Status: finished.
Sweet Divulgence
Sweet Divulgence
Red and yellow alone together form the worst color combination in the history of ever: rotten tomatoes and dirty school buses; blood, guts, and mustard; the sign for McDonalds, home of calories-and-grease-and-bad-raps-galore. This is a restaurant that doesn’t serve food to me; but rather experiments; experiments, experiences, and too many memories. Whenever I step into a McDonalds; a slight uneasiness comes to me. I feel out of place. I feel stuck inside my brain; bogged down with the muck of many and many memories.
-
When we lived in Minnetonka, my mom would frequent the McDonalds off of Highway Seven, turning herself in for her Diet Coke addiction and a few Happy Meal toys. She would often give rides home to the workers and they’d let her pull machine levers to swirl soft serve into cones for herself and us, her rude, yet innocent brood. Once she got so fed up with us kids and our pesky ways that she ran away from us. She needed some serenity to regain her composure, so she left our home in search of some. After some immature deliberation, my brother Jonny and sister Kelsey pedaled their way down our driveway and onto the grey-black pavements that led to the local McDonalds, where they found my mom hiding from us. Another time, my siblings and I believed ourselves to have invented the then delectable art of dipping French fries and McNuggets into chocolate shakes; the perfect combination of warm grease and cool frozen sugars.
-
When we were older, my family relocated to another state. Kelsey worked at the McDonalds in Sabraton, the little community nestled between two West Virginia hills. An older man would come in during her shifts to see her; a man that she and her friend soon discovered was a registered sex offender. It was a discovery that left them more than a little spooked.
-
It’s just inevitable. McDonalds disgusts me, especially when you go there with a friend and have to watch them talk to you with a mouth full of mysterious meat as those familiar smells you want to shove up a vent float throughout your nostrils. Or when your skinny skinny beautiful model cousin can swallow quarter pounders with cheese like no other and won’t even gain an ounce. But what really disgusts me the most is that they sell bags of crap and call them Happy Meals. The only place in the world that disgusts me just as much and gives me the same feelings is none other than a school cafeteria.
-
In my younger days, I was a chubby little girl with a tuft of curls sprouting from my head like daisies and a belly that told of an obsession that would someday become a part of my secret struggle with depression. Back then, I knew nothing but shyness and having to get help with my friendships. Back then, the words of my tiny classmate Nicole Johnson first came to haunt me; words that would return to me during my episodes of depression and moments of silence set aside for my shames and sorrows.
-
“You know, Hannah, if you keep eating cheese, you’ll just end up getting fatter.”
-
We were third graders. The nature mural walls of the cafeteria at Groveland Elementary school closed in on that moment. I had been asking for small unwanted rectangles of cheese from my peers, and then those words came and changed me. I couldn’t shake them loose from the bad wiring in my brain and they just got all tangled in the mess. But most importantly, my heart remembers how it felt to have those words said to me. The sensation of the dropping beats; a stomach full of them.
-
My stomach continuously was filled with these heart droppings from then on. When I was in middle school, my mom was at a point where she was working out three times a week, doing Weight Watchers again, and she had me join the weight loss program with her. I never progressed with it. I didn’t understand why I was stuck with this problem at my age. I didn’t want to go to a meeting full of old fat women in the musty, dated basement of some rickety-old church. I wanted friends my own age and to be pretty. The number on the scale always was within the same range every week. I was only there because of the pressure that was building up on my back and shoulders and in my heart. I was only there to gather the building blocks that would slowly construct a wall known as my lack of serotonin; a blockade from being my full self. I didn’t know what I was doing, and eventually my mom let me stop going. I lost trust with my parents because my mom would tell me that my dad would talk to her about how he was concerned about my weight, which was a predecessor to troubles behind my closed bedroom door and callow scribbling on unsure pages.
-
One school night, Kelsey and I decided we were going to pack lunches for school the next day since public school cafeteria food in West Virginia was a nasty unknown. I didn’t want to have to pack an ice pack so I shoved a strawberry Panera bagel and other food items into a brown paper bag. The next morning, my mom wanted to see what I had packed. She pulled out each item one by one, raising her voice “Carbs! Carbs! Carbs!” I felt betrayal. I felt heat rush to my cheeks and a faucet turned on behind my eyes. She was getting upset at me for something I didn’t know; something she should’ve taught me. I didn’t feel like taking a lunch to school anymore.
