Chicken legs
Indigestion #4
Hello and welcome to Indigestion, a semi-to-not-at-all-weekly column where I attempt to tie memory to sensation to sense of self to connect the dots of my little life. It’s been almost two months since the last installment while I rearrange my priorities. It’s a little dark, but then also I hope it is light. Love you.
at seventeen i started to starve myself / i thought that love was a kind of emptiness
at least i understood then the hunger i felt / and i didn’t have to call it loneliness
8
I used to be skinny. Like a pole. Or maybe a javelin. Wrap your fingers all the way around me to form a ring. Lift me up. Feel the ease of my heft. Toss me away. Light as a feather, but I drop like a carcass.
Chicken legs, my childhood friend Danielle used to call me on the playground. Chicken legs chicken legs chicken legs. Like barbs under the skin, the more I resisted it, the more it got stuck until the moniker gained an impeachable foothold with my friends and family. My mom in the minivan calling me chicken legs. Danielle’s got a crush on me, this is why she torments my malnourishment. My grandpa on the lawn calling me chicken legs. He’s got legs just like mine, takes it like a joke and dishes it back out, boomerang me boomerang you.
Because it was funny. Funny when a boy is a little ugly, a little misshapen. Funny because boys don’t care about that kinda stuff anyway. Boys are fine anyway. Boys don’t care. I don’t care. I just remember.
How many times must we learn that words are sticks and names are stones and I bruise like a peach, I become the defect you see. No good. Toss me away.
An ugly bird, I thought myself. Can still picture me running around on the hot asphalt after school with my arms tucked close to my sides, headless, spewing shame from my open neck. Flightless. Lift me up. Feel the desiccation of me. Toss me away.
16
I used to be skinny. At 16 years old, I weighed 84 pounds at almost 6 feet tall. Bean pole, chicken legs. I sat on the examination table at the doctor’s office while my primary care physician pressed the cold ring of a stethoscope against my naked chest. Watched her trying not to count my ribs like rungs on a ladder. Pressed the backs of my legs hard against the table’s plastic sides not to draw attention. Chicken legs all the way down. Sharp of my tailbone aching, flimsy paper crinkling beneath my discomfort.
All of me small and not small enough.
“I have to ask you something,” the doctor said, soft, or I wasn’t listening. My mom tucked away in the corner, withholding. “Have you been eating?”
I nodded. I said, “Yes,” out loud.
She pulled away slightly. “Have you ever skipped a meal on purpose?”
I shook my head. I said “No,” almost gagging on it.
But I was sat there in my underwear with my penis and flat chest, proving myself to be a boy and what would make a boy want to be skinny like that? What could make a boy stop eating? I was easy to believe because I said what confirmed the easy perception.
A strange experience to be a skinny man. People don’t quite know how to cope with their intrinsically taught knowledge that thinness is good and to then be presented with a thin man and have his ugliness shatter the illusion. When I was younger, I presented like a girl in the soft and small and shy sort of way. I was offered lots of ‘ladies’ in restaurants or clothing stores, and then some really intense, embarrassing prostration in the form of ‘sir, so sorry sir.’ Affirming my manhood even if they hardly believed it. I sort of enjoyed being a confounding creature, knowing that when people saw me, they could understand me no more than I understood myself. And maybe for a moment thinking me a pretty, flat girl before the ugliness of my boyish frailty snapped into perspective like a taut rubber band. Always left a red welt on my skin.
There’s a particular way to be skinny as a man. It cannot be meek, but has to be assertive, a particular tossing about of the limbs so that even though you are small your presence is still large, a man’s insistent presence. Anger is your fat and you must be swollen with it if you’d like anyone to look your way. It’s a sort of drug addict vibe a thin man has to wield and unfortunately I wouldn’t face an addiction crisis until after I stopped having an eating disorder. I can never win.
I didn’t even want to be skinny is the thing. I hated the shape my body made with all the pallid skin clinging to my bones like plastic wrap. The contours of my stomach like an apple chewed to the seed-bearing core. The legs, always the legs, long like stilts, knees knobs that won’t turn, that can’t do anything but struggle to hold me up. The taller I got, the more my skeleton pushed at the confines of my self-restriction and the more that restriction felt like a righteous punishment for my stupidity.
I only wanted to be like him. Like a lot of them. These teenagers on the internet who smoked cigarettes and spoke in black and white about the sensuality of their darkness. Who not only enjoyed their neuroses but made them gorgeous and palatable. Something I could swallow. Posted myself listening to The 1975, shared monochrome gifs from Skins UK on my Tumblr. It was all a culture, the only culture I was offered, something simple to ground myself in.
All the cool kids are starving themselves. I can be cool, too.
It’s fucked, it never stops being fucked. We were just kids, man.
