8/15/2025
Keep the Feast: Pica Disorder and the Desert’s Call to God
Recently I was invited to participate in my favorite live lit event: Write Club, where writers are given opposing topics and pitted against one another. My friend Dani was given “moist” against my “dry.” As we set about our process, we kept in touch exchanging trash talk and encouragement in friendly intervals. When it came time to perform against one another I was suddenly terrified of how vulnerable this piece feels. A minute from show time I ducked into a quiet, dark alley and prayed, offering my performance to God. His will be done. There’s a lot of solace in prayer. It’s something I want to pursue in my writing going forward. For now, enjoy this piece about mysticism, pica, and the deserts we stuff inside ourselves.
LISTEN to the audio of my performance here:
Last week I tripped and spilled a can of baked beans on my kitchen floor. I had to use a real towel to clean it, because I was out of paper ones. Again. And I was out of paper towels -again- for a reason shameful enough that I tried to write three drafts of this thing before finally settling for this one, where I just tell you the truth:
I was out of paper towels because I ate them all.
I have pica disorder. It means I sometimes eat things that aren’t food. This mostly means chewing on paper towels until they become these dried out little tumors I like to call “paper bones.” The last time I cleaned my apartment, I had enough paper bones to fill my vacuum. It’s a stress thing. When I am overwhelmed or overworked I will whittle a roll down to nothing one dry sheet at a time.
I promised myself I would never write about this. I could write about sex or BDSM or anything I wanted but never this. Too gross. Too weird. But now I need to. I need to talk about what the stress of the world is doing to me. I need to talk about how I’ve eaten enough paper towels in the last 7 months to put all the paper I ever ate before to shame.
And this is all about shame.
It started when I was younger, around eleven, and sent home with my first bad grade. I ate it, right there in the school hallway. I destroyed the evidence before I could show my parents, but when you swallow a secret, it stays with you. Like gum. Like disease. It stays in your body and spreads like sunlight over death valley until every garden in your heart is cracked and brown and burning.
The report card was just another brushfire. I was already a conflagration of secrets by then. Ever since the older boy when I was nine touched me when I didn’t want him to and I didn’t tell anyone.
Nothing grew in my body after that but sand dunes and shame. I was a desert son with a sun in my stomach. I furnaced whatever I could into flames, hoping the smoke signals would send help. If only someone could read them.
Nothing takes me back to that shame quite like my pica. It makes me feel like a freak. There she is, irony’s bastard daughter, the poet who eats paper, who writes haikus to season the scraps. Go ahead, ask her how to publish a book, and ask her the difference between the taste of Quilted Northern and the Quicker Picker Upper (little more mint on Bounty for some reason).
I am a freak, at my freakiest, right now. I go to work and chew paper towels. I watch the news and chew paper towels. I hear about how my friends are getting priced out or evicted one after the other, and I chew paper towels while I do what I can to help. I am terrified and dry as a desert inside.
My one comfort, though, is this is not without precedent. I’m a Christian. Hell, most of my role models are freaks just doing their best. Teresa of Avila would levitate while she prayed and had wet dreams about angels. Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi would wear a corset of nails and lick the wounds of lepers while she gave them comfort. Catherine of Siena wore an invisible wedding ring made of Jesus’ foreskin. Freaky women are the stained glass windows of my church in the wild. Every step I take is lit by their colors.
So I chew paper like locusts in dark honey. So I grow out my hair and ready my hands for good work. So I whip myself after reading the Psalms. So I softly say blessings over the bodies of sleeping lovers.
When I go into the desert now it isn’t to hide. It’s to pray.
I’ve been praying a lot lately. For guidance, for courage. I pray to my freaks for the strength to keep going. Flannery O’ Conner once wrote in her prayer journal “don’t ever let me think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your Story.” I have been swallowing my version of His story for too long. There has to be a reason bible pages are the worst tasting paper I’ve ever tried. I was made to spit them out, baptized with my own tongue.
And it would be easy to just swallow my faith these days, when the leaders of churches want to kill people like me, when the Pope says my gender is harmful to families. When Jesus says love thy neighbor and they call empathy a sin. They want to tell me I’m alone.
I am alone. Alone with God in my desert, swallowing paper to clean up the spill inside. Things are getting hot. The air is too dry to breathe for most people.
But I am not most people. I am a woman of the desert, sand-blasted and fire-glazed to handle it. I’ve been preparing all my life for these temperatures. Like Teresa. Like Mary Magdalene de Pazzi. Like Joan of Arc. I am a freak on fire with the truth God gave me. Because God said “speak” and I listened to Him and not the institutions wearing his face.
The desert is hot, but not as hot as I am tonight. Right now. Lit up like a tungsten bride of Christ. My burning insides are hot enough to give off this light for miles.
Before tonight I had enough paper bones to skeleton my closet. Before tonight I wasn’t going to talk about eating paper. Ever. But tonight, everything’s out in the open, all my secrets spilled on this stage.
Now you know what I am. What we all can be when we burn the shames inside us.
I am a miracle. I am a girl who swallowed a desert and spit out the voice of God. A girl who wears dresses the color of smoke while she tries to keep the people she loves warm. I am a girl who loves Jesus and her own trans body, enough to stand up to Christians who hate it.
I am a girl who eats paper and breathes fire.