-
And that’s how it went. Sometime during my later middle school years, I began developing new habits. I stopped eating lunch at school altogether. I would tell people it was because I didn’t like the food, but the real reason was because I had become self-conscious of people seeing me eat. Off and on the sadness would come; little suicidal notes in my brain. I cried to my middle school counselor once. I was too scared to tell her because I was scared she would tell my parents about my bad thoughts.
-
Because of the stress that thinking about my weight was causing me, I didn’t want to think about it. So I tried not to, but I still kept the habit of not eating lunch. When high school came around, I would wake up around five and eat breakfast and not eat again until around four in the afternoon. I would come home tired and drained with a headache bloomed inside my brain lobes, and then I would most likely eat too much at once. My mom would try to make me at least bring a little something to school to eat and so sometimes I did just to soothe her scolding that bit at my ear like a gnat.
-
By the time junior year came around, I was an unhealthy twenty pounds heavier than I had been as a freshman. I didn’t like being a size eighteen. I hated numbers, but they began to rule me. I felt like guys didn’t like me because of my size. I felt like they only ever liked my skinny pretty friends. I felt like they only loved me for a fat sister friend. Senior year came and I was quietly crumbling. People would ask me how I was doing and out of a habit I had formed I would tell them I was doing great, but they didn’t know that I would cry some nights because of the loneliness; because of how inferior I felt. They didn’t know that I was forming new scars and the skin pigment on my thighs was being altered. I didn’t fully realize how often I was lying about how I felt until a classmate of mine started asking me how I was doing about five times during one class period. I would tell him repeatedly that he already asked me to which he’d respond “just making sure.”
-
That summer, I knew that I was falling. I prayed for a friend. I needed someone to be completely honest with because I wasn’t being completely honest with myself. I grew up with lots of great friends whom I could experience a bit of laughter and happiness around, but I found difficulty sharing things with them that I confined to my twisted mind; the plans of how I would live the rest of my life in pretense, obsessed with my clavicles and their bony protrusion, and later in my twenties, lock myself in a hotel room, never to come out alive. I told myself lies. I told myself that I was the only one who would ever miss me.
-
I was on a downhill descent. Several months later, things in my mind just started to explode. On a shopping trip out with my mom, I started sweating in the store, my hands clammed up, and I told my mom I was stressed out and didn’t know why. On the ride home, she used one of her softer tones and asked, as we were about to drive past the Dairy Queen,
-
“Do you want some ice cream because you’re stressed out and don’t know why?”
-
“No” I sheepishly yanked the word from my mouth.
-
I had learned that food wasn’t going to fix this and as much as I love my mom now, there are qualities about her I don’t want to inherit, but I’ve developed a little. Growing up, she used to hide bags of chocolate and eat them. Once she revealed to us that one time she had bought several boxes of Girl Scout cookies and scarfed many of those boxes by herself. Oatmeal cream pies would be concealed in nooks of the pantry; slithering our names from afar as they played temptress. I ate when I was bored, sad, or lonely. I ate when I wasn’t hungry. I began to bring my childhood into my adulthood by buying granola bars and eating a whole box at once, one bar after the next, until my stomach was shouting at me with distaste.
-
“I didn’t know McDonalds existed when I was a kid. My dad only ever took us to Mickey’s Diner. He never took us to McDonalds.”
-
I hear her voice in my head as a revelation. She took her childhood into her adulthood by taking on the role of yo-yo dieter. We are self-haters. It’s in our bloodstream. The doctor told me so a few months ago when I sat scared in a room and told him about my family history. I had gotten tired of living like death. I was tired of running away from school when I was overwhelmed; tired of my bed; tired of being sad and feeling ugly. I wanted change. I needed change into a transition from a negative lifestyle to a positive one.
-
I decided this one windy afternoon in April. I sat on the grass at the park when I was supposed to be in class. I had been trying to escape by running from responsibility; distracting myself by stringing glass beads into bracelets. But I couldn’t focus. My heart dropped into my stomach once more. Fed up with the unnecessary hurting and inexplicable pain, I returned to my apartment and made an appointment with a counselor. The night before my appointment was the last time I intentionally hurt myself. I slid a rotary blade around on my arm; leaving behind little scratch marks. I sobbed to a counselor for an hour and showed her the self-inflicted imperfections. I purged my long-kept secret like vomit up and through my throat. I needed to rid myself of it. After the appointment, in a great post-purging exertion, I flushed that blade down the toilet and hoped desperately for freedom from falling.
