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info.
It's only twice a week, so there's not much of a chance.
IT'S 'JUST A CIGARETTE', IT'LL SOON BE ONLY TEN.
Honey, can't you trust me? When I want to stop, I can.
Honey, can't you trust me? When I want to stop, I can.
CONTENT ADVISORY.
This character and the story in his info deals with themes of societal and internalized fatphobia, diabetes stigma, low self-esteem, bulimia and what it does to the body over time, unwanted/accidental children, and US intervention in the Middle East. He was an active participant in the "Global War on Terror". Freddie's opinions on weight, health, the military, and global politics do not reflect my own.
Bulimia and self-shaming are far from his entire personality or the focus of every single tag, but he is a person dealing with severe mental illness, and that mental illness is apparent in the narrative. If you're uncomfortable with any of this and don't want me to ask, opt out.
Bulimia and self-shaming are far from his entire personality or the focus of every single tag, but he is a person dealing with severe mental illness, and that mental illness is apparent in the narrative. If you're uncomfortable with any of this and don't want me to ask, opt out.
synopsis.
Frédéric "Freddie" Lavoie is a 33-year-old lapsed Catholic, former-military commercial pilot who got out of the Air Force a year ago and developed bulimia one week after being told at his biannual FAA medical certification exam that his recent weight gain was "concerning" and that the dramatic dietary changes that came with the dream job at a major airport last year—in combination with genetic predisposition toward developing the condition with prolonged excessive sugar intake—had led to pronounced insulin resistance and prediabetes on the cusp of Type 2 that would, if nothing changed, almost certainly evolve into diabetes—and a diabetic requiring insulin loses their pilot's license, with it the greatest joy in his life and the all-consuming interest his life revolves around.
He's been at this for four months now and slips under the radar pretty well despite his body starting to buckle under the combination of malnutrition, the intense physical strain of bingeing and purging three or four times a day, and the insulin resistance he refuses to take his prescribed medication for out of shame. He's very secretive, but he also just gets overlooked—he doesn't fit the generally advertised image of the eating disorder patient as a young, model-thin woman; he doesn't look like a ballerina, just some guy in his thirties who, in the examiner's words, "could stand to lose a little weight". But he hasn't lost weight as it's generally assumed people with eating disorders will—he just maintains, hiding in plain sight. The damage to his teeth and throat needs a dentist's pen light to be seen, and the abrasions and flushing of the knuckles that tend to present on bulimic patients are pretty mild on him.
Personality-wise, Freddie's normal-ish; he's friendly, witty, and usually well-liked, even if he doesn't really have any interests or hobbies that don't revolve around planes or flying, sociable without being loud or wildly gregarious. The same intelligence that has lent him a degree of cleverness in concealing his mental health issues can make him an interesting person to talk to. He can be very charming, and he's a fun date.
That said, dates tend to stay just that: dates, never more than two or three, with or without quasi-one-night-stands. Between the parental divorce that made him a devout atheist at age 7 and his never really getting over being cheated on by a serious girlfriend during his first deployment ten years ago, Freddie is intensely averse to commitment and the very intimacy he craves. He goes on a lot of dates, does well with an array of genders, and sleeps around like someone confident in his own skin—but that general confidence (body image aside) is periodically interrupted by the surfacing of repressed feelings of inadequacy further aggravated by two eternally aloof parents and an unwanted but pragmatically accepted—free healthcare—Purple Heart awarded for a pea-sized piece of debris getting embedded in his calf in Syria during an IS group shelling.
He's been at this for four months now and slips under the radar pretty well despite his body starting to buckle under the combination of malnutrition, the intense physical strain of bingeing and purging three or four times a day, and the insulin resistance he refuses to take his prescribed medication for out of shame. He's very secretive, but he also just gets overlooked—he doesn't fit the generally advertised image of the eating disorder patient as a young, model-thin woman; he doesn't look like a ballerina, just some guy in his thirties who, in the examiner's words, "could stand to lose a little weight". But he hasn't lost weight as it's generally assumed people with eating disorders will—he just maintains, hiding in plain sight. The damage to his teeth and throat needs a dentist's pen light to be seen, and the abrasions and flushing of the knuckles that tend to present on bulimic patients are pretty mild on him.
