Roxane Gay: When Food Serves To Heal The Soul

They say that there are circumstances in life that change you forever. Because when someone uses your body and strips you of your privacy, it causes you to lose part of your identity. This is what happened to Roxane Gay, who began to hate herself and her body so much that food was her refuge from the pain of rape.

Roxane Gay’s life totally changed when she was only 12 years old when she was gang-raped. The one who was her partner took her to a forest and, helped by her group of friends, repeatedly raped her. Scared to death, with feelings of guilt for having trusted the person she loved like a naive woman, she began to hate herself and feel disgusted by her own body.

Roxane Gay and food as a defense against rape

This hatred and fear of being raped again led her to use food to heal the wounds in her soul. He chose to eat to cancel himself before the world. Food became her defense and her escape route from pain.

Roxane knew that women are raped just because we are women. He knew that there is practically nothing we can do to avoid being the prey of an animal or animals that believe they are the owners of our body. There was nothing she could do except one thing: be so physically repulsive that no man would be able to notice her or touch her again.

His idea, that idea that women instill in us from a young age is that we should not take up space. Women must be thin and pretty to please the eye and especially men in our society. Let’s not forget that television, magazines and everything we consume sends the message that being thin is a social value that will make them accept you and love you more.

This led her to reach 261 kilos that led her to a gastric bypass to try to save her life. Her body became a prison in which to enclose the hatred she felt towards herself. The silence in the face of rape was the beginning of this self-destructive spiral that plunged her into the grip of the compulsion towards food.

Learn to love yourself beyond what society says your body

Today, Roxane Gay is a leading American writer, columnist, college professor, and feminist. You have learned to value your body as it is. Now he knows how to love himself beyond what society or the media say about his body.

In her book Hunger, Memories of My Body, she breaks her silence and encourages other women to do so. Roxane shows us how she has stopped hating herself because she has learned that what happened was not her fault. He has learned to love himself as he is. Food no longer dominates her life, but it is she herself who directs it without letting her past be the one that marks her step.

Roxane is a “survivor” and does not consider herself a victim. By telling his truth, his experience and his relationship with the body, he does not seek pity. It seeks that the silence that we impose on ourselves when our body is violated is broken and teaches us to love ourselves beyond our appearance. It teaches us that, although many things have happened in our life, we are the ones who decide how to live it, we are not guilty or responsible for a violation and hatred towards ourselves is never the way out.