A Call For Help

This isn't as desperate a thing as it may seem, but it is a necessary thing that I need to do in order to keep my life from getting worse than it already is.

It's time for me to face this, hard as it's going to be.  Not a lot of people may know this about me, but I've got an eating disorder.

Yes, I'm a man in his mid thirties with an eating disorder.  I suppose I'm what the professionals might call a binge eater, but I'm no professional, so it's kind of dumb for me to be trying to diagnose myself, especially since I'm also something of a chronic overeater, too.

There are two really big reasons why this is a damned hard thing for me to deal with.  One is that I do believe we all know that we have to eat to survive.  If I don't eat, I starve and die, just like everybody else, in spite of my weight.

The other is, as I said above, that I'm a guy.  That's relevant because I'm a citizen and a life-long resident of the United States, where the general consensus is that men don't have eating disorders.  I assure you, we do.  But the perception that we don't makes it at least twice as hard to overcome this thing before it kills me.

To sum up that last paragraph, here's this stamp thingamajig I found on Deviant Art a while back.  I was going to try to be cool and embed it here, but that didn't quite work out the way I'd hoped.

Yeah, I know.  The media lie to people.  What a shock, right?

But moving right on, there are people in my life I can turn to for help with this.  The thing is, though, that the best ones are also the worst ones in that regard.  I'm not going to say specifically who they are, at least not now, but I will say that they're like most people to whom we Americans apply the term "activist" in that it isn't so much that they aren't helpful as much as it is that it often at least seems that they help the way I eat: once I get started, I have trouble knowing when to stop, and by the time I get it figured out, I've already overeaten, oftentimes by quite a bit.

Now, the whole subject of activism is one that I might approach in another blog at some point.  For the time being, though, I've got a more important matter to write about.

But anyway, I need a little help.  I'd like as much of that help as possible to come from people I know off the Internet, but I'd also like to think that some of it can come from those I know online, too.

To those who might question why I'm writing this, I must say I'm not doing it to cause any harm or open up any rifts or something of the sort.  I'm doing it because there's a conversation we should have on this matter, and I can't think of any better way to go about starting it.

So there you have it.  A glimpse into my more personal side.  I'll probably live to regret this, so I can only hope it's not as badly as I fear.