Wrongfully Convicted: Coronavirus, Civic Unrest, & Cencorship

Today, the first of June, I feel safe, but that is not to say that I do not feel extremely anxious. It is worth noting the current state of affairs in the United States of America. Even the concept of “state,” is irrelevant because nothing is static in nature. The news continues to evolve, from a space launch contingent on unpredictable weather reports and a global health crisis, to a politicized handle over a health crisis that conceived economical and sociological blunders including parameters for what qualifies as essential, like community prayer, and then the desecration of my maternally inherited home church, St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

I would say that I lost my appetite; the integral indicator of hunger, an excitement for eating and trying new flavors, has lessened to such a degree that my body’s internal survival mechanism has to be oiled and as such, has fueled my hand to grab at odds and ends in the pantry.  Notable signs of my body in deficit are a penchant for irritability, begrudging self-inflicted epithets, and a fast-paced flurry of internal thoughts that combat one another. I still need to weight restore and nutritionally rehabilitate. I need to utilize coping mechanisms. I need to be proactive. I have made progress, but it is stunted. I have to do – I must do – I need to- I want to- I should and I could have.

I am convinced that today, June 1st, is the official start of summer because it marks the beginning of the last month of the academic year. This June, I am excited for my birth month because I am no longer approaching a dreadfully low body-weight. Then again, I was paralyzed for most of yesterday and this morning, when I crawled out of bed at 5 am, preoccupied with not only my possible regression regarding weight, but also the city of my birth burning in a hell fire under the auspices of justice. Silencing voices for the sake of solidarity is a form of censorship I cannot get behind. The fringes finagling their way into a pursuit of their own accord without regard for a common humanity is the obliteration of any decorum. A war waged inside a country is oxymoronic, and the solidarity that was being forged in light of a universal mortality, is being broken now too, by the very same mortality.

I took a hiatus from writing this, when on June 2nd, I crashed and burned, coping the way I knew how and that has time and again proven unproductive. I cried at my lackluster attempt at nourishing myself in a balanced manner. I reprimanded myself for withdrawing from plans to create a more sustainable means to an end. Instead, I reached the desired end in a last-minute effort, a push, or a sprint that resulted in feeling unhinged and out of control. I broached this scenario with my therapist.

He said that I spoke as if I committed a crime. My mom asked me bewilderingly, “did you do anything wrong?” I obviously thought I had; otherwise, I would not be so reproachful. My therapist combated this thought process; He told me, “You cannot be the judge, jury, and defendant all at the same time.” I found myself wrong from my own perspective, and that yardstick was inaccurate by definition.

This may all seem rather abstract to you, but I professedly did not want to provide a specific context because the situation is stealthy by default. It is so very individual, my last-minute approach to reaching a goal, that the entire day runs according to an ill-conceived plan until the dead of night, when I realize that the plan was self-sabotage, that my body requires a greater dose medicine that I never provided it with. You could say the imbalance, with this diction as used, would cause me to overdose. In this case, the medicine for someone recovering from a restrictive eating disorder and still needs to weigh restore, is food.

My therapist continues to communicate that food is not a drug. You do not become addicted to it. We need food. It’s necessary for survival. Now, you may think that I am ridiculous for articulating the rudimentary knowledge of a human’s basic needs. It was never lost on me that food is essential for survival. What was lost on me, however, was how and why I chose to make a direct connection with food to my emotions, to how I moved, and to life’s heavier and lighter moments. It all felt so wrong and contrary to how it should be. It felt wrong. It feels wrong. And yet, from the perspective of my treatment providers, and my mother, I am reassured time and again that I am not in the wrong. I did not commit a crime.

This rationale is still difficult for me to assess. I waver backward and forward, and try to intellectualize it as best as I can. My therapist usually ends our conversation with, “try and relax,” which does nothing for me except provide permission to do so, just as they provide me with permission, or rather, directions, to eat at a surplus. I always respond to his fruitless closing remark with, “easier said than done,” to which he acknowledges. After all, if it were easy to find peace and not be at battle with one’s self, there would be no need for therapy.

It’s no so much that I have wronged, and it is instead the feelings of guilt and regret that spawn this idea of wrongness. Interestingly, last night – the evening of June 4th and the wee hours of June 5th – I had dreamed, yes, being courted on by a graduate school crush who I have not seen since 2015, but also dreamed of crouching down in front of a wad of cash, and picking it up. Finder’s keepers: That little jingle rang in my ears until I saw a small bi-fold wallet about two inches away. I felt uncertain, incredulous, but decided in the span of a second to send the money to whomever it belonged to, assuming that it was the wallet owner’s stash.

What is wrong, and what isn’t, is a tug-of-war between subjectivity and outright truth. Assessing wrong from right inherently provokes judgment. There will inevitably be contrasting views, and to invoke censorship so as to enable one viewpoint’s voice to ring and not compete with external noise is to eliminate any defensive play. One is playing offense against an unarmed individual. If this is not hypocrisy, then what is?

Communicating via expression, visual cues, as discussed in my last post in light of the mask-wearing mandates to prevent the spread of Coronavirus, imparts judgment from the get-go. Disapproval may cause one to furrow his/her eyebrows. Exasperation may cause an eye roll as opposed to a muted sigh. As a half Punjabi woman, courting seemed to me to occur primarily with facial recognition: cues with the eyes including the length of time staring, or quick flutter of eyelashes. And after my dream about possibly having unrequited love between me and that graduate school crush, (I am almost 30-years-old and have never experienced a relationship much less a date,) I opted to check an astrologer’s horoscope published on a health and wellness digital publication that I venture to daily.

As a Gemini, the astrologer said something that rang true: “Being discerning and also forthcoming with your words will draw them in.” A couple of years ago on a road trip to Boston, my parents and I were sitting at the boutique hotel bar in Cambridge, having breakfast when a man sidled alongside me. I was deep in conversation with the host behind the bar. I rememeber being animated, and free in speech, mind, and style. My parents stared at me and asked if I had noticed that I had grabbed the attention of the man and that he seemed entranced. I scoffed at the thought. According to them, at the time, all I had to do was regain my health from the grips of anorexia and there was no stopping me and the pursuit of love.

The horoscope continued to read: “Unsurprisingly, words of affirmation is the love language of Gemini, for whom conversation is a form of foreplay…to connect on an intellectual level. Seduce their mind, and their heart will be yours forever.” Dabbling in language as a hobby, craft, meditation, and hopefully, career, could not be more coincidental. That being said, in recent days, the call for silence, muting, and blacking out, is at odds with my very ethos. To suppress my words and to flirt with becoming comatose is a dangerously dark approach to seducing sustainable change. If this conviction is wrong, then I believe the judgment best be left to the stars. The stars seem to have spoken.