Confessions from an Ex-Bulimic
The last time I went round to his flat we bonded over vomit like atoms swapping electrons. He managed to stay distant no matter how personal we got, unsurprising considering his avoidant attachment style and colourful history of substance abuse. We used to meet up once a year to exchange saliva and for the other 364 days he never responded to my messages. Sometimes he’ll occasionally stalk my Instagram stories like a digital carnivore with glitching teeth. Like a planetary alignment that happens once every few years or the hour we gain back in the summer only to lose again once it gets cold: he could never be in my life for as long as I wanted.
I remember lying in bed together and sharing intimacies like hard boiled sweets. There’s something soothing about seeing your shame replayed in someone else’s life. It’s familiar like spotting your favourite actor in an uncredited cameo. He tells me about the time he’d been so hungover that he vomited several times while taking a shower. I place my hand on his belly and think about all the sick that’s been pushed out of it and all the sick yet to come. This creates a mirage of tenderness as if our bodies were the background of summer; the horizon wiggling in the distance like an uncomfortable worm.
It kind of turned me on, talking about it. Polite society doesn’t tend to discuss what it’s like to be physically sick, especially when it’s in relation to something self-inflicted. If someone catches a stomach bug and vomits for any entire day, it’s not their fault. No one really cares. But for the others, vomit is a by-product of obsession that you have to twist your life around so that it doesn’t get stained.
Vomit is personal. Living with it is like being chronically alone but still sleeping on the edge of your bed every single night. You throw up the stuff that could have been you. In Freud’s essay on ‘Negation’ he talks about how one of the simplest decisions we make as a human is whether to keep something inside or eject it out. That’s all babies do: eat and spew. We just learned to do it more discreetly.
You can vomit wherever you want. In your neighbour’s garden. In little bowls in your room. In plastic bags in your room. In cardboard boxes in your room. In mugs in your room. Going for the toilet is too obvious. Once you pass the line you start to see the world as a series of potential containers for an outbreak of fluid. You can even keep your little sicks in your room for weeks, just for the hell of it. You wake up surrounded by them like a reverse miracle. How someone manages their sick really says a lot about them. Most people want some distance between themselves and the event, but others want their sicks close like children. Little sicks like babies.
When I used to make myself vomit it was just an unpaid, full-time job. You can’t go on strike and there’s no one else to unionize with. Do you any idea how hard it to maintain that kind of stamina for emptiness? I want you to think of it as a muscle you build up. In fact, forget all you know about waifish, teenage girls in bathroom stalls with their fingers down their throat. Here’s an insider secret: when you get good enough you can do it freehand.
When you make yourself sick for long enough, it starts to feel like a normal thing your body. It occupies the same space as pissing or sweating, no longer just an isolated threat or a signal. Think of it as way of marking your territory. Sometimes I feel like I haven’t really moved into a place until I’ve been sick it in. Then it’s mine.
Words for sick sound like the act itself. Google synonyms for the word sick and you will find in the suggestions: ‘how to say I’ve vomited in a nice way?’. Let’s face it, there’s no way around sick.
Sometimes it can take over. I once got into the habit of collecting all my sick in a giant bag and then disposing of it in a public bin. Once, the big bag spilled out and flooded the street like water balloon filled with cum. Once I dropped off a bag on my way to therapy and then joked about it with my therapist. At that point, sustaining myself wasn’t a straightforward action of putting something in. The narrative had been disrupted.