The nurse stared at me blankly.

"I have never once heard someone refer to themselves as a failed bulimic."

But I wanted to be honest, even if it was only a voluntary study. How else would she know that I'd tried? Really hard! She was taking down my life story in units, disorders, and episodes, to put towards a giant dataset that would test the hypothesis that depression was caused by inflammation in the brain. I had signed a consent form to get a spinal tap in London but the study lost funding before I could have attempted that unique and terrifying experience, a twist in the tale as true now as it was then, a decade ago.

Until recently, I considered myself pretty much recovered from food craziness. Forgive me using a flippant term. I don't even like referring to "my eating disorder" anymore, not least because it makes me want to hum the My Little Pony theme. It is a shapeshifter, in itself and every self it passes through, and a common affliction caught environmentally. So to describe it as a singular thing that is singularly mine feels off, almost like saying, "my own influenza", instead of, "this fucking flu". I could be bold and describe it in past tense, though I would hear its hum somedays, low enough to ignore. I railed against diet culture and found that by letting go of control, I could feel free.

Now, I won't bore you with details - I'm bored enough of them - but for medical reasons, I can only eat specific things for the time being, with no set end in sight. What a way to confirm that eating is one of the main sources of joy in my life, particularly sharing a wide variety of food with loads of other people! I can still eat and eat a few things in the outside world, so it's a gilded cage but I'm pacing all the same. I remember my past self, curse her for that futile restriction. I force gratitude in my present self, that she's well enough to attend the function, clutching a camomile tea, hoping her non vivant mind will shift through osmosis.

"And," says my friend, her eyes growing wide, as if she could suddenly breathe through them. "That's what I'm trying to embrace. This thing is happening and I feel this way and that thing is happening and I feel this other way too..." I consider this as a bland mouthful of ramen noodles turns to mush against my tongue. Just accepting this long chain of conjunction. No stopping, no contradiction. No conflict resolution required if there's no conflict to resolve. Could it be that simple to lower stress by removing but from my internal vocabulary? We finish lunch, which she treats me to, a small act with a big impact, and turn the corner. We're taking part in some art workshops that culminate in a performed piece.

The artist leading the devising speaks many languages. We layer our voices, whistling, speaking, singing, building to cacophony. We are given prompts to begin talking automatically. It is unbelievably easy to keep spewing. It's like thinking, in that it doesn't stop, but the source isn't our minds. It's like our bodies doing impressions of our thoughts. I mimic the sound of the hum telling me everything will be fixed if I'm skeletal, feel it resonate through my body, through the other bodies in the room, through the room itself. It is outside of me, where it belongs. Eyes closed, listening to the others, we've become birds. Merged with the group in performance, it occurs to me that this is the first thing for me that has captured something about the experience of being alive right now. Not because it gave answers, but because we could speak back.

Everyone I know is really going through it. I can't tell how much of it is this time and how much of it is just we've reached midlife. Finding out that this lunar year belongs to the fire horse, I immediately pictured that one Pokémon. I was annoyed, at my lack of imagination and that I couldn't remember its name. Fire horse, though - it checks out. Something is charging. I reel from how petty my own immediate difficulty is, how difficult I find it, after several difficult years in a row. It's just a lot. Give me a break.

Oh ho ho, once again my expectations of how I should be living my life are dampening the experience of my life as it unfolds! The source of suffering, as ever, is that my life is not conforming to the image I have constructed of my/self! That the self demands coherence in a way my experiences resist! That this voice that's speaking is an elemental block, not a soloist stepping forward temporarily from a choir, chanting and and and and and...

What is your body for? I heard it internally and I didn't think it. I loved the question, precisely because I had no answer. Freed from purpose, I felt my body simply be for a few moments. Maybe it's that osmosis I wanted. Maybe I should look into why I feel calmer seeing that kind of stress. Maybe I'm not alone. You can hear it, right? That flush of prickling along your skin?

The force of that galloping heat?