“Addiction is all or nothing thinking,” my father told me, “like your battle with depression. You either pull yourself together or completely succumb to the sadness, never leaving your bed. All or nothing thinking, the hardest and most manipulating kind of reasoning.”
My dissociative self is sadly not a witness to my world but a captive to my mind, chained to the fear that the minute I return to the restaurant floor, my body will cave into a carcass and dissipate into dust.
“Mommy, why is our house painted different colors? No one else’s house is like that.”
“Because honey, your father likes chaos, and I am an artist.”
In time, I learned how to cheat my body’s system, depriving it of food and exhausting it with exercise. I started to walk with my thighs spread apart from each other, keeping my hips locked and my gait wide. My hips tried to relax, begging me to stop putting them in the middle of my mind’s complex-driven conquest. But I was too terrified to hear them plead, terrified of being hated by the cruel boys in my class who wanted someone emptier than I was.
