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I was an anorexic boy. This is my story (1997-2014).

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The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but unites it only in its separateness.

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

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2014 - Reflections (8)

Every moment, every action crystallises in the expanse of all that is potential.

Beacons perch aloft this terrain. Stoked by many, they swell with import.

We stare, convinced by the resilience of a path forged through repetition.

The landscape strobes light and shadow.

Difference is starved of luminescence, unseen, beseeching affirmation.

Mindscapes dissected by a glare stuttering through blinds.

Yet darkness is not empty.

The beam blots out what it cannot covet, encloses what it cannot contain.

Hues of colour swirl without reflection in its wake, disillusioned and lost.

From behind the veil, you act.

Your presence flares through crystalline.

The route widens.

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Robyn & Royksopp - Monument

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Reflections (7)

This is not the story of ana then, and recovered now. Its neediness to be sustained entices me to follow well-worn grooves.

As a perfectionist, I criticise myself hyper-actively. I map self-worth against elevated expectations, in the hope of projecting an idealised version of myself.

I watch myself in anticipation of falling below an expectation from afar. Pressure rises. I can’t always subdue it, hating myself for feeling this way, for not being better. I punish an object fat with failure. A punch, a puncture slit in skin, a wasting of flesh, a pipe worried into bursting. Self-harm to relieve the anxiety.

There will always be triggers of self-doubt in my life-world. Perfection is a bastardised idea. It is a conceit that defeats potential, forcing us to deny and fall into line.

I need to understand all these moments not as parts to discard and patches to wear. I occupy space within and outside multiple environments. A space suspended of preconceptions, informing not defining me.

Recovery isn’t finished when weight is restored, or by acknowledging the illness. It takes time to claim ownership of contradictions with the world and myself. To resist being conscripted into carrying out the violence of another on my body.

Truth is ambiguous, unveiled in my experience of situations. Beauty is the expression of personal experience unencumbered by fear of difference or imperfection.

Recovery is a horizon. You get closer.

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Self-portrait (2014)

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2014 - Reflections (6)

I can only speak for my own experience. There are many gay, straight, bi, trans, or asexual men and women battling an eating disorder, all with individual stories to tell. This shouldn’t hide the affinity in our experiences. Eating disorders are indiscriminate; they defy boundaries and so must we.

I was not anorexic in pursuit of the velveteen skinned magazine model. Starving yourself isn’t a vanity project. I have come to understand the disorder as a sexual awakening gone awry. I may be wrong.

Layers of significance coiled around me, offering certainty to live in. My mind warped into a hyperreality, all logics contracting to their extremes in an attempt to cancel out the error. I grew frustrated as I disassociated into the disorder. The task was never complete.

In righteous hatred, I throttled my recalcitrant self. An alarm call scorched my throat for help and in warning to the glowering gaze upon me. Tunnel vision. It felt as if I had been infiltrated. I hadn’t. I am multiple aspects; the voice was mine. I was speaking from an encroached space.

I was captured by and yet detached from my environments; my self ruptured into abject parts and projected untruths.

We are not stencils with off-cuts. Throughout life, the full spectrum of emotion bursts erratically. In these moments, aspects of your self are unveiled. Not all good, not all bad, not all or nothing, but all you.

Your presence defies logics plotting out social consciousness. Yet the space you attempt to claim is absorbed as a failure of the rule. A defect to correct.

Rebellion. We are complicit in reproducing partial truths by defining ourselves in opposition to them. Coming out is celebrated, in spite of the need to do so resting on the assumption of heterosexuality bestowed at birth.

The unquestioned faith in so-called normality, defining itself through binary oppositions. Polarised and shed of nuance, rhetoric appeals to our shared assumptions. You are included through exclusion, shamed back into the fold. Cast as functionaries of a larger order.

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When Saints Go Machine - Church and Law

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Potentiality (in its double appearance as potentiality to and potentiality not to) is that through which Being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding or determining it (superiorem non recogna scens) other than its own ability to be… an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer

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2014 - Reflections (5)

We exist on the threshold of potentiality – it is possible to do anything, even what is considered to be impossible.

This panoramic vision is cropped by partial truths. People coalesce around the centrifugal force of ever spinning webs of significance. Threads constrict, locking our minds. With strangled vision we glean impressions from our environments, acting unquestionably on the assumptions they conceal. We give life to the order of the truth-making classes.

Our environments possess us and reproduce themselves, difference measured as deviance or lack. You turn desire into hate, either inflicted outwards (the repressed homosexual goes queer bashing), or against yourself (restricting, purging, binging, self-harming).

There is always more rot to dig out, so the story goes. You will never reach an ideal.

The ideal is a false consciousness, as much as it is truth affirmed through people’s actions. Motivation enthralled to the spectacle. The exterior image is understood to express the substance of the subject. We seek recognition on those terms, finding only exclusion.

Yet a truth is so unless and until it is disproved. During my education, it was impossible to speak of homosexuality by virtue of law. Fear for livelihoods, and a culture laced with homophobia, restricted the positive representation of gay men and women during my formative years.

It is no longer impossible to talk of homosexuality to children. The age of consent is no longer 21, as it was when I was born. Marriage encompasses same-sex relationships.

The vanguards of the gay community faced illegality of the act, of being present. They faced the brutality of order. They created a celebrated space within and outside their own moral condemnation. They realised our potential to be in the public sphere, by realising our potential not to exist within the paradigm of deviancy. They eschewed their own impotentiality to be self-determined.

A truth of the moment does not negate the possibility of its falsehood.

You can eat and you won’t get fat. You can be gay and not lose everything. You can be depressed and allow yourself to be happy. You can grieve and keep on going.

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Rhizome

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Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in the object or "return" in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature.

Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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Kraftwerk - The Hall Of Mirrors

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2014 - Reflections (4)

Labelling is distorting. Overlay all your identities and they may reflect splinters of your fragmented self. Always already partial. Always already imposed. Always already existing.

Nobody has a singular identity, regardless of sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion. We reveal different aspects of our selves at different times with different groups in different places.

To strive to be whole requires recognition that you are a multi-dimensional being. You are one and all of the labels attached to you, including attributes that have been ostracised onto an-other (ana or rex).

Getting better calls upon you to reconcile yourself to an inner contradiction: you are and you are not anorexic. The impossibility in your mind of being free from ana is neutralised when you understand yourself as both.

It is about being aware of engrained thought patterns, catching them at earlier points before they spiral off with their own furious momentum. Vigilance. Free from denial, the contradiction opens space in your mindscape to reason with responses to certain stimuli. A state of suspended belief in your triggers, in what they purport to signify.

Pause, breathe, disarm. Realise the potential to eat and the potential not to restrict or purge.

Part of you will always hold the spark - a predisposition. That is not to say that you do not fight the disaster that is an eating disorder, it simply means that you needn’t hate yourself for being that way.

Self-hatred closes the circle, trapping you in torment. The oppressor and the oppressed standing before and reflected in the mirror.

The fictions cast by the disorder have defined my lifeworld, just as much as the fictions cast by my environments. They are realities I have experienced.

All exist simultaneously.

Interwoven in chaos and harmony.

All have meaning.

No overriding significance.

One is all of them.

The multitude within me.

One is not reducible to its parts.

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Self-portrait (2014)

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The mirror stage [assuming an image] is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality… and, lastly, to the assumption of the armor of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.

Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the ‘I’ as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience (1949; Écrits, 1966)