Brian could never do anything right.
His earliest memories all involved some variation on that theme.
What are you, stupid?
You’re a waste of space.
A waste of air.
A waste of my hard-earned money.
You should never have been born.
You were a mistake.
All things he heard over and over again. All things that were beaten into him -- sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally -- by his parents.
He lived most of his childhood in fear. Fear of doing something wrong. Fear of his father coming home. Fear of his father’s hands or his fists, striking him. Making marks on his skin. Marks on his soul.
Fear of what he couldn’t control.
Control was how it all started. Even when Brian couldn’t control anything else, he could control his food. No one could force him to eat. No one was shoving food down his throat.
He was still in elementary school when he made that discovery -- that he could feel like he’d outsmarted his parents by pretending to eat his dinner, but really, he was only pushing food around on his plate, or stashing it in a napkin to be thrown away later. Brian liked feeling like he was in control. He became addicted to the feeling, and soon the dinner table activities that he’d occasionally engaged in for months became something that he did several times a week, and ultimately every day.
The control gave him something to hold onto when the fear became too much.
He’d think about it every time he was hiding in his bedroom closet, hoping that his father would be too drunk to find him in there. He’d think about it when he was trying to flatten himself against the wall, just to be an inch or two farther from Jack’s fists. He’d think about it when he was cowering under the covers in his bed, listening to his father yell at his mother or his sister and hoping he wouldn’t be next. He’d think about it when he was nursing his wounds in the bathroom in secret, in fear that his father would find him in there too and call him a pussy and smack him again and tell him to take it like a real man.
His sister Claire was the only one who saw what he was doing, but she never said anything. It became just another thing that was a part of the unspoken pact that seemed to exist between them. They both lived in hell, and neither of them wanted to do anything to make it any worse.
As Brian got older, he came to depend more and more on the control he found in keeping a tight rein over his food. He also discovered that starving himself made for an effective distraction from the pain -- the physical and the emotional -- that his father was inflicting on him. So he started finding more ways to restrict. More ways to control.
He told his mother he was eating breakfast at school but never did. He’d eat enough lunch to not feel too lightheaded, so he could still do well in his classes, because he knew that bringing home bad grades would certainly result in more of his father’s wrath. But he’d never finish his lunch, because he didn’t want to be too full later. He needed to be hungry enough that the ache in his stomach would overshadow the pain from his father’s words and his father’s blows, and give him something to focus on.
Then he met Michael Novotny, whose mother Debbie declared Brian to be “too skinny.” So she’d prepare rich, cheesy pasta dishes that he couldn’t resist. He’d end up eating three or four helpings sometimes, because it was all so good -- so much better than the dry chicken and limp, overcooked vegetables that were often served at his house, because it was about all his drunk mother could pull together. Debbie’s food made him feel loved. Warm. Comfortable. He started craving those feelings as much as he craved the food.
He started eating more at home, too -- finding comfort in food in much the same way he’d once found comfort in starvation. Jack began making comments about how Brian “ate like a horse,” and how he was going to eat them out of house and home. How there was only so much of Jack’s hard-earned money that could be spent on food, and Brian was clearly eating more than his share. So Brian started sneaking food -- taking it up to his room to eat in private, rearranging things in packages so it didn’t look like he’d taken as much as he did, sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night for a snack when Jack was passed out drunk. Eating made him feel better. Less lonely. Less sad. Less anxious. Michael's friendship had given him an escape from those feelings, and now food did too.
Michael was no longer his only friend -- food had become a friend as well.
And soon, his lanky frame started to fill out a bit.
That was when his mother noticed one evening that his pants were tight. He’d noticed it too, but hadn’t thought much of it -- it happened all the time. He’d have a growth spurt, his pants would become too small and too short, and his parents would bitch and moan about how much money he was costing them, but ultimately he would come home from school and find that his mother had left a couple of new pairs of pants on his bed. But this time was different.
This time, Joan pinched his waist -- hard -- between her thumb and forefinger and said, “Getting a little bit pudgy, are we? What is that Novotny woman feeding you? And why are you spending so much time over there anyway?”
Brian didn’t answer any of her questions. He was thankful that his father was working overtime that night, because his father would have made him answer her. He tried to ignore the stinging sensation where her fingers had pinched his skin. Tried to ignore the corresponding sting of her words. Tried to keep the flush of embarrassment out of his cheeks. He sat down at the table and stared down at his plate and suddenly he didn’t want any of it. The thought of food made him feel sick. Ashamed. So he employed some of his old tactics -- pushing the food around on the plate and stashing it in napkins, although it was more difficult to keep it a secret with less people at the table, since Claire had gone off to college earlier that year. It was just him and his mother. But she was more than a little tipsy, which worked to Brian’s advantage. She was either none the wiser or she just didn’t care. And again, Brian felt in control. He fell right back into the comfort brought on by the restriction.