-
After the second appointment with the counselor, I agreed to see a doctor to obtain medication for my condition. My counselor scribbled down with surety on a piece of referral paper I’d hold unsurely with failing fingers; the inky words poking me in the eyes. When I had my consultation with the doctor, he had me take a blood test to make sure my feelings weren’t being sourced by an underlying cause. He revealed to me later that my organs work great, I’m not diabetic, and I don’t have cancer. I have Major Depressive Disorder. It is the reason why I was sad when I knew I was supposed to be happy, the reason why I hated myself, the reason why I cut, the reason why I didn’t want to live, and the wall that kept me from my health—and it is anything but me.
-
I still struggle sometimes, but with the help of many wonderful friends and family I’ve been able to smash my brick-wall depression and rebuild it into something beautiful. I’ve been able to sculpt my heart into stratums of hope and progression; and I’ve learned the tenderest manifestations of existence lay within those chambers and ventricles. As humans, we have both independent and dependent elements in the art of our souls. I feel that as we grow, we still cry over the things we truly want and need, only we tend do it in the silence of our hearts. Through finally asking for the help I needed, I’ve learned the power that the positives have over the negatives. I’ve learned the letting go of stains and the holding on to scars. I’ve learned that I’m still growing, maturity is physical death, and to claim maturity before the time has come for it is indeed spiritual death; a work of art hastily gone unfinished.
-
Nowadays, I feel like I’ve progressed into an advanced state of immaturity; a higher level of probability for positivity taken in at the perfect dosage day-by-day. The McDonalds on Highway Seven has been shut down for several years now. It’s gone with the years and wrecking balls of demolition, as will be my depression someday, but I surely am not. I am still here; more womanly than the chubby girl-y I was in my elementary days, middle school phases, and high school hallways. I still struggle sometimes, but I see in the mirror now, not ugly, but the odd proportions of a Michelangelo and the head of an Andy Warhol, lips and curls and cheeks pale with blush; a pink like the colors of a present day contemporary. Something boring at first glance, but I hope, with meaning beyond that. I am slowly becoming becoming.
-
When we lived in Minnetonka, my mom would frequent the McDonalds off of Highway Seven, turning herself in for her Diet Coke addiction and a few Happy Meal toys. She would often give rides home to the workers and they’d let her pull machine levers to swirl soft serve into cones for herself and us, her rude, yet innocent brood. Once she got so fed up with us kids and our pesky ways that she ran away from us. She needed some serenity to regain her composure, so she left our home in search of some. After some immature deliberation, my brother Jonny and sister Kelsey pedaled their way down our driveway and onto the grey-black pavements that led to the local McDonalds, where they found my mom hiding from us. Another time, my siblings and I believed ourselves to have invented the then delectable art of dipping French fries and McNuggets into chocolate shakes; the perfect combination of warm grease and cool frozen sugars.
-
When we were older, my family relocated to another state. Kelsey worked at the McDonalds in Sabraton, the little community nestled between two West Virginia hills. An older man would come in during her shifts to see her; a man that she and her friend soon discovered was a registered sex offender. It was a discovery that left them more than a little spooked.
-
It’s just inevitable. McDonalds disgusts me, especially when you go there with a friend and have to watch them talk to you with a mouth full of mysterious meat as those familiar smells you want to shove up a vent float throughout your nostrils. Or when your skinny skinny beautiful model cousin can swallow quarter pounders with cheese like no other and won’t even gain an ounce. But what really disgusts me the most is that they sell bags of crap and call them Happy Meals. The only place in the world that disgusts me just as much and gives me the same feelings is none other than a school cafeteria.
-
In my younger days, I was a chubby little girl with a tuft of curls sprouting from my head like daisies and a belly that told of an obsession that would someday become a part of my secret struggle with depression. Back then, I knew nothing but shyness and having to get help with my friendships. Back then, the words of my tiny classmate Nicole Johnson first came to haunt me; words that would return to me during my episodes of depression and moments of silence set aside for my shames and sorrows.
