It's Okay to Leave Your Apartment, You Know

He's mad at me. I can tell even through the curt text message. Only two words. No period. Ignored my thank you. We talk every night, but tonight is the third night I've avoided him. The weight of his dependence on me is too much to carry around. Avoidance is how I treat everyone, it's finally his turn.

I'm such a hermit these days. I talk very little about that here. Maybe it seems like it's nothing to do with this eating disorder, but truthfully everything is to do with that. I almost only leave my apartment for class, and only if I must. Just walking to campus is cause for anxiety.

Though I am enormous and fat, I feel very small and scared walking along the edge of the sidewalk wearing my over sized jacket when it's really too warm for that. Though I feel very small, I cannot help imagining everyone's eyes on me. I wonder at what they must think of me. The judgments they might be making, and things they might think if they could actually see me, in the way no one sees me. Not even here.

Maybe it was the shrink and the the frank discussion of my disorder. It was the first time I've come face to face with everything I'm doing, the first time I've admitted it all out loud in one sitting. There's more of course, always more, but it was as much as I could divulge in an hour. Somehow now that it's all out there in the world, written across a page of his yellow legal pad, linked to me and not just a faceless blogger identity; I feel it all the more intensely. Or maybe I'm just more aware of it and how far from normal, from healthy, I've come.

My reclusive habits stem from my fat and the shame that lives in every pound. It isn't the eating disorder. I've had the eating disorder much longer than I've had this monstrous, self-inflicted loneliness. I'm inside solitude so deeply, I don't believe I could get out even if I wanted to. And now I am pushing away the one person I've relied on for actual contact.

I know I can get myself out of this. I just need to lose more weight. I just need to fit back into those lovely clothes waiting for me in my closet. My new scale will be here on Tuesday. I am going to do this. Fast until I'm happy.