I hadn’t taken a photo of myself since dyeing my hair pink again, over a month ago. Now I have. It seems fitting to start an emotional vanity session with some visual vanity.

If you’re a regular visitor, you may remember this post in which I spoke of steps forward and leaving behind insecurity, of letting go of a lifetime of discomfort and fear about my appearance, my weight, my body, my face.

It was a fucking revelation, a light-bulb moment, eureka-i-found-it. And now, after the revelry, light-bulbs can go off as well as on, and maybe, just a little, I lost it again.

So I was eating whatever the hell I wanted to eat and not freaking out about it. This was nice for a few months. Looking back, I think I had two reasons for going this route. The first was that I needed to prove to myself that putting on weight is not going to cause the world, my world, the world around me, the world in my head, to come crashing down.

The second was that subconsciously, this whole putting on weight business may just have been a grand act of self-sabotage wrapped in denial. Because having put weight on, I am now in the perfect position to want to lose weight again. Which also is not going to cause the world to come crashing down because it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do. To lose weight after gaining weight. And who could argue with that?

I keep typing and deleting. Everything is either too personal or not personal enough. I don’t know. I can’t find the words I want to say and I have no idea why I feel the need to say all this so publicly.

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a starving skeletal shadow of myself and it is extremely unlikely that I ever will be again, unless world war three kicks in and I end up in a concentration camp for people with facial tattoos.

I am eating really healthily right now. Seriously. It disturbs me a little when I stop and think about it. I am hooked on Pink Lady apples and fat-free yogurts and rye bread (although not all at the same time). I know how many calories are in absolutely fucking everything, but I always have. I just tried to forget for a while, but it isn’t that easy. Sometimes you remember things in spite of yourself.

I am keeping a food diary and it makes me feel better, a way to keep things in order and feel in control without taking drastic measures. Yes, I sometimes compete with myself and I try to eat less than the day before but then I tell myself to stop being so fucking stupid and remind myself that in order to be able to work I need to ensure that I actually feed myself enough to provide my body with the energy it needs.

I have accepted that I am not indestructible and that as satisfying as it may feel to go a day (or two) without food, I can no longer do that kind of thing because my body and my life do not allow for it. I have also accepted (most of the time) that what I see in the mirror is rarely what other people see when they look at me. Like to a ridiculous degree. Delusional body dysmorphic disorder, if you like to label these things.

I wanted to end with another revelation and I’ve been trying desperately to concoct one but I just can’t. More typing and deleting and typing and deleting. I am very much without a revelation. I can’t even make one up.