-
“You know, Hannah, if you keep eating cheese, you’ll just end up getting fatter.”
-
We were third graders. The nature mural walls of the cafeteria at Groveland Elementary school closed in on that moment. I had been asking for small unwanted rectangles of cheese from my peers, and then those words came and changed me. I couldn’t shake them loose from the bad wiring in my brain and they just got all tangled in the mess. But most importantly, my heart remembers how it felt to have those words said to me. The sensation of the dropping beats; a stomach full of them.
-
My stomach continuously was filled with these heart droppings from then on. When I was in middle school, my mom was at a point where she was working out three times a week, doing Weight Watchers again, and she had me join the weight loss program with her. I never progressed with it. I didn’t understand why I was stuck with this problem at my age. I didn’t want to go to a meeting full of old fat women in the musty, dated basement of some rickety-old church. I wanted friends my own age and to be pretty. The number on the scale always was within the same range every week. I was only there because of the pressure that was building up on my back and shoulders and in my heart. I was only there to gather the building blocks that would slowly construct a wall known as my lack of serotonin; a blockade from being my full self. I didn’t know what I was doing, and eventually my mom let me stop going. I lost trust with my parents because my mom would tell me that my dad would talk to her about how he was concerned about my weight, which was a predecessor to troubles behind my closed bedroom door and callow scribbling on unsure pages.
-
One school night, Kelsey and I decided we were going to pack lunches for school the next day since public school cafeteria food in West Virginia was a nasty unknown. I didn’t want to have to pack an ice pack so I shoved a strawberry Panera bagel and other food items into a brown paper bag. The next morning, my mom wanted to see what I had packed. She pulled out each item one by one, raising her voice “Carbs! Carbs! Carbs!” I felt betrayal. I felt heat rush to my cheeks and a faucet turned on behind my eyes. She was getting upset at me for something I didn’t know; something she should’ve taught me. I didn’t feel like taking a lunch to school anymore.
-
And that’s how it went. Sometime during my later middle school years, I began developing new habits. I stopped eating lunch at school altogether. I would tell people it was because I didn’t like the food, but the real reason was because I had become self-conscious of people seeing me eat. Off and on the sadness would come; little suicidal notes in my brain. I cried to my middle school counselor once. I was too scared to tell her because I was scared she would tell my parents about my bad thoughts.
-
Because of the stress that thinking about my weight was causing me, I didn’t want to think about it. So I tried not to, but I still kept the habit of not eating lunch. When high school came around, I would wake up around five and eat breakfast and not eat again until around four in the afternoon. I would come home tired and drained with a headache bloomed inside my brain lobes, and then I would most likely eat too much at once. My mom would try to make me at least bring a little something to school to eat and so sometimes I did just to soothe her scolding that bit at my ear like a gnat.
-
By the time junior year came around, I was an unhealthy twenty pounds heavier than I had been as a freshman. I didn’t like being a size eighteen. I hated numbers, but they began to rule me. I felt like guys didn’t like me because of my size. I felt like they only ever liked my skinny pretty friends. I felt like they only loved me for a fat sister friend. Senior year came and I was quietly crumbling. People would ask me how I was doing and out of a habit I had formed I would tell them I was doing great, but they didn’t know that I would cry some nights because of the loneliness; because of how inferior I felt. They didn’t know that I was forming new scars and the skin pigment on my thighs was being altered. I didn’t fully realize how often I was lying about how I felt until a classmate of mine started asking me how I was doing about five times during one class period. I would tell him repeatedly that he already asked me to which he’d respond “just making sure.”
-
That summer, I knew that I was falling. I prayed for a friend. I needed someone to be completely honest with because I wasn’t being completely honest with myself. I grew up with lots of great friends whom I could experience a bit of laughter and happiness around, but I found difficulty sharing things with them that I confined to my twisted mind; the plans of how I would live the rest of my life in pretense, obsessed with my clavicles and their bony protrusion, and later in my twenties, lock myself in a hotel room, never to come out alive. I told myself lies. I told myself that I was the only one who would ever miss me.
