On Swallowing The Mouth and Other Foreign Bodies

Chewing on accents, the mouth becomes a foreign body, suddenly not ready-to-hand. Flavors unfamiliar and sounds that struggle out. I have sought the abject. My own language becomes distant: "Lasagna de saumon" for dinner. Emphatic mistakes and excessive silence, successful and unsuccessful attempts at eavesdropping, Google translates the name of this little girl from Eugenie to eugenics, and she sounds out a French word extending the gargling of the R as though the sound is a hair in her throat as she puts the word together.

My body is unable to excuse itself when it lapses social graces because my immediate response is unintelligible to whomever it is intended: "Sorr- Pardon!" And the body language is there sincerely gesturing to awkwardly compensate for the mouth like the friend of the inappropriate drunk.
But this abjection of the mouth is pleasant in a way, rather than the overwhelm of unbelonging of an eating disordered abjectedness.
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early 15c., "cast off, rejected," from Latin abiectus, past participle of abicere "to throw away, cast off; degrade, humble, lower," from ab- "away, off" (see ab-) + iacere "to throw" (past participle iactus; see jet (v.)). Figurative sense of "downcast, brought low" first attested 1510s. Related: Abjectly; abjectness.

Sometimes I can feel November 17 as it looms in the distance, slowly creeping upon me with its full weight. Some years I only remember the date days after. Each year isn't easier, but it's also not that each year isn't easier.
Some people count from the first meal skipped or vomited, if they can even remember. Some people count by the number of bruises from their spine. Some people don't count. 7 years ago I was admitted. 7 years ago. Seven. Il y a sept ans. Sept ans. Sept.


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The question, "what's really going on?" assumes some 'actual' issue as the cause of the disorder. It is a scapegoat.

"But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." Umberto Eco

Those reasons, causes, underlying issues, and all the factors we spend years in therapy identifying only work to sustain a recovery if we fashion them powerful enough. Because we do fashion them. We pick things in our lives that we can't make sense of and decide that it's a reason things went wrong. When you 'relapse,' it doesn't really have much to do with whether or not you've uncovered the root cause yet, as many therapists would have you believe, because there is no such thing. There IS realizing that you are totally in a world that is completely available to you, verifying that it is full of stuff like sadness and weirdness and that it has not been set up for feeling acutely, and then deciding to live how is best for you. That itching in your skin and the discomfort of a body, the sense of being constrained, and foreign to yourself, or made of something else entirely from the world, this is a thing.

That abjection is expected is terrifyingly freeing.
That you can indeed, survive it; solicit it; even enjoy it, allows you to make it your own and in doing so strips it of it's destructive aspect for the moment.
And then the foreignness dissipates and you are yourself entirely because you have swallowed the foreign body.

The ED is a constant attempt at suppressing the experience of unbelonging, abjection, foreignness, being-in-the-world, being human. BEING abject, fully inhabiting your foreignness is an assertion of a whole you. The abject may have some history in your relationship with your mother or early sexuality or bullying, but those reasons only work to fuel a sustained recovery for as long as they are important and emotionally charged enough and in as much as they bring you to inhabit yourself, your sensations, your world.

The work is actually much simpler than any of the therapeutic tools they throw at you and shove down your throat: Actively permeating a philosophical shift in your psyche, in your everyday, in your actions and your speech and your relationships to people and yourself and and the world and the things which remind you of your separateness, the loneliness of abjection, the isolation of foreignness, that is where the work of 'recovery' happens and exhausts us.

"to regain consciousness," from Anglo-French rekeverer (13c.), Old French recovrer "come back, return; regain health; procure, get again" (11c.), from Medieval Latin recuperare "to recover" (source of Spanish recobrar, Italian ricoverare; see recuperation). Meaning "to regain health or strength" is from early 14c.; sense of "to get (anything) back" is first attested mid-14c. Related: Recovered; recovering."

And we may throw that word out because it is not something that any of us are doing again as the prefix would indicate. There is nothing before that we must find to repeat or return to; to attempt to return to a prior point would only have us running the same course. There is no blunder to repair for we have only ever been being human and there is no mistake in that. Even to uncover, or discover, replacements which others have suggested, summons images of revealing some actual truth which laid hidden all this time, and such a notion is not only misleading, ineffective and disempowering, but also makes us feel downright stupid for having missed the truth, being unable to find it in it's hiding place, or for having misplaced it ourselves. This is unhelpful. What we are doing in this work is much more akin to something with a eu- prefix, a new living, a new being, a new body, for in our authentic 'recoveries' (with their highs and lows of all varieties), we are continually renewing an effort to be honest, to incorporate the world into our selves, to change, adapt, grow, be in the world and in our bodies. Perhaps we may simply refer to 'recovery,' and better yet, to our lives, as an 'oeuvre,'

"a work, composition," especially a musical one, 1809, from Latin opus "a work, labor, exertion" (source of Italian opera, French oeuvre, Spanish obra), from PIE root *op- (Germanic *ob-) "to work, produce in abundance," "good deed;" Old High German uoben "to start work, to practice, to honor;" German üben "to exercise, practice;" Dutch oefenen, Old Norse æfa, Danish øve "to exercise, practice;" Old English æfnan "to perform, work, do," afol "power"). The plural, seldom used as such, is opera.

An artist's work in entirety is often referred to as their oeuvre, and also sometimes as their body of work.
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The work of body is about an exertion, an openness, and continual redefinition. It is easy not to do this. There are so many other things to pay faster attention. It is easy to let the lips numb up, for the tongue to mechanize and teeth grind to stubs. And when we do allow the abject in foreign flavors liven the mouth, the strangeness of our existence is on the tip of the tongue and teeth clatter in confusion of what they are. These sensations threaten to override the rest and render us so entirely foreign to ourselves, so completely self-disgusting that it drives us to the edges of possibility well beyond the realm of a world worth living in; where I was 7 years ago. What I do now, in this happier place, in this place more accepting of the dross; is to let my mouth be wretched with accents and strange words, with new foods at different hours; is to let my body be awkward in waving the waiter, delayed from the dub of my French words slightly out of sync in conversation; and to gather all that bizarrity and swallow it. Incorporate.