And it’s embarrassing, still, a child begging to be seen and loved like every other child. But the act of it. To tell him: I skipped a meal again, I didn’t finish the lunch my mother carefully and lovingly packed for me, I’ve got no appetite. The sympathy he shared along with the cutting admission that we’re in it together, doing it to please one another in the most displeasing way. Starved for no one’s benefit. Grainy pictures on flip phones of our pale flat bodies in bathroom mirrors.
I wanted to be him. I wanted to be him to garner his love? He hated himself. I hated him. I hated me. I could not stop.
My doctor said, “okay, let’s get you back on track.”
I was prescribed a regimen of daily nutrition shakes with my meals. These thick, sludgy things in flavors like powdery chocolate and chalky vanilla to provoke a basic disdain. Drinking them felt like pumping myself full of fat. Hard to swallow, I could never take it all at once, had to drip feed like a baby bird. But I’d drink it all, I would.
Tell him: “I’m trying. It’s a good thing, I think, to try.”
And him not trying but letting me know what new lines he’s dug into his forearms. The immature romance of that. Knowing I could not inflict half the pain on him that he inflicts on himself. Sitting on the cold tile of my bathroom floor watching the tiny blue squares swimming beneath me like water. Trying it on my thighs, hating the pain, the uselessness in the hurt but feeling like a failure if I couldn’t follow through. Had to have something to tell him. Pain to share. That’s love, is what I thought. To know the same pain and cradle it together like something precious. It was ugly.
But it’s the only way I knew to forge connection. Take my pain and press it into the flat of the internet. Thin myself out in the hopes of finding closeness. It worked, is the sad thing. I made so many friends by pretending to be depressed and anorexic online and I did it for so long that I became depressed and anorexic and one of those things stuck decisively to the lining of my skin. I can’t seem to steam it out.
20
I used to be skinny. In college, I swelled to 95 pounds but seemingly those ten pounds were made up of much heavier unmeasurable pounds. Men liked to pick me up just to feel the lack of me, but I could hardly seem to pick myself up off the floor most nights. To care for myself was to lift a building off my chest. I was weak.
The awful protein drinks worked and I felt the difference between eating and not eating enough that I wanted to eat again. But impossible too, to pick up the weight and carry it to the stove with me and hold it up on my shoulders while I cooked. Pizza rolls again. Mac and cheese again. I’ll sleep instead of eating again. I’ve just got a fast metabolism. Chicken legs but I know how to cover them up, sink into a pair of women’s jeans.
I wore women’s pants because they were the only kind that could fit my waist though they only seemed to highlight the absence of my hips, a deepening of my lack. Size 00, I should have spent my early 20’s collapsing on Paris runways, but again that whole being a man thing. The thinness was not something I could grow into but seemingly turned me more childlike the longer I ignored it. No stringy strips of muscle to make me worth a second glance.
Just tired all the time. Working retail, full time student, second job, 80 hour weeks then drinking away the weekends. All this noise easier than offering myself compassion. Wasting this one shot I’ve got at being a person, why should I care?
I tended in those college years to drift toward peoples in disarray. Trauma bond or bust. Chaos is the forge and if we both hate ourselves then we never have to change. This is the blue screen of my youth that I wear around my neck like a lesson. Hurt is love is isolation is closeness is the mirror I use to see me in you.
And then, him again, haunting my physical halls like I deserve it. Don’t come close but remind me why I did this to myself in the first place. Remind me it was not worth it. Kissing in the dark, wishing I could break. Don’t know why I do the things I do, keep doing them anyway.
I often find myself in contradiction. Only know how to beg for care, never to ask for it. No one handing something over at gunpoint is capable of being genuine about it. What a beast of burden I can be. I make you nervous with my need. I give more than I take but I can make that taking so big. I’m sorry, I’m just hungry.
28
I used to be skinny. I’ve got this appetite now. Hungry all the time. For life, I guess, sure whatever I’m hungry for life. Also hungry for food. New flavors, vibrant colors, the settling of nutrients in my stomach. Filling out my frame.
When I smoke weed, all I do is eat. The vapor swelling in my lungs seems to unlock the pit I formed in my stomach as a child. All of that hunger catches up as though I’d only been deferring it to the future and it’s all I can do to keep up with my own insatiability. I wake the next day feeling like shit, lethargic and, god forbid, fat. I’ve gorged myself trying to fill a gorge. Go figure. Please–go figure it out. I’m tired of suffering for the things I do to myself.
It’s hard to look at in retrospect, just how at unrest I was as a child. Every memory shivers with this heightened sense of unease. The image of me pinned to the couch in the home I grew up in sort of warbles through the distortion. I was small and pulsing at all the edges. I always wanted out and I always held myself in.
It’s hard to look at now how that unrest has followed me into adulthood. My inability to reconcile that love and care are inextricable, must be carried as a pair or the other will ring false.
I turned 28 last month. I was trying to put together a thing for my birthday which I never really do, preferring to move past it with as little fanfare as possible. But I’m trying to give myself space in which to accept love. It’s proving difficult.