-
I was on a downhill descent. Several months later, things in my mind just started to explode. On a shopping trip out with my mom, I started sweating in the store, my hands clammed up, and I told my mom I was stressed out and didn’t know why. On the ride home, she used one of her softer tones and asked, as we were about to drive past the Dairy Queen,
-
“Do you want some ice cream because you’re stressed out and don’t know why?”
-
“No” I sheepishly yanked the word from my mouth.
-
I had learned that food wasn’t going to fix this and as much as I love my mom now, there are qualities about her I don’t want to inherit, but I’ve developed a little. Growing up, she used to hide bags of chocolate and eat them. Once she revealed to us that one time she had bought several boxes of Girl Scout cookies and scarfed many of those boxes by herself. Oatmeal cream pies would be concealed in nooks of the pantry; slithering our names from afar as they played temptress. I ate when I was bored, sad, or lonely. I ate when I wasn’t hungry. I began to bring my childhood into my adulthood by buying granola bars and eating a whole box at once, one bar after the next, until my stomach was shouting at me with distaste.
-
“I didn’t know McDonalds existed when I was a kid. My dad only ever took us to Mickey’s Diner. He never took us to McDonalds.”
-
I hear her voice in my head as a revelation. She took her childhood into her adulthood by taking on the role of yo-yo dieter. We are self-haters. It’s in our bloodstream. The doctor told me so a few months ago when I sat scared in a room and told him about my family history. I had gotten tired of living like death. I was tired of running away from school when I was overwhelmed; tired of my bed; tired of being sad and feeling ugly. I wanted change. I needed change into a transition from a negative lifestyle to a positive one.
-
I decided this one windy afternoon in April. I sat on the grass at the park when I was supposed to be in class. I had been trying to escape by running from responsibility; distracting myself by stringing glass beads into bracelets. But I couldn’t focus. My heart dropped into my stomach once more. Fed up with the unnecessary hurting and inexplicable pain, I returned to my apartment and made an appointment with a counselor. The night before my appointment was the last time I intentionally hurt myself. I slid a rotary blade around on my arm; leaving behind little scratch marks. I sobbed to a counselor for an hour and showed her the self-inflicted imperfections. I purged my long-kept secret like vomit up and through my throat. I needed to rid myself of it. After the appointment, in a great post-purging exertion, I flushed that blade down the toilet and hoped desperately for freedom from falling.
-
After the second appointment with the counselor, I agreed to see a doctor to obtain medication for my condition. My counselor scribbled down with surety on a piece of referral paper I’d hold unsurely with failing fingers; the inky words poking me in the eyes. When I had my consultation with the doctor, he had me take a blood test to make sure my feelings weren’t being sourced by an underlying cause. He revealed to me later that my organs work great, I’m not diabetic, and I don’t have cancer. I have Major Depressive Disorder. It is the reason why I was sad when I knew I was supposed to be happy, the reason why I hated myself, the reason why I cut, the reason why I didn’t want to live, and the wall that kept me from my health—and it is anything but me.
-
I still struggle sometimes, but with the help of many wonderful friends and family I’ve been able to smash my brick-wall depression and rebuild it into something beautiful. I’ve been able to sculpt my heart into stratums of hope and progression; and I’ve learned the tenderest manifestations of existence lay within those chambers and ventricles. As humans, we have both independent and dependent elements in the art of our souls. I feel that as we grow, we still cry over the things we truly want and need, only we tend do it in the silence of our hearts. Through finally asking for the help I needed, I’ve learned the power that the positives have over the negatives. I’ve learned the letting go of stains and the holding on to scars. I’ve learned that I’m still growing, maturity is physical death, and to claim maturity before the time has come for it is indeed spiritual death; a work of art hastily gone unfinished.
-
Nowadays, I feel like I’ve progressed into an advanced state of immaturity; a higher level of probability for positivity taken in at the perfect dosage day-by-day. The McDonalds on Highway Seven has been shut down for several years now. It’s gone with the years and wrecking balls of demolition, as will be my depression someday, but I surely am not. I am still here; more womanly than the chubby girl-y I was in my elementary days, middle school phases, and high school hallways. I still struggle sometimes, but I see in the mirror now, not ugly, but the odd proportions of a Michelangelo and the head of an Andy Warhol, lips and curls and cheeks pale with blush; a pink like the colors of a present day contemporary. Something boring at first glance, but I hope, with meaning beyond that. I am slowly becoming becoming.