Roxane Gay: When Food Serves To Heal The Soul
They say that some circumstances in life can change a person forever. Because when someone uses your body and steals your privacy, it makes you lose a part of your identity. That’s what happened to Roxane Gay, who began to hate herself and her body so much, that she used food as a shelter from the pain of rape.
Roxane Gay’s life changed completely when she was only 12 years old and was the victim of gang rape. The boy who was her boyfriend took her to the woods and, along with a group of friends, they raped her several times. Scared to death and feeling a lot of guilt for having trusted the person she loved like a naive person, she began to hate herself and feel disgusted with her own body.
Roxane Gay and food as a defense against rape
This hatred and fear of suffering rape again led her to use food as a cure for her soul’s wounds. She chose to eat to annul herself before the world. Food became her defense and her escape route from the pain.
Roxane knew that women are raped just because they are women. She knew that there is practically nothing we can do to avoid being the prey of an animal, or animals that believe they own our bodies. She could do nothing but one thing: become something so repulsive that no man would be able to like her or touch her again.
Their idea, this idea that women have been taught since they were girls, is that we shouldn’t take up space. Women must be thin and beautiful to please the eyes and especially the men in our society. Let’s not forget that television, magazines and everything we consume sends us the message that being thin is a social value that will make people accept us and like us more.
This led to her weighing 261 kilos, which led to bariatric surgery to try to save her life. Her body turned into a prison, where she kept the hatred she felt for herself. The silence in front of the rape was the beginning of this spiral of self-destruction that plunged her into the grip of a binge eating.
Learn to love yourself beyond what society says about your body
Today, Roxane Gay is a leading American writer, columnist, university professor, and feminist. She learned to value her body the way it is. Now she knows how to love herself far beyond what society or the media say about her body.
In her book “ Hunger, Memories of My Body” , she breaks her silence and encourages the rest of the women to do the same. Roxane teaches how she stopped hating herself, because she learned that what happened wasn’t her fault. She learned to love herself the way she is. Food no longer dominates her life, she is the one who guides her, without letting her past mark her steps.
Roxane is a “survivor”, she doesn’t consider herself a victim. Telling her truth, her experience and her relationship with her body, she doesn’t want to cause pity. She wants the silence we follow when they rape our bodies to break, and she teaches us to love ourselves far beyond our appearance. She teaches that, despite many things happening in our lives, we are the ones who decide how to live it, we are not guilty or responsible in the face of rape, and self-hatred is never the way out.