Personality-wise, Freddie's normal-ish; he's friendly, witty, and usually well-liked, even if he doesn't really have any interests or hobbies that don't revolve around planes or flying, sociable without being loud or wildly gregarious. The same intelligence that has lent him a degree of cleverness in concealing his mental health issues can make him an interesting person to talk to. He can be very charming, and he's a fun date.
That said, dates tend to stay just that: dates, never more than two or three, with or without quasi-one-night-stands. Between the parental divorce that made him a devout atheist at age 7 and his never really getting over being cheated on by a serious girlfriend during his first deployment ten years ago, Freddie is intensely averse to commitment and the very intimacy he craves. He goes on a lot of dates, does well with an array of genders, and sleeps around like someone confident in his own skin—but that general confidence (body image aside) is periodically interrupted by the surfacing of repressed feelings of inadequacy further aggravated by two eternally aloof parents and an unwanted but pragmatically accepted—free healthcare—Purple Heart awarded for a pea-sized piece of debris getting embedded in his calf in Syria during an IS group shelling.
personality.
— Positive Trait: Sociable. Despite everything that lurks below, and for all of Freddie's issues forging deeper, more intimate connections with others—or, more aptly, keeping himself from fleeing once he realizes he is beginning to do so—Freddie gets along well with most people and finds it easy to strike up conversations and to relate to other people. He's not overly loud or rowdy, but he's a fun guy to go out with; he's kind and charming when he wants to be, with wit and a good sense of humor: there's a reason he has a lot of success on Tinder and got on well with his comrades in the military. He made friends easily when he first joined, and he's maintained those friendships even after getting out, though it does bear mentioning that none of these friends are people he can confide deeply personal things in.
— Positive Trait: Intelligent. Intelligence can be defined in a variety of different ways; in this instance, Freddie is both knowledgeable and a quick and willing learner. He did well in a difficult course of study at a rigorous school—physics—and had to pass numerous tests and learn a tremendous amount of new information to be accepted into the Air Force as a pilot and subsequently be allowed to fly. He's good at memorization and figuring out how machines work; engineering-type information like how the systems on a plane work is very intuitive to him. He's just very good at figuring things out and processing and contextualizing information so that he's able to use it to troubleshoot; Freddie is talented in applying his technical knowledge to specific situations.
— Positive Trait: Reassuring. Even despite all of his own issues, Freddie gives the practiced impression of someone who is confident and in control. He's spent years as Pilot-in-Command on various crafts, and he commanded crews when he was in the military. He's able to keep an even keel, shut down his own fear, and focus on reassuring the people around him in disaster situations in which he is the one expected to stay calm above all else. He's very practiced at comforting people who are afraid of flying, for instance, and was able to keep his crew from panicking during one in-flight emergency in which a landing had to be made with two engines on fire (not entirely unheard of). Having been an officer, and a Captain or higher for the latter half of his Air Force tenure, he's comfortable being the one other people look to for guidance and knows how to fill that role in a way that inspires confidence.
---
— Negative Trait: Perceptions of Inadequacy. Despite the air of confidence and comfort in his own skin that he projects, Freddie is haunted by persistent feelings of inadequacy in the back of his mind that tend to surface without warning, a man like a picturesque Florida neighborhood built atop hollow limestone caverns, ready to be swallowed by a sinkhole at the slightest tectonic shift a blow to his confidence would offer.
