Dinnertime I would tell them..... and I would cry. I would cry b/c they were telling me my punishment. I would cry hoping they would forget about the food on my plate. They hardly ever forgot.

I was always the last one to leave the table. Always sitting there fighting off eating any more green beans. I would wait until no one is the room and I would put the food back into the serving dishes. I w ould go tell my mom I had finished, and sometimes she w ould come and check the trash can. I just thought I was so clever. I had perfected the art.

That chair sits in my room still today, and I haven't lain over in probably 6 or 7 years. I hadn't even thought about what I used to do till today. I was trying analyze why, but I think it's just something I did. No explanation. I didn't need one way back then, so I guess I don't now either.