Do I need therapy? I don’t know.

In many ways I’m feeling really great and my life is going really well– my marriage feels solid, we’ve made a lot of financial goals that we’re either meeting or on track to meet, I’m feeling relatively stable at work so I’m not feeling like i’m moments away from getting fired (and therefore moments away from poverty). I’ve been feeling many moments of pride over being able to save my money and I’m beginning to relax about money because I feel like we’re being more fiscally responsible and we’re able to plan for our future! It’s a little overwhelming to think that in the last year we’ve gone from living paycheck to paycheck to planning on having a kid (!!!) next year because holy cow we can actually afford one! We’ve been talking about getting a car because WE CAN AFFORD ONE. We’ve been talking about renting a new apartment because WE CAN AFFORD IT. And we want it!

So to recap– my marriage, my finances, my work life (and most of my relationships in general) are great. I’m feeling super stable.

AND YET…..

My body image is shit. My eating is shit. I’m feeling pretty out of control as far as my body is concerned. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I see a beautiful person, but sometimes I look in the mirror I feel like my body represents so much failure. I actually feel like a failure a lot, and it always is a result of my body, my weight, or what I’ve eaten. Every time I eat something wrong, I feel worthless. I feel like a failure. I think in a way I  thought that because I had the surgery I would WANT less. I was hoping that with this surgery I wouldn’t have to feel so much guilt over eating food. Every bite feels like a failure. I don’t know how to stop feeling this way. I don’t know how to have a healthy relationship with food, and I don’t know if I will every have a healthy relationship with my body, which makes me SO ANGRY. How is this fair? Why can’t my body be what I want it to be? And if it just can’t for whatever reason– if I’m truly not meant to be the weight I have thought for years that I should be– why can’t I be okay with that? Why can’t I let go of this “idealized Ndeya” and just be me?

Right now when I think about food, my greatest desire is to be able to not eat.  I wish I could just ignore food altogether, to simply stop eating and live off of air. If not air, then perhaps they could just connect me to a tube and feed my intravenously so I wouldn’t have to look at food ever again. I would rather just keep my mouth shut forever. I know I can’t do that and I know I have to eat, but every encounter with food these days feels like failure. I don’t eat the RIGHT things, I eat too much of the wrong things. I eat things even when I don’t want them. I hate that. I feel so overindulgent and disgusting. I honestly don’t think I deserve food. Me, personally. I rationally know that food is neutral, neither good nor bad. It’s not moral or immoral. I now that rationally, but I can’t connect to that idea emotionally, I don’t believe it when it comes to my personal relationship with food.

I want to stop eating the wrong foods. I do believe that I eat too much sugar and that I strongly believe that if people saw me eat on a regular basis they would agree. But I also want to be able to completely stop eating food and perhaps people might think that is going too far. However, it makes sense to me– if I avoid food, I won’t be able to binge on it. I won’t have the opportunity to overindulge or eat bad foods. I’m not sure if this is something I can fix on my own, or if I need therapy.

Part of me wants to go to therapy because maybe a therapist would help me figure out how to stop eating bad foods, how to eliminate them from my life, so I can lose more weight and become the woman I’ve always wanted to be. But I’m also afraid that if I go to therapy, the opposite will happen, that therapists will just try and get me to think of food as neutral when clearly it is not! I’m afraid of foods for a REASON, I’m afraid of carbs and sugar because THEY ARE BAD FOR ME. And I’m afraid that if they convince me to focus on something else, I’ll eat more of it, without feeling consequences and then I’ll gain all the weight I’ve lost and I’ll be in an even worse place than I am now. I don’t want to live my life fearing food, but I want to be fat even less. I don’t want to be fat anymore. It makes me feel like I’m a walking failure.