My name is Jamilah, and I purposely experience periods of starvation.

To start: as far as I know, I don’t have an eating disorder.

I could use the excuse of having hardly any money, but I’m fortunate enough to have family that will feed me if I can’t/don’t want to feed myself. Considering I only explore beyond my palette when I go out to eat, which is rare nowadays, it doesn’t cost much to feed myself each month (shoutout pasta!). Money isn’t the problem, which is always people’s first thought.

Starvation is an indirect method of suicide–at least, for me. Of course, it took going to therapy for me to realize this.

I starve myself when I want to numb myself, when the hurt becomes too much to bare, when I can’t stop thinking about how my existence has ruined so many other people’s lives, when it becomes too hard to pretend that everything’s okay.

When I starve myself, I have more out of body experiences. Somehow, I become unattached with my physical form yet become aware that it’s breaking down. In my head, I’m watching myself disintegrate while feeling it, but my brain is another world that doesn’t allow me to care. It’s so hard to explain it without using my hand gestures.

In a weird way, disassociating from my physical form helps me focus on whatever is consuming my mind that causes the seemingly never-ending hurt (even though I know the hurt eventually ends). Eliminating taking care of myself allots for more time to sit and think and feel and absorb, and I know that is an incredibly incorrect and messed up mindset.

Does this kind of relate to the previous writing? Yes, but that was miniscule compared to the other events in my life that have caused so much pain over the past few months. They’re way too personal to write about on here and involve people I’ve never mentioned/written about on here (shocker! my entire life isn’t on my personal blog!).

I feel bad that I make people worry when I go through these periods of starvation, especially nowadays because I’ve never had people in my life who actually cared. Is it bad that I find it refreshing? Like, I can no longer go through life without people, who are nowhere near blood-related to me, noticing that something is wrong just by looking at me.

Hopefully my recent spring spell of starvation was the last one, but the mind is a tricky thing. I wake up every morning ready for the mental battle.