About the project

Hey, I’m Marina, the storyteller behind the work. In Nourishment, my goal is to share real stories by creating a fantastical audiovisual ecosystem in which to experience them by looking and listening.

I use symbolism along with dream logic to craft visual stories and articulate feelings about a secretive set of disorders that I know particularly well. I believe we heal through storytelling; by listening to others’ stories and sharing our own.  

I didn’t know many of the ED/DE facts and statistics I mention in this project when I started working on Nourishment even though I am more familiar with ED/DE than most. I started thinking about the project during the pandemic, when my disordered eating came out from hiding. It turns out I wasn’t alone in my relapse. The number of people messaging the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) help line went up by over 78% in 2020 compared with the same timeframe last year.

I was not part of the group reaching out for help, however. Like many people with a history of ED/DE, I’m cagey about this aspect of myself (I did most of the research for this project on an incognito browser.) Research suggests that the secrecy could be linked to denial, a lack of self-awareness, or is a way to pre-empt social interference in the behaviors and choices.

This is a photographic and audio-based work born out of roughly 15 years of hiding my disordered eating.

Until very recently, I never acknowledged I had a problem. That I could have had a problem. I stand taller than the average American male at 5’10. I have broad shoulders, wide hips and muscular legs. Women’s jackets have never fit me appropriately. I find the sizing in certain clothing brands personally offensive.

How could I have had an ED/DE, if I’ve never been “skinny”? I couldn’t possibly merit “help”. This was a misconception I held onto for decades: what eating disorders and disordered eating look like, who can have them, and why. This is exactly the kind of absurdity this project is attempting to navigate.

I am mentally exhausted from thinking about calories, ingredients, “good” foods, “bad” foods, pounds and kilos and meters and miles. As a professional storyteller, I understand and relate to the world through visual and linguistic expression; yet, for most of my life, I have relied on binary, numerical truths to determine my self-worth. That and a dysmorphic view of my own body.  

I have experienced a spectrum of these conditions: binge eating, restricting, cycles of dieting, over-exercising, and simply starving myself until I couldn’t stay awake in my high school classes. Heart palpitations from the stress of it all, which still come back like little knocks on my chest to remind me of my choices. 

Years of therapy, seeing a nutritionist here and there, a curated garden of cleanses and meditations, submitting myself to expensive gym memberships with classes called “Yoga Booty,” “Ass and Attitude” and “Rockstar Body” were supposed to alleviate the tyranny of the inner voice telling me to stop eating, work harder, work out at least twice a day, because you’ll never be successful or beautiful looking like this, weighing this much, wearing this size, and no one will ever love you anyway, so you might as well just stop eating.

What I’ve learned is that there’s not a magical cleanse that can rid my brain of the compulsion to make myself disappear. To dream about my fat melting away is if by blowtorch. It’s a drumbeat that comes in and out of my own daily soundtrack, and I learn and re-learn to choose to lower the volume when I realize it’s getting a little too loud, and sometimes as much as several times a day. I remind myself that healing is possible, even if it takes a lifetime.