But it's not particularly remarkable that Freddie's self esteem is built on a shaky foundation. His background has, from a very young age, conditioned him to believe that he's just not enough—it's fairly common for parents of children, especially young children and especially Catholic parents, to stay in unhappy marriages until their offspring move out "for the child's sake", but Freddie's parents only stayed together until he was 7, leaving him to wonder once he learned that this was not the norm why he hadn't been good enough to stay together for like most other kids. Growing up before and after the divorce, his parents didn't make him feel unwanted, but they weren't over-the-top loving and didn't frequently emphasize how happy they were to have him; his father was particularly aloof—and sometimes he still wonders if there was anything he could have been or done as a child to make them like him more, ultimately concluding that he was inadequate in the face of the child his parents 'needed'
Deep down, Freddie also still believes that being cheated on was, in some way, in his control - that there was something he could have done to make himself good enough to be the only one she needed. Maybe if he'd called her more than once a week, or was better in bed, or was a better romantic partner, he could have been good enough to not cheat on—a very false logic that doesn't account for the fact that sometimes people just do bad things.
These feelings really came to a head during his second deployment, after he was mildly injured by a mortar blast—it's standard procedure to put anyone who gets injured while engaging with the enemy, regardless of the severity, in for the Purple Heart, a medal the US gives to soldiers injured in combat. The injury simply has to be a direct result of enemy action and serious enough to require medical attention, and the piece of shrapnel that became shallowly embedded in his calf after the blast fit both of those criteria. However, it's up to the individual whether or not they want to choose to accept the medal, which comes with several benefits in healthcare, employment, and financial status. Freddie didn't feel that he had done enough to get it, or that he deserved it, because he felt inadequate compared to the other recipients - people who had been much more severely injured - and had to be talked out of making the mistake of declining free healthcare for life simply because he felt like he didn't "do enough."
These feelings of inadequacy also crop up when he's speaking to other veterans, and he usually stays out of conversations with people who have been deployed during wartime because of them; it's kept him from being able to form bonds over it and talk about the things he did see. Again, he feels like he didn't "do enough", despite having very much engaged in real combat for three years, because he didn't engage in any fighting up close, or endure the sort of trauma that he's heard ground forces describe—in Freddie's mind, to be adequate enough to join in these conversations, he'd have to be able to match their specific kind of experience, and the level of violence and up-close gore in them.
— Negative Trait: Affirmation-Seeking. Freddie has a very intense need for external validation that started in childhood, during which time he didn't get the validation and attention he needed from his parents. He wears his uniform instead of changing after work because he likes the respect he gets; he sleeps around to an almost pathological degree because he needs near-constant reassurance that other people find him attractive and likeable. When a person chooses to go out on a date with him, or have sex with him, it's a temporary hit of affirmation and validation because they're choosing to spend their time with him alone instead of somebody else. But it's a shallow, fleeting feeling compared to the validation of being prioritized in a relationship, and his need for affirmation is a yawning void - hence why he repeats the same behavior over and over. Another, more benign example of this tendency at play in his daily life: Freddie's fond of sending dates uniformed selfies because he wants to be told that he looks good in it to counter his own insecurities, which insist the opposite every time he gets dressed.
— Negative Trait: Commitaphobic. Between his parents’ divorce when he was age seven, which set his first and most intimate impression of marriage as an institution, and then being cheated on in a two year relationship with his last girlfriend some 10 years ago, Freddie avoids commitment and tells himself he doesn't want to settle down or date seriously. He’s very active on dating apps, goes out on dates, has flings–but he dodges attempts to hang out too many times, tries not to go on too many dates with the same people in a row, and ghosts people if he feels like they're getting uncomfortably close to him or the conversations are getting too deep. Most of his liaisons usually only last 2-3 dates/hookups, and when they end, his partners are usually left bewildered, wondering what went wrong when they seemed to be having a genuinely good time before that.
But if Freddie lets them get close to him, they can hurt him like Sarah did; if they fall in love, they'll undoubtedly just fall out of love and come to hate each other like his parents did. It's better this way, or at least less scary.
But deep down, despite his refusal to acknowledge it, Freddie longs for closeness with another person and and craves intimacy with others, which is why he sleeps around to the degree that he does, constantly chasing fleeting glimmers of connection - but his self-sabotaging behaviors around dating make that impossible to actually achieve because he always cuts things off prematurely, even if he doesn't want it to end yet—a defense mechanism to avoid ever having to repeat the pain of being cheated on at the cost of depriving himself of a basic human need. He's been starving himself of this sort of human closeness for the past ten years because of the level of fear and anxiety he has over commitment and connection, and he lives with an omnipresent feeling of alienation and solitude because of it.
