When you fight yourself, what's the winning move?

“I am transformed but not yet, exactly. The transformation has begun—this pain, this excruciating pain, it is part of the process—and will not end until—well, I suppose I don’t know when. Will I ever be done, transformed in the past tense, or will I always be transforming, better and better until I die?” – Carmen Maria Machado, Eight Bites

I did not understand Eight Bites when I first read it

Succinctly: A woman gets gastric bypass surgery, like her sisters did, and loses a great deal of weight. Then the lost weight takes the form of a golem, which she beats to death; however the golem doesn’t die, and instead follows her around, passively helping in small ways but never making itself seen, until the woman dies.

After my first read, I got the obvious things:

• The woman’s sisters are flat reflections of single emotions like vanity and shame, and are as two-dimensional and paper thin as their post-surgery bodies
• Shedding weight also caused our main character to shed her connection with her daughter
• The joy and conquest from excising all the unwanted parts of your body and killing them, bloodily and violently, with your own hands.

But after all the grief and violence came love, and that vexed me.

How lucky she was that the flesh golem chose love

When I encounter media I don’t like, I ask myself “Well Gordy, how would you have done it better?” and then I’ll compare my ideas to the author’s work and that can help me understand through contrast. So here are a few alternatives:

The Dorian Gray

Reference The woman is caught so strongly in her fictional self-image as a thin person that she cannot abide any reminder of her past. She begins beating the flesh golem, tearing at it with tooth and nail. Yet each bite and each blow to the golem is dealt to her own body as well. Her urge to preserve the story of herself as a thin woman is stronger than her urge for self preservation, and when she kills the golem, she kills herself.

The Babadook

Reference After tearing the golem apart and scattering the remains in her basement, the woman has a few weeks of peace. Then the snacks came. Although she assiduously avoids processed foods, she starts seeing bags of crisps, candy bars, and sodas appear in her kitchen. No matter how often she throws them away, they keep appearing in her fridge, then in her shower, and by her bed. She dreams at night that a monster is force-feeding her, and somehow she starts gaining weight again. Unable to take it, she starts running, down the street, out past the city limits, to a field with nobody and nothing around. Nothing except the can of soda at her feet!

The Heart of Darkness

Reference The gastric bypass was an enormous success – while most patients lose 20 - 25% of their weight, she is down 44%! She has given away all of her old, large clothes. She has stopped going to her old favourite restaurants, and goes to yoga classes instead, where the other stick-thin women go. At first, she only noticed their bodies and how they were thin like her, but then she hears the talk about fillers and implants, and suddenly she is back on the outside. Desperately she schedules appointment after appointment at the clinic, scheduling plastic surgery for her nose, her breasts, her stomach – not even her hands and feet make it through unscathed. After months of painful recovery, she gleefully plans to surprise her daughter by pretending to be her Uber driver. She pulls into her daughter’s driveway, she gets into the car, and the daughter doesn’t recognize her.

Back to the story

Each of those possible endings has as precise and true moral: fighting yourself is a losing battle, you cannot run from yourself, and relentless pursuit of a goal makes you lose sight of yourself. So why did Machado eschew them in favour of a moral about loving yourself?

I think it is because the author is not trying to scare readers with a cautionary tale, but show them that love is the only winning play.

she could have chosen love from the start and saved herself a lot of trouble

“Arms will lift me from my bed—her arms. They will be mother-soft, like dough and moss. I will recognize the smell. I will flood with grief and shame… I will cry as she shuffles me away from myself, toward a door propped open into the salty morning. I will curl into her body, which was my body once, but I was a poor caretaker and she was removed from my charge.” – Carmen Maria Machado, Eight Bites

All of my revised endings revolve around conflict. After all, every good story needs conflict! Yet Machado subverts that when her flesh golem refuses to haunt the woman, refuses to chase her, refuses to change her further. Instead the “monster” acquiesces, respects the woman’s boundaries, loves from a distance, and forgives. Conflicts are neatly wrapped up with a winner and a loser, so Machado invites reflection instead.

And the truth is that the story ends about the same whether the woman got bypass surgery or not: she dies, aged 79. But in this story she dies hungry and unsure if it was worth it. And when she learns the truth she is flooded with grief and shame. It is sad to see that she only experienced self-love after passing.

My take is that the bypass surgery didn’t cut away the woman’s stomach, nor did it help her shed her fat. Instead, it cut away her empathy for herself, and took away her capacity to love beyond what she saw. I think her grief at the end came from realizing that she had lost much more than excess fat. I think she could have chosen to love herself, as she was, from the beginning of the story and saved herself a lot of trouble.

And if I apply that to myself, I can understand my own vexation. By relating so hard to the story, my own grief and shame surfaces. I am forced to consider my own advice and ponder the difficulty of simply “choosing love.” It would be much easier to choose a surgery that could make me wealthy, or fix me up with the perfect partner, or assuage my anxiety forever. But such things would also render me static and frozen at perfection, inhuman and unable to change. And the story says that those feelings would catch up with me anyway, at the end. The only winning play, then, is not to run, fight, or hide, but to love yourself.