But his growing body fought the restriction this time. He felt hungrier than he’d ever felt before, and food suddenly had a much greater allure. It was all he could think about sometimes. He’d dream about eating cheeseburgers and pizza and huge plates of spaghetti. Eventually, he found himself in a pattern of restricting his food at home so his mother wouldn’t make comments about his weight, while binge eating everywhere else -- at school, at Deb’s, at the diner with Michael. The restriction helped him feel in control, while the bingeing brought him comfort and helped him numb out.
As Brian got older, his need for control never left. If anything, it became stronger. And the way that he gained that control morphed and changed as he came of age. Sex became another way for Brian to be in control, and he craved it as well. He kept most of his relationships distant, though, because getting too close to people -- and letting them get too close to him -- was too unsettling. He didn’t have enough control when he let people get too close. Suddenly, his independence meant everything to him. Because if he was independent, he was totally in control.
He emancipated himself from his parents as quickly as he possibly could after his high school graduation, by starting college during the summer session rather than the fall semester like everyone else. He could care less about spending the summer after his senior year partying and celebrating so-called freedom. His freedom wouldn’t come until he was out of his parents’ house. September simply wasn’t soon enough for Brian. For Brian, freedom would come in June. His declaration of independence was swift and final -- there was no looking back. He would never live under his parents’ roof or their rule ever again. He told himself he would never be at the mercy of his father ever again, either.
College brought with it more freedom than Brian had ever imagined. And with it, more control. He could do whatever he wanted. Eat whatever he wanted. Have as much sex as he wanted. Go to the club seven nights a week if he wanted. There was no one to stop him. No one to belittle him or berate him.
Brian’s focus became doing everything he could to exert more and more control over his life. And he soon realized that an important part of maintaining control over his sex life was keeping his physique in tip-top shape. He kept hearing girls in the dining hall -- the ones who made huge salads every day at lunch without fail -- talking about how they were avoiding carbs so they wouldn’t get fat. That made sense to Brian, because as much as he didn’t like to remember the sting of his mother’s pinch as she’d told him all those years ago that she thought he was getting pudgy, he knew that pudge had come from Debbie Novotny’s pasta and the cookies and chips and crackers he’d sneak up into his childhood bedroom.
Those girls wanted guys to find them attractive. Brian wanted the same.
So he started avoiding carbs, save for the alcohol he’d drink at the club. And the restriction brought back that familiar high that he remembered -- keeping control over his food made him feel good. He’d go to the dining hall each day and eat a lot of protein and a lot of vegetables, avoiding all of the breads and cereals and fruit and pasta. He started avoiding fat as well, just for good measure. After all, it made sense that fat would make you fat, right? So, no carbs and no fat for Brian Kinney.
But it wasn’t long before it got hard to concentrate in his classes, and his performance in soccer began to suffer. Brian was feeling tired and foggy all the time. His coach started asking him what was going on. Suddenly, it sounded like his scholarship was in jeopardy, and his freedom along with it. If he got kicked out of school, he’d have to move back home. That couldn’t happen. He couldn’t let that happen. Brian’s anxiety started to rear its ugly head again, just when he thought he'd gotten rid of it once and for all by leaving the hellhole that was the house he grew up in. The feeling made him uncomfortable -- he didn’t like feeling out of control, and anxiety definitely made him feel out of control.
His coach asked him about his sleeping habits and his drinking habits and his diet. Brian didn’t talk about his sex life or his penchant for spending many a weeknight at Babylon, drinking and sucking and fucking. But Brian had thought the way he was eating was healthy -- with all of the lean protein and the vegetables -- so he didn’t hesitate to share that information with the coach. He was a little bit proud of it, actually. Proud of the willpower it took to eat that way, day in and day out. But the coach made Brian feel small and stupid when he told him that he needed carbs to fuel his athletic pursuits, and said it as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. So he had to find a way to add carbs back in, while still maintaining the physique that kept every gay boy on campus wanting him. He also had to find a way to hold onto the sense of control that he so desperately craved.
Thus, “no carbs after seven” was born.
It became an anchor. Something that Brian clung to. Something that helped relieve his anxiety. Something that he knew he could always control, no matter what.
Maybe he was a little bit obsessive about it, but what did it matter? If it helped, it helped.
No harm, no foul.
No excuses, no apologies, no regrets.
