Today was a spacious day. I managed whole two walks (it only counts as a walk if it has no productive or consumptive purpose – everything else is a trip). On my first walk at lunchtime I managed to reach the forest. I had a good podcast on, but kept putting it on pause and circling back to the yesterday’s therapy session. As I ruminate on it, more questions emerge, more understanding on how angry I am about things that happened to me. And maybe I am even angrier about the things that didn’t happen. I kept thinking back about the lonely lonely lonely me in my late teens and early twenties. This girl, so desperate for love and companionship, so afraid to be seen or notice any sign of affection, even less return it. This girl who wants to be kissed and touched, but wouldn’t ask for it, because she was taught that it is sin. The girl who doesn’t go on dates, who is afraid of intimacy, the girl who lives in her head, doing her best to ignore what is happening in her body.

Her body, in the meanwhile, is a battlefield. It carries the weight of fat-shaming when she was a child. It is subdued by the expectations of purity culture. When her big love ends in rejection, she puts the blame on her body. She condemns it, because it’s too fat, because it is not lean or elegant. So she decides to transform it, not through love and attention, but through relentless discipline and judgment. It starts innocuously enough with regular jogging. Who’d be against that? Then she discovers the gym, she starts eating less, she starts cutting out fats, then carbs, then practically everything, until her diet consists of quartered apples, low-calorie bread (who invented this abomination?!), low-calorie cheese and/or luncheon meat, sugar-free chewy candies and abominable amounts of diet drinks loaded with aspartame. She loses weight, she thinks about food, food, food all the time. And the thinner she gets, the more she fat-shames herself.

What scares me, when I look back at her, is that no one comes to her aid. No one asks what is going on, as she melts away physically. No one, except her parents, confronts her, and their intervention brings no results. No one even tries to advice her or offer help. Why, I ask myself. Maybe, because people around her are just as deluded as she is. They too believe that what is happening to her body doesn’t matter. In their eyes, she is a picture of success. She is top of her class, outperforming everyone academically. She also out-prays, out-bible-studies and out-christians everyone around. Her version of Christianity, the evangelicalism, is highly performative. She is even planning to go back to her country and join the evangelical ministry (my mother was shocked by this decision, but ultimately relented – how I wish now that she didn’t).

I have a picture of me around my early “missionary” period. On the picture, there are bunch of Irish teenagers, the “missionaries”, and a few staff of the local evangelical student ministry – barely out of adolescence themselves. I am one of the staff. I am twenty-three, I have short boyish hair, dyed jet-black with a red streak à la Run, Lola, Run. I am not just thin, but emanciated. I don’t look confident, or happy, or having the slightest understanding what the hell I am doing. If anything, I look part-scared, part-aloof. If I could find some way to go back in time and talk to that girl, I think all I’d say would be “Don’t fuck up your life.”

On my second walk, at sunset, there was just so much of sweet, simple, calm goodness distilled in a short quarter or an hour. First, the sunset itself and the pink bellies of the clouds in the sky fading from dark blue to light blue to orange over the water reservoir. The branches of the trees, alight with the last sun-rays. The joy of walking. The podcast: Ross Gay speaking of sorrow, wilderness and joy. The gardens, all abloom. The particular freedom of Friday evening multiplied by the freedom of summer quickly approaching solstice. The aliveness of it all.