Notes From The Smoking Area

I remember in December of 2024 breaking down crying to one of my new flatmates.

“I think I’ve got an eating disorder.”

I was crying tears of shame.

Here I was, a boy.

With an eating disorder.

Does it get any more woke?

Does it get any more on the nose?

Could I be any less of a man?

My flatmate was perfect, as was every woman I spoke to afterwards.

Speaking to her gave me the confidence to speak to more people about it.

What had stopped me from speaking about it, truly, was that I didn’t think boys could really have eating disorders.

Now, I would go as far as saying I’m a man who pushes gender norms.

I like to think of myself as emotionally intelligent.

A self-proclaimed feminist and hater of the patriarchy.

But there I was, contorting myself into the imaginary cage of patriarchy.

I knew the rules were bullshit.

I just didn’t realise I was following them.

I had also developed a completely warped relationship with what I saw in the mirror.

I would look at myself and say:

People with eating disorders are thin.

You’re fine.

This would usually be after I had eaten for the first time in days.

Throughout university, friends and I developed incredibly unhealthy relationships with food.

We would claim we didn’t have eating disorders, our eating was just “disordered.”

It was an incredibly useful distinction when none of us wanted to admit that something might actually be wrong.

Some of us would take shots of apple cider vinegar in the morning.

We could acknowledge that our behaviour wasn’t normal while simultaneously convincing ourselves it wasn’t serious.

Because there was always someone thinner.

Someone eating less.

Someone who looked more like what we imagined a person with an eating disorder was supposed to look like.

And if they existed, surely we were fine.

It wasn’t until I finally started making male friends that I began to understand how completely fucked my perception of men’s bodies had become.

For so much of my life, boys had felt like something I observed rather than something I was part of.

I had been told by several boys growing up that I didn’t look quite right.

And I mean, I saw it myself.

There were all these boys with six packs and dick trenches.

And there I was with my sticky-outy belly button.

A podger, I gleefully recall being called.

That stuck with me for many years.

But when I actually started having male friends, rather than simply looking at men and wondering all the ways in which I failed to look like them, I saw bodies as things people actually lived in.

I saw what it looked like to build muscle.

To be fit.

To eat because you were hungry.

To eat because your body needed it.

To exercise because it made you feel good rather than because you hated what you saw in the mirror.

There wasn’t one male physique I had somehow failed to achieve.

There were just men.

Living in their bodies.

It sounds embarrassingly obvious now.

But I don’t think it was obvious to me then.

I don’t find myself entirely free from any of this.

When I’m stressed, normal eating is pretty much the first thing to go.

I find myself smoking lots of cigarettes and drinking lots of black coffee.

Sometimes that same voice creeps back in.

You’re fine.

You’re being dramatic.

You don’t look like someone who has a problem.

And I have to remind myself that I have heard this bastard before.

But ultimately, as I grow older, I hope to become more free from the imaginary constraints we put on one another.

And the ones we put on ourselves.

I joke about my abstinence, but actually there is a deep-rooted logic behind it.

For perhaps the first time in my life, I don’t want somebody else’s desire for me to be the evidence I use to decide whether I am desirable.

I don’t want to outsource that validation to someone else.

I want to look in the mirror and like what I see.

Not because it is perfect.

Not because somebody wants to fuck it.

Not because it is thin enough, muscular enough or whatever enough I have decided it needs to be that week.

But because it is mine.

I have grown to like myself more.

More than I ever did when I was 19 or 20.

I don’t think loving yourself is some destination you eventually arrive at and then get to put your feet up.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and think I look great.

Sometimes I don’t.

Sometimes I eat without thinking about it.

Sometimes stress arrives and suddenly I am having the same arguments with myself that I thought I had grown out of.

The shame I felt all those years ago still creeps into the back of my mind.

And there’s another part of me that finds that frustrating.

Because I know better now.

I understand where some of it came from.

I understand masculinity.

I understand body image.

I understand the ridiculous expectations we place on ourselves and each other.

Surely if I understand the cage, I should know how to walk out of it.

But knowing something is irrational doesn’t necessarily stop you from feeling it.

No matter how strong-willed or educated an individual is, none of us are completely free from the impact of negative body image.

Not even feminists.

Not even haters of the patriarchy.

Not even people who know better.

And not even boys.