Saturday 5 January 2013

Day 158: Generating an Eating Disorder - The Power of Images - Part 2

This blog is a continuation to:
Day 155: Introduction – Starving Myself

Day 156: Wanting Passion and Purpose in Life

Day 157: Generating an Eating Disorder – Part 1


Besides managing my thoughts deliberately to keep myself 'energized' and 'motivated' -- I also used images to further indoctrinate myself with my new 'lifestyle'.

The thoughts helped to some extent to 'keep me going', but it wasn't enough. So next, I started to play with images in various ways. I would become very specific about what I would watch on TV, to make sure that I only or mostly watched shows with lots of skinny people or fashion programmes. This was to everyday, as much as I could, imprint and instill my 'goal' to make sure that I do not stray off my path. I also made sure to go through all the regular and fashion magazines we had, to again imprint those pictures into my mind to keep myself motivated. Whenever I would slack on this 'picture' regime, I would slowly but surely start becoming less 'committed' and sloppy within my routine of doing and not doing things.

So just like with the reading not being 'enough' anymore to keep me going, where I expanded the point into managing my thoughts -- just 'looking' at the pictures had come to a point where it was not giving me the same 'energy dose' to submerge myself into my obsessions. So again, I took it a step further. Instead of 'passively' looking at the images/pictures and taking them in, I decided to 'engage' myself more actively -- I figured this would give me a 'higher return' of energy through 'investing' more effort in it lol. And I turned out to be right. I started a scrap book, where I started pasting in the pictures from the magazines that I liked the most, arranging them all very precisely and meticulously -- giving it as much attention as I could. The cutting, pasting and arranging was giving me some 'extra fuel' to run on, but I was looking for more. So I looked for another way where I could engage myself more within the realm of images: which was drawing.

I started keeping a sketch book aside my scrapbook, where I would draw / copy images and would attempt to draw them to perfection. This was very time-consuming and required a lot of concentration - so this was like the perfect activity to draw energy from, because it had to be PERFECT. I had to get the ratios, the lines, the curves -- everything had to be perfect before I would stop. And then I would go over those lines and curves that I liked again and again (like say the hipbones). The slow and meticulous drawing and correcting, really locked myself into my obsession-mode and worked quite effectively in terms of brainwashing myself.

This was when I learnt the power of putting pencil to paper -- where next, I explored the point of writing.
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