For the most part, people accepted Brian’s food rules and didn’t question them. They might roll their eyes, but they never said anything. Deb was really the only one who ever gave him any real flack over it. Sometimes he wondered if she saw it for what it really was. If she’d had any inkling of what was really happening when he’d come over to her house and eat plate after plate of pasta and chase it with a slice or two of cake. If she’d known what he was truly seeking -- and finding -- at her house. That it wasn’t really about the food at all.
Just like his food rules weren’t really about the food, if he was being honest with himself.
That was hard, though. Being honest. Recognizing the rules for what they were, and the fact that they probably weren’t healthy. Brian didn’t want to think about that. So he just kept up the mantra, even though his behavior often contradicted it. Even the simple act of saying he did it seemed to give Brian a little bit of that high -- making him feel in control. Giving him power.
He maintained the rule so religiously that it became an unconscious habit -- something he didn’t really even think about anymore. At least, he didn’t until one night at Woody’s when he ran into Alex Wilder.
Everyone knew Alex was a shrink. He’d made a lot of comments over the years about how Brian was a well-adjusted, high-functioning bastard in spite of what Alex felt were a great many psychological issues.
Sometimes, Alex would give names to the disorders he felt Brian had. Obsessive compulsive disorder. Sex addiction. Narcissistic personality disorder.
Brian would shrug off the psychologist’s barstool diagnoses by pretending to be disinterested and firing off a sarcastic retort or two, but then he would go home and look them up on the internet. That usually concluded in Brian wondering whether or not Alex was right, although he guessed it didn’t really matter if he was or not. Brian Kinney didn’t do shrinks, so there was nothing that could be done about it even if Alex’s diagnosis was correct.
That night at Woody’s, he’d ended up sitting next to Alex purely by accident. It was a busy night at the bar, and the only open seat was next to the psychologist, who visited the bar on most nights to have a drink and unwind from his day. And probably, Brian thought, to analyze the bar’s patrons as well. He sure as fuck spent a lot of time analyzing Brian.
Brian ordered a beer, and cursorily acknowledged Alex’s presence, although he was none too thrilled that he would likely be the subject of the shrink’s free analysis tonight. The other man had a beer of his own, along with a basket of french fries that was half gone. He pushed them an inch or two in Brian’s direction.
“Want some fries?”
“No thanks. I don’t do carbs after seven.”
Brian said it without even thinking. It was just habit. Maybe even a little bit of an excuse, although Brian wasn’t sure what it was an excuse for at this point.
Alex raised an eyebrow and looked at Brian in a way that made him have to look away because it made him feel uncomfortable.
“Really?” Alex said. Brian could still feel the man’s eyes on him. He could tell from his tone that the wheels were starting to turn inside the psychologist’s head.
Brian put on his best sarcastic mask and voice and turned back to face the man. “Yes, really. You got a problem with that?”
“You know that beer has carbs in it, right?”
Brian shrugged and looked away again.
“And here I thought you maintained your body effortlessly. No dieting, no magic...just pure, natural talent.”
“What can I say? It takes effort to look this good.”
“Are you sure that’s really what it’s about?”
Christ, Brian thought to himself. Here came the psychoanalysis. He wasn’t in the mood for it tonight, so he tried not to engage. He suddenly became very interested in the baseball game playing on the television behind the bar, even though he could give a shit less about sports.
“You know, eating disorders can serve as a mask. A way to hide. A distraction.”
Why the fuck was he talking about eating disorders? Was he on some kind of a mission to diagnose Brian with every single disorder in the DSM-5? Brian wouldn’t have been surprised if he was.
Brian continued to try to ignore Alex’s yammering, until he finally couldn’t take it anymore and downed the rest of his beer in one gulp, threw a $20 bill down on the bar and walked out without saying a word.
But twenty minutes later, Brian was sitting at his computer in his loft, staring at a page that outlined different types of eating disorders.
Weren’t eating disorders something that teenage girls had when they became obsessed with being thin and pretty? Brian had always thought of them that way. But if that was the case, then why were the words on the page ringing so true for Brian?
The words seemed to be jumping off the page at him. Anorexia. Restriction. Binge eating. Orthorexia. Past trauma. Anxiety. Depression. Control.
Control, control, control.
He liked control. He found it comforting. Grounding. There was nothing wrong with that.
When he couldn’t bring himself to look at the words anymore, Brian closed the page quickly and downed the rest of his glass of whiskey.
And he shrugged off Alex’s words once again, just like he had all of the others over the years.
After all, it was just no carbs after seven. And it was no big deal, right?
If it helped, it helped.
No harm, no foul.
No excuses, no apologies, no regrets.