nothing to declare

[rm]

So, as previously noted, I have recently acquired a new dentist. He's a great dentist, his prices are a little better than many, and I'd give out the recommendation any day of the week. Before I continue, please note that my dental phobia is extraordinarily severe; if I've found someone I'm comfortable with treating me, I cannot just choose to go somewhere else. Which unfortunately means accepting or addressing a little problem, not unique to this particular practioner. So don't, for the love of all small gods, tell me to change dentists. That's not the answer to this story.

I am not bullimic. In fact, I have morbid, nearly phobic feelings about vomitting and have done so only three or four times in my life (not enumerating multiple nstances within two specific medical events counted within that three or four). However, the specific condition of my teeth as arrived at through a highly acidic diet, severe night-time grinding, 7.5 years of braces and bad genetics, does lead dentists to inquire if I am or have been bullimic. I don't take offense at this, as I'm very clear on how the question is arrived at, and it is a medical query of legitimate concern.

The problem ensues when I explain why they think that and why it's not the case. They don't believe me. They insist I protest too much. Sometimes, they will lecture me about relatives (who may or may not exist) who don't have eating disorders per se but were so worried about calories they just kept popping life savers to keep them going while they tried not to eat. Maybe that's what I'm doing, they ask.

I've never been anorexic either.

Not that I haven't been accused of these things before. (I want to pause here to talk about the word accused. I get than an eating disorder is a disease, not a weakness of character, but that understanding doesn't change the tone of these exchanges that have appeared throughout my life, so my using the word is not about my feelings about eating disorders but the way in which other people present their feelings about them to me. I think it's a digusting way to address an eating disorder to someone, whether or not they have one, and it's part of the problem I am coming to. Please, I don't want to be the villain of this tale; I've lost friends to it before).

I am, for the record, 5'6" with a weight that is generally somewhere betwen 110 and 120 lbs, depending on all sorts of factors -- hormones, exercise, what I'm eating, schedule, health. I have never counted calories except during times I was so poor I was afraid I wasn't consuming enough. When I first reached this height I weighed less than 100 lbs, and then sat at about 103 for years. I danced, had sort of only half gone through puberty. It wasn't a big deal. I ate like a horse and that's how it was. But you know what girls at camp said. Girls and school and old man doctors. Isn't that how it always works? For what my body has always been, I'm the right shape and size and weight for my height. It's not something I worry about, and believe me, I know that's a blessing on many fronts.

So I am not offended when the dentist asks me if I have an eating disorder.

But I am offended when he doesn't believe me when I reply. If I were a man, with these teeth, he would ask the question still. But I suspect he would believe me when I answered. Maybe it's not that I'm a woman (and this is so noted as he drops hints about how women think being too skinny is attractive, but it's not, trying to lure me into confession), maybe it's because he knows I'm an actor. Sadly, I'd like to think so. it offends me less.

But there is more to the dilemma, the aggravation, the sorrow, and let's be frank, the intense rage, I feel about this, the perils of being a woman in search of medical care. Considering a number of things about my nature, it would be somewhat unfair of me to offended by someone probing to see if I were a liar, because, after all, like everyone, I often am.

There is something else the repeated doubt says to me, and that is is that I don't, in the doctor's eyes, deserve this body. That I couldn't possibly have come by it honestly, whether through genetics, hard work or dumb luck. That a woman like me, with a mouth or a face like mine, just doesn't deserve such a socially valuable thing (and believe me, I'm aware of that, even if my own aesthetic preferneces do not particularly line up with that world view), and as such, could only possess it through pathology or deceit.

I have made and do make so much of my living and my art through my flesh, so to imply that it is not mine, that I am unworthy of it, that it is a lie or a falsehood, is a slap in my face. The first thing I was ever praised for was my ability to express myself through dance -- not my intelligence, not my writing, but my flesh, my certitude. I live in it so fully, when there have been so many good reasons to try to pull away from it -- health, accusation, and the pure beauty of my rather complicated fantasy lives. It's so utterly what I am, even my too thin and too long arms which when I look at them cause me to realize I often cannot fathom what use I could possibly have in this world not made for ethereal things.