Kelly and I were at dinner when I told her how anxious the whole thing was making me. “The feeling is irrational,” I explained, “but what I picture is me sending out a little e-vite for the gathering and not only will none of my friends want to come, they actually will be so annoyed by the invitation that they will come to my apartment and shoot me with their individually procured guns and leave me to bleed out on the hardwood floor. On my birthday.” Again, I emphasized that I’m very aware the feeling is irrational but that the feeling is truly that big. The fear of needing others runs that deep, it’s carved little canyons into all my greedy organs. Asking anything of another living person feels like a cleaver already half buried in my chest.
I want to trust the love that I am given but my idea of love is built on a rotted foundation where emptiness and starvation are an imperative and building a new framework of understanding is no overnight task. There’s too much to clean up. I’ve spent too long starving myself of love and I no longer know to digest the stuff. I choke on it. Breathless panic. I am hollowed out once more, vacant mason jar, murky see-through. Lift me up. Feel the potential in my breath. Please don’t toss me away. I am learning to trust. I’m trying—I think it is a good thing.
Eating, I see now, is a gift. Or it’s just a basic and necessary function but I am given the choice to spin it into a gift. And I should, and I do. But capable still of looking in the mirror and not being quite sure what I’m seeing. The expansion and contraction of me, as though I’m a real living body.
Fat, I think, and then the next second horribly skinny. Stilt man on chicken legs. Maybe only the barest moment of clarity where I can look at my naked thing and see nothing but me, just a passing glimpse of truth, that I am something to be loved, that I have made room for love in all the folds of my skin and the lattice of my bones and I would be a good home for this love, I would hold it close and keep it warm, make a religion of tending to it.
But I have to accept it first. I must eat the love to become it.
I must eat. And I am hungry I am starved I am ravenous. So I eat.
Once interred, in turn to turn to bone / Ribs like a house to the lord
A Creative Month(?) in Digestion
Maybe you’re new here or maybe you’ve been really trying with all your might to avoid my insistent PR campaign, but I self-published my first novel recently. It’s dropping for free in weekly installments or it can be purchased in full on my website. I’ve talked about that at length, no need to rehash.
But the feeling of it: I spent the month pre-release journaling almost every day about how I would need to be kind to myself leading up to it, I would need to understand that it will no longer be mine once it leaves my hands, I would need to fight the incessant doubt at every turn. All of these things have proven to be true. I think I’ve handled myself well which I’m proud of. I’m proud of the book, too.
Thank you to anyone that has liked, commented, shared, purchased, promoted, praised, dropped kind words, continues to follow the story for free, on and on and on. My people have been good to me. You know who you are. I’m endlessly grateful.
The work it took to meet my self-imposed deadline and to crawl out of the creative-drain that the work placed me in has been difficult. I took a pretty substantial break from writing anything meaty in the weeks following publication. I did some silly writing. Some horny writing. My aimless journaling. Stuff for myself and no one else, basically. A soft reminder of the fun and joy that I take from writing, that it doesn’t always have to be such work—sometimes it does have to be work, but sometimes it’s just breathing.
And as always, I am constantly considering how best to use this slowly growing platform, what kind of writing best represents me and my creative goals, what I want my readers to see. Part of the reason that there was such a gap between this and my last Indigestion post is that I’m trying to remove some ego from my writing. It’s important to me that what comes from this series and my personal writing is not just dredging up my pain for prose, there has to be some aim at understanding myself with an arc toward real healing, which essentially requires a lot of time and attention. So I’m scaling back on the amount of personal stuff that will come out of Just Wonderin’. My drive has always come from fiction and that’s what I’m going to continue to focus on moving forward.
I can’t remove myself entirely though. You’ll still see me peaking from behind the curtains when I feel a glimpse is needed. Thank you for your kindness, patience and feedback as this whole JW project evolves. I’m very grateful.
jw
This is very, very good—some of the best writing I have seen on Substack. God, you have a strong voice. I teach at university; I earned a master's in fiction, and I think I know a few things if credentials matter. I subscribed for free; I will move it to pay if everything is as good as Chicken Legs. Please read and write more; you have a gift, but most will not recognize your gift, and you will never get the recognition you deserve. I used to write more fiction and read more fiction, but now I am a marketing professor, so I have sold my soul. But I admire you. Every word is sincere. I have tried to write about my childhood; it was very bad, but I am okay. However, some categories (in my case, ugliness) are such a cliche that when people read the words, they mentally exit through the "everyone goes through this" door—one day, I will take it on; this post comes the closest, but most people don't understand, and failure is more about me than the reader. If you don't mind, please read; if I don't hear from you and you think I am full of shit, no worries; all the best, Paul https://www.freedomtoffend.com/p/a-genetic-redemption-stirred-memories?r=iy2ds&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Excellent writing. Love and identify with this section especially: Asking anything of another living person feels like a cleaver already half buried in my chest.