Purging Words Upon a Screen

I don’t know why I have to do everything in excess: work, exercise, read, write, eat.

I must eat every last mango in the bag. Or finish every single cookie until they no longer exist. I feel awful until I’ve made them all disappear.

The last time Chad was out of town for a weekend, I ate an entire jar of Cookie Butter from Trader Joe’s.

Since we moved to Asheville, I do most of the grocery shopping. My grocery cart shimmies around the cracks in the floor and makes my hands shake as I push it up and down the aisles.

“Excuse me.” “Excuse me.” There are noisy people everywhere.

I glide past a little blonde girl standing up in the back of a shopping cart. She’s probably 4 years old. My eyes transition from her blue eyes to the guy I assume is the father. He’s grabbing milk a few feet away. He’s not even watching his daughter, standing up in a shopping cart.

Once when I was at Target, I saw a child tip over in a shopping cart. And so I imagine this little girl reaching up for some colorful bag of candy and the cart tipping over with her in it. I hear her scream. I hear the horrible crash of metal on linoleum and limbs. Her head smashing through the displays of cans. The absentee father rushing over as I stare in a horror.

“Excuse me,” the man says and brushes past me to push his cart away.

She’s okay. The cart hasn’t moved and neither has she. I blink away the horrendous vision and my eyes land on a brown jar of Cookie Butter.

The jar is smooth in my cold hand. A smile spreads across my face as I nestle the jar between our organic vegetables and almond milk. My secret. Chad wants us to eat healthy all the time. And most of the time I do. But sometimes I just can’t help myself. I like having secrets.

I used to be bulimic. For 10 years off and on, mostly on. But I stopped cold turkey when I almost died of a probably unrelated blood clot when I was 24 years old. 12 Years ago.

Wow. I hate throwing up. When I stopped purging, I was finally able to tell people, “no” and stand up for myself. It was like a people-pleasing switch inside me had been turned from on to off. Now I say “no” all the time.

I do the same thing with books and information. Chad was furious when he found out how much I spent on business and self development courses, something else to binge on.

The scent of ink on paper gives me such a rush. I cannot put a book down until every last page has been read. No matter how long the book is. No matter how much my eyes burn, I have this horrible sense of anxiety until I’ve consumed it all.

When I’ve read the last sentence on the last page, I feel a little bit sad. Until it starts again with a new book.

I read over 600 pages in the last 2 days. I read after Chad goes to bed. I have to binge on something. But I won’t take anymore courses...at least not ones that we have to pay for.

I’ve come full circle. In college I had this secret ambition to be a writer. And so I wrote, blogged, self-published, guest blogged and so on. Even when I was working two jobs and going to school, I always wrote.

Even when I was doing bridal makeup and performing at Casinos and sending out handmade hula hoops and wearing all the hats in my business, I wrote.

Now after a book binge, my fingers purge words upon a screen. They march like little soldiers taking orders from my brain.

I won’t allow myself to stop until I feel that beautiful emptiness.