People will always believe what they want to believe, and hear what they want to hear, and my flesh has always been suspect in some fashion or other (which I think is something all women could say before defining their meaning across so broad a spectrum it frightens me), but I'm a prideful creature in so many ways, including my willingness to enumerate my flaws. But there's no trade I can make, no sins I can declare to stop what is ultimately irelevant and condescending questioning. This is what it means to be in a non-dominant social grouping -- you are not just a transgessor, but _the_ transgressor, emblematic of everyone who looks or lives like you, both when you succeed (taking something you have no right to) and when you fail (being a burden on others).

I'll let you do the Miltonesque pondering on your own time, but so often it is the pettiest things that make being a woman feel like you've lost a war you can't even remember fighting.

Comments

[cookie-cm.livejournal.com]

I'm impressed that he cared enough/was interested enough to bother to ask...and for his own medical practice, as these disorders can possibly have implicatoins during certain procedures...he's covering every body's asses.

[rm.livejournal.com]

The problem is, he won't stop asking. And either I'm telling teh truth, or I'm never going to stop lying. It's not being asked once, or even twice that bothers me, as he should, it's being lectured to about a disorder I don't have while the intruments are in my mouth and I can't even reply.

[cookie-cm.livejournal.com]

That would be annoying to the point of anger, sorry for that experience. But then again, a good dentist is, unfortunately, hard to find...what in life isn't a compromise? Not much at all.
argh.

[00goddess.livejournal.com]

Argh. I understand your upset. For me it's been somewhat the opposite- I am routinely accused of being sedentary or of overeating. When I first became ill, one of the first symptoms was myserious weight gain. I went to doctors to try and find out what was wrong. They all told me that I needed to lose some weight, start exercising. No matter how often I explained that I was doing nothing differently than I had before, they insisted that the weight gain was the cause of all my symptoms and that the cause of the weight gain was my own laziness and poor nutrition.

I knowyou want to stay with this dentist, but how does this behavior reflect your comfort level with him? How can you continue to be comfortable with him treating you? If you do decide to stay with him, maybe you should write him a letter telling him some of what you have written here. Maybe he will care, maybe he will examine his own behavior and see that it is inappropriate. Otherwise, you might be having to put up with his insinuations every time you visit, and how comfortable will that be?

[laurel]

I know what you mean. I was frequently accused of having an eating disorder when I was a teenager and in my early twenties; I was told I was underweight by doctors when I was a kid too.

It does sound like an accusation and it's frustrating when people don't believe you. I actually was part of a support group for people with eating disorders at my high school because it was easier in the end to just go (plus my best friend was in the gruop and I thought maybe I could help support her).

Strangers, relatives, friends, acquaintances, doctors, etc. would all tell me to eat more and variations thereof. Like it was their business. It drove me nuts.

Strangely enough, I eat healthier stuff now (and yet I'm plus-sized these days). I ate a ton back then, though I was sometimes a picky eater and wouldn't eat much at school, for instance (but I made up for it when I got home).

I still get touchy when I hear people talking about other folks weight. When Ally McBeal was on and everyone would say that Calista Flockhart should "eat a sandwich" etc. Gah!

People seem more open about commenting on your weight when you don't weigh so much (to generalize); when you're on the heavier side, they talk but usually behind your back or just on the edge of earshot.

It does make me wonder if there is any weight where people wouldn't comment or have strong opinions and feel the need to express them. And it doesn't seem like men have to deal with this. Sigh.

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

oh, gods, I feel you. I was 5'7" and 115 on a good day; I was the only person I knew who lied about their weight to revise it upward on their driver's license. All through school I had to fight off the nurse or the gym teachers and so on who were convinced I was anorexic or bulimic; I really wonder if they got paid a bounty for every one they turned in to therapists, or something. I wore extra layers on the days when they weighed us, and the heaviest boots I could get away with.