— Positive Trait: Intelligent. Intelligence can be defined in a variety of different ways; in this instance, Freddie is both knowledgeable and a quick and willing learner. He did well in a difficult course of study at a rigorous school—physics—and had to pass numerous tests and learn a tremendous amount of new information to be accepted into the Air Force as a pilot and subsequently be allowed to fly. He's good at memorization and figuring out how machines work; engineering-type information like how the systems on a plane work is very intuitive to him. He's just very good at figuring things out and processing and contextualizing information so that he's able to use it to troubleshoot; Freddie is talented in applying his technical knowledge to specific situations.
— Positive Trait: Reassuring. Even despite all of his own issues, Freddie gives the practiced impression of someone who is confident and in control. He's spent years as Pilot-in-Command on various crafts, and he commanded crews when he was in the military. He's able to keep an even keel, shut down his own fear, and focus on reassuring the people around him in disaster situations in which he is the one expected to stay calm above all else. He's very practiced at comforting people who are afraid of flying, for instance, and was able to keep his crew from panicking during one in-flight emergency in which a landing had to be made with two engines on fire (not entirely unheard of). Having been an officer, and a Captain or higher for the latter half of his Air Force tenure, he's comfortable being the one other people look to for guidance and knows how to fill that role in a way that inspires confidence.
— Negative Trait: Perceptions of Inadequacy. Despite the air of confidence and comfort in his own skin that he projects, Freddie is haunted by persistent feelings of inadequacy in the back of his mind that tend to surface without warning, a man like a picturesque Florida neighborhood built atop hollow limestone caverns, ready to be swallowed by a sinkhole at the slightest tectonic shift a blow to his confidence would offer.
But it's not particularly remarkable that Freddie's self esteem is built on a shaky foundation. His background has, from a very young age, conditioned him to believe that he's just not enough—it's fairly common for parents of children, especially young children and especially Catholic parents, to stay in unhappy marriages until their offspring move out "for the child's sake", but Freddie's parents only stayed together until he was 7, leaving him to wonder once he learned that this was not the norm why he hadn't been good enough to stay together for like most other kids. Growing up before and after the divorce, his parents didn't make him feel unwanted, but they weren't over-the-top loving and didn't frequently emphasize how happy they were to have him; his father was particularly aloof—and sometimes he still wonders if there was anything he could have been or done as a child to make them like him more, ultimately concluding that he was inadequate in the face of the child his parents 'needed'
Deep down, Freddie also still believes that being cheated on was, in some way, in his control - that there was something he could have done to make himself good enough to be the only one she needed. Maybe if he'd called her more than once a week, or was better in bed, or was a better romantic partner, he could have been good enough to not cheat on—a very false logic that doesn't account for the fact that sometimes people just do bad things.
These feelings really came to a head during his second deployment, after he was mildly injured by a mortar blast—it's standard procedure to put anyone who gets injured while engaging with the enemy, regardless of the severity, in for the Purple Heart, a medal the US gives to soldiers injured in combat. The injury simply has to be a direct result of enemy action and serious enough to require medical attention, and the piece of shrapnel that became shallowly embedded in his calf after the blast fit both of those criteria. However, it's up to the individual whether or not they want to choose to accept the medal, which comes with several benefits in healthcare, employment, and financial status. Freddie didn't feel that he had done enough to get it, or that he deserved it, because he felt inadequate compared to the other recipients - people who had been much more severely injured - and had to be talked out of making the mistake of declining free healthcare for life simply because he felt like he didn't "do enough."
