Stick a fork in me.

I'm done. I can’t do this anymore.

I have this feeling like I could eat a thousand meals and still not be full. That everything I do is akin to eating. Everything is the act of putting something savory on my tongue and swallowing it up with my entire body, just to temporarily reach that elusive interminable fix of feeling full.

But when I’m not eating, I am always looking for that high. I overachieve at work and thrive on my boss’ approval. I’ll tell a joke at a party just to get that sweet stomach-filling hit of laughter. I even get a rush after creating that perfect meme. You know, the one that gets you 250 likes and you weren’t even trying.

Likes. What an awful concept. You know what often gets the most likes, always has always will? Pictures of your kids.

I wonder if that’s why parents post them so often.

But the feeling of power that comes from eating, not even doing drugs or binge-drinking matches it. Once you swallow something and it is inside of you, you don’t have to say a silently demand to your body that it will live inside you forever and never be destroyed or broken down.

And all you have to do to ensure that happens is to never move again.

I have no control over my body. No, I don’t have an eating disorder. No, I don’t have a weight problem, I simply have a life problem. A creating life problem. But how can I be in the business of creating life when I have done such a worthless job with my own?

You see, my life is both a series of missteps and false starts. Sure, I’ve achieved things. I could say I was #blessed for a number of reasons and I know things could be a lot worse, sure.

But I’ve been a victim of sexual assault and abuse. I’ve been homeless. I’ve had the rug pulled from under me in life more than once. But everything is fine now, so the focus is now on that I’ve gained weight.

People say I should look outside of myself more, and not be so stuck inside the way yesterday’s pancake breakfast is still stuck.

But these same people never look outside of themselves. I know they’ve been through hard times. Their victimhood is understood, and they thrive off it. They seek out the same pleasures and achievements, but somehow their success rate is higher, even when they aren’t even trying.

And then it seems to be a constant windfall of acceptance and likes, and it never stops. And now they project an image of something who is never struggling, out of shape, or unhappy. And even if they are all three of those things, it doesn’t matter, no one would dare point it out to them.

Becoming a parent erases all of your flaws.

Then they want to pretend that in doing these things they leave a legacy and further their name, while I sweep their old dusty regrets under a heavy complaint-woven rug and pretend they never shared them. Pretend they never said, “I hate my kids” or “Don’t ever have kids, it’ll ruin your life.”

Pretend. Pretend. Pretend. Pretend. Pretend. Pretend.

Their life has meaning now, so that must mean mine still does not.

Sometimes I wish I had more of a weight problem. Maybe if I were larger I’d be less invisible to whoever is behind the pulleys and switches that control the universe. And I would have something like that to blame all of my problems on.

I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I just mean it wouldn’t be just one problem, it would be THE problem. And I could identify myself with that. It could be the thing I write about, the thing that makes me who I am.

But as it is I am not a trendy amount of fat, but still fat enough to make people accuse me of not taking care of myself.

And once again I will reiterate that being semi-fat is the least of my concerns.

The size of my body is just one part of my powerlessness. I know this because I felt the same way when I was small.

Growing up I was underweight and bullied by the boys in my class for my lack of curves. The girls in all the yearbook dance photos always had some heft to them, at least certain parts of their body did.

And I was often reminded that if I had just “put a little bit of meat on my bones” I would be a lot more attractive.

And they weren’t wrong.

As I started to eat the kinds of meals my mother didn’t make, you bet I put on the required amount of weight that made me desirable to the opposite sex.

And I was.

And it was devastating to my mother, who was certain I would end up a teenage pregnancy statistic, like she was.

But she dodged the bullet of being a young grandmother and has somehow continued to dodge the tortuously slow bullet of being an old grandmother.

And so, everything is different now. I am not too skinny to get laid and knocked up too young. I have lots of sex now. I have sex like it's my job. But now I am “fat”, and "old" with fertility problems.

And everything I have done as a human being between those two stages of life seems to matter very little.

So, what have I done besides complain? I keep trying. I work hard to keep myself at an invisible amount of overweight so that people go, "you're not fat!" but then insist I stand next to them in pictures as they turn to the side to look skinnier than me.

And apparently I am sexy and desirable and worthy and good enough and charming and successful. That’s what people tell me when I try to tell them how much I am hurting and how much my body is hurting me.

The body that I feed and live inside to survive, the body that carries my muscles and bones through all of this, my body, the thing I am closest to physically, still does not understand what my wants and needs are.

How can you have any power when you have no control over that?