I remember one day I had the stomach flu, and went in only because I had a big exam in second period that would've been impossible to make up. My mom knew this, and was expecting me to call her and ask to be picked up around lunchtime.

I made the mistake of going to the nurse instead of just using a pay phone.

"Hi, I'm really sick and nauseous and need to go home, can you call my mom?"

"Oh, dear. Have you been throwing up a lot?"

"Kind of, yeah. I'd rather not talk about it."

Have you had lunch?"

Urk. "No."

"What about breakfast?"

"Can we stop talking about food please? No, I didn't have breakfast. I can't keep food down."

"Oh, dear me. Have you been doing this a lot? Are you worried about your weight?"

"Yo! Lady! Stomach flu! You know, the one that's been all over school this month?"

"If you haven't been eating, and you've been throwing up, I'm concerned. When was your last meal?"

"Lady, you're gonna get to *see* my last meal on your desk in a minute if you keep talking like this. Call my mom, will you? She had the same thing this weekend."

"I'm still concerned about your eating habits."

"Do I have to go find a pay phone? Or throw up on your desk? Call my mom, damnit!"

A few years ago, when Kate Moss was all over billboards? And people were slapping "FEED ME" and "HEROIN KILLS" stickers over them? I had her exact measurements. It made me feel horrible. There I was, finally beginning to accept my figure as something that might not be horrible and bony and skeletal, daring to wear things that actually exposed my figure, and then - heroin chic.

I'm 130 lbs now, and I'm not happy about it, because I know I lost at least 5 lbs of muscle tone to being ill. People say it looks better than I used to, and I don't understand how 130 lbs. of sedentary, sickly flab and cellulite can look better than a healthy 115 with muscle tone. I could cope with the weight gain if it were healthy, but it isn't.

Skinny people shouldn't suffer for existing.

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

I've been skinny and I've been fat and Iv'e been stuff in between and it never ends, does it? It's like, there's NO weight that's OK for women to be, and it's as if we can't or shouldn't feel good about ourselves for how we look.

[schmidtybooger.livejournal.com]

In high school I was 5'2" and under 100 pounds. Now, I'm 5'4" and 110. Every doctor I went to asked about my weight and is concerned about my weight. Every year in school invariably one teacher would send me to the nurse thinking I was anorexic or bulimic. No one thought to check my thyroid, until college. Even now the only doctor who doesn't question my weight is my endocrinologist.
People constantly tell me how lucky I am to have the thyroid disorder because it allows me to eat whatever I want. While it is fun to eat cheese everyday it's not fun to have your immune system attack your body because it causes a myriad of other problems.
While I applaud your dentist for being concerned about your health (I've had many doctors that didn't care enough to follow up on my concerns, hence the not knowing about my thyroid for quite some time.) it would irk me to no end that he continues to question you despite the fact that you've made it abundantly clear his concerns are unfounded.
Bah!

[miep.livejournal.com]

fuck 'em. just look him in the eye and tell him you are ready to confess your secret passion for salted lemons. that ruined my mom's teeth. salted lemons. so yummy. i want one now. with salt. or a salted lime. or tamarind candy with salt and chile...

[lllvis.livejournal.com]

I've been reading back through your journal to find a good post to refer my good friend kingdom_key1 to read. I want her to read your entries, and I'd even more like to see each of you add the other to your respective friends list. I think you two share a good bit in common.

On her behalf, I'd also enjoy it if you read her fledgling journal, maybe even leave her a comment!


L

[rm.livejournal.com]

I've been noticing (but skimming) your posts about her, as I've been busy or sick for the last bloody couple of months, but she's more than welcome, and I will try to check out her journal over the next couple days. Pretty much I friend everyone back who friends me provided they write in a language I can understand, post more than quizzes and don't seem bad crazy.