Zibby Mag

By Jessie Kanzer

I am now the captain of my fridge.

My freedom comes from self-mastery, which began with a choice. And then another and another.

It wasn’t immediate, and there have been myriad roadblocks along the way, but the reason I am so profoundly grateful for my past struggles is because I needed to master myself in order to overcome them.

In other words: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Incidentally, I chose that quote for my high school yearbook. I was far from healthy then, entangled in a codependent teenage relationship, smoking, doing drugs (not the good kind). What’s more, I had never dealt with my secret tween eating disorder; it lay dormant at the time, but would come back to haunt me after my hot-and-heavy, 18-year-old love affair shattered.

Little did I know how much Friedrich Nietzsche’s oft-quoted adage would resonate throughout my life. Reading it now — alongside my serious-while-trying-to-look-sexy yearbook portrait — it seems almost prophetic. When I picked the austere words, I had been referring to mawkish, commonplace teen dramas: a best friend who’d stolen my boyfriend, the feeling that I didn’t belong. But they took on a deeper meaning after graduation.

I’d felt a lack of control since I was eight years old.

Having left Latvia, then part of the Soviet Union, my family shuffled around Europe until we settled in Brooklyn, all of us sleeping in one room. We moved and then we moved again, and then once more, upgrading our digs as I tried to upgrade my experience. I went from being bullied and overlooked to being objectified.

Turning all of these external circumstances inward, I began attacking my body as the host of a suffering soul. First I starved myself, then, when I could no longer stay away from food, with its scents and textures and life, I became bulimic. A cool, polished figurine on the outside, I clogged toilets with vomit everywhere I went.

I clearly remember the moment of reckoning when, after sleep-walking my way through college, I realized that I was the one who needed to change; I had the power to alter my fate.

Having yet again expelled an enormous amount of food, I knelt on the bathroom floor feeling weak, sad, irredeemable. Though I seemed to have flushed my self-loathing down the toilet, I still felt it chasing after me.

“A waste of human space,” I thought. “Disgusting, living for nothing.”

And yet, in the depths of hopelessness, I felt a strong presence — an energy that transcended my temporal problems — what I would now refer to as the Tao, Source Energy, Spirit…God, if you wish. I saw it then as an awakening — my first experience of becoming the observer of my own human turmoil, and acknowledging it for what it was: a blip in time.

I had turned all of these external circumstances inward, attacking my body as the host of a suffering soul.

Eventually, I committed to my mental health. I sought psychotherapy and read loads of therapeutic books. My progress was intermittent; there were times I fell off the wagon — like when my first therapist placed a giant cookie tray in front of me, then promptly fell asleep in the middle of my session.

My compulsions with food abated over time. At first, I stayed away from indulgent trigger fare like pizza, fries, and donuts. Gradually, food lost its hold on me. The strength within, my willpower, was all that mattered. I realized I was free.

“Can you believe I used to eat a dozen donuts for breakfast?” I’ll ask my husband from time to time. I could swap in any similar scene from my past life: a tub of butter in one sitting, Burger King, literally anything I’d find in my parents’ kitchen.

“That’s crazy,” he’ll say, as I nod, proud of how far I’ve come.

In my current life, food is not something I think about outside of its pragmatic context, as in feeding my family or sating my own physical hunger. I’ve stripped it of its psychological power.

In fact, my addictive personality, which was also behind my obsessive behavior with men, has been mostly overcome. I indulge in treats plenty, but I try to do it for the mental break it occasions: a chance to relax and savor, or to experience the ambience of the occasional meal out — the kind we’re all dreaming of these days.

It’s not that the compulsive tendency doesn’t rear its persistent head anymore. (These days it takes the form of uncontrollable scrolling or my hankering for some sort of high or buzz or whatever.) The difference is that I make a conscious decision to fill my void elsewhere, preferably with a connection to the mystical, or to the pure love I feel for my babies (especially when they’re asleep). I set the phone aside, I rein in my senses, I get my high from spirituality and endorphins and kid jokes.

In the poem “Invictus,” William Ernest Henley writes, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”

I am a small but mighty human. I am all-powerful. I, too, am the captain of my soul…or at least my fridge.

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Jessie Asya Kanzer is a spiritual writer, immigrant, and mama obsessed with human alchemy — the process of turning our sh*t into gold, so to speak. Sign up for exclusive excerpts of her upcoming book and all sorts of soul boosts!