Untitiled
25.09.22～25.10.22 (one month)
Freeform crochet
The time that trying not to disappear—
Is it my head that wants to eat, or is it my stomach?
I decided to respect and love myself,
the way I would treat someone I love.
Even when I clearly wasn’t hungry, I would order late-night food,
and the next day I often regretted it.
Even when I knew that eating more would make me throw up,
I would mechanically, forcibly put food into my mouth.
In a way, I wasn’t eating because I truly wanted to eat—it was only a kind of stress relief.
When I had sadness or anger that could not be explained in words,
that was difficult to articulate,
I wanted to chew and swallow those emotions and vomit them back out.
You could even say it was a form of minimal self-harm.
And at some point I realized:
that desire belonged to my mind—not to my stomach.
I realized that my stomach is more honest and more intelligent than my head.
I’ve only come to understand this recently.
So when I try to eat until I’m full—
not because I truly want to eat,
but simply to relieve stress—
I ask my head and my stomach,
“Do you really want to eat this right now?”
And I have decided to record it, like a diary.
For the time being, I want to keep crochecting until I get past that false craving.
But I don’t want to use crochect to suppress or ignore my desire.
Through the slow, repetitive motions of crochecting,
before making any decision,
I want to give myself time—
to think slowly, and then think twice.
And when crochecting, I want to cultivate patience.
Not the patience of enduring desire,
but the patience of giving patience to myself.
I have never been a mother,
but I imagine there is a child inside my stomach.
I’ve never raised an animal,
but I imagine my stomach as a cat or dog I love.
If someone I loved were already full,
would I still force food on them?
I decided to treat myself
the way I would treat someone I love—
with respect and love.
I read something somewhere:
Anorexia is the desire to shrink until your body and your self disappear.
Binge eating is the desire to grow until your body becomes unrecognizable.
Both are desires to disappear.
I want to have a more earnest conversation with those desires.