These feelings of inadequacy also crop up when he's speaking to other veterans, and he usually stays out of conversations with people who have been deployed during wartime because of them; it's kept him from being able to form bonds over it and talk about the things he did see. Again, he feels like he didn't "do enough", despite having very much engaged in real combat for three years, because he didn't engage in any fighting up close, or endure the sort of trauma that he's heard ground forces describe—in Freddie's mind, to be adequate enough to join in these conversations, he'd have to be able to match their specific kind of experience, and the level of violence and up-close gore in them.
— Negative Trait: Affirmation-Seeking. Freddie has a very intense need for external validation that started in childhood, during which time he didn't get the validation and attention he needed from his parents. He wears his uniform instead of changing after work because he likes the respect he gets; he sleeps around to an almost pathological degree because he needs near-constant reassurance that other people find him attractive and likeable. When a person chooses to go out on a date with him, or have sex with him, it's a temporary hit of affirmation and validation because they're choosing to spend their time with him alone instead of somebody else. But it's a shallow, fleeting feeling compared to the validation of being prioritized in a relationship, and his need for affirmation is a yawning void - hence why he repeats the same behavior over and over. Another, more benign example of this tendency at play in his daily life: Freddie's fond of sending dates uniformed selfies because he wants to be told that he looks good in it to counter his own insecurities, which insist the opposite every time he gets dressed.
— Negative Trait: Commitaphobic. Between his parents’ divorce when he was age seven, which set his first and most intimate impression of marriage as an institution, and then being cheated on in a two year relationship with his last girlfriend some 10 years ago, Freddie avoids commitment and tells himself he doesn't want to settle down or date seriously. He’s very active on dating apps, goes out on dates, has flings–but he dodges attempts to hang out too many times, tries not to go on too many dates with the same people in a row, and ghosts people if he feels like they're getting uncomfortably close to him or the conversations are getting too deep. Most of his liaisons usually only last 2-3 dates/hookups, and when they end, his partners are usually left bewildered, wondering what went wrong when they seemed to be having a genuinely good time before that.
But if Freddie lets them get close to him, they can hurt him like Sarah did; if they fall in love, they'll undoubtedly just fall out of love and come to hate each other like his parents did. It's better this way, or at least less scary.
But deep down, despite his refusal to acknowledge it, Freddie longs for closeness with another person and and craves intimacy with others, which is why he sleeps around to the degree that he does, constantly chasing fleeting glimmers of connection - but his self-sabotaging behaviors around dating make that impossible to actually achieve because he always cuts things off prematurely, even if he doesn't want it to end yet—a defense mechanism to avoid ever having to repeat the pain of being cheated on at the cost of depriving himself of a basic human need. He's been starving himself of this sort of human closeness for the past ten years because of the level of fear and anxiety he has over commitment and connection, and he lives with an omnipresent feeling of alienation and solitude because of it.
physical details.
Freddie stands at 6’ even, with a tidy general appearance and good posture, always clean-shaven; he looks a little older than he actually is, especially around the eyes, from a lot of direct sun exposure abroad near the equator and in the cockpit. He’s bilingual - fluent in French and English - but speaks French with a Québécois dialect that is, for the most part, mutually intelligible with Parisian and African French speakers. He doesn’t have much of an accent or many regionalisms pinning him to any one part of the US, but a keen ear would be able to pin him as having a trace of New York State to his voice, diluted by assignments around the country during his ten years of active duty. He uses a trace of cologne, but not much, just enough to faintly pick up on when standing at the edge of his personal space. It wouldn't be fair to trap his copilot in the cockpit with that.
The great irony of his bulimia and issues with body image is that he’s not actually that overweight—he's only carrying the recent addition of some 40 pounds and was slim to begin with before that—and his metabolic issues stem almost entirely from prolonged poor diet, not body fat. On the whole, he’s still built fairly narrow; due to a combination of heredity and insulin resistance, he carries almost all extra weight as abdominal fat, giving him the appearance of a mildish beer belly (think: six months pregnant or so) without actually having much softness to his face or hands, and only a slight thickness to his arms and thighs—a dadbod. He's built kind of like the comedian Shapel Lacey. All of this said, though, Freddie’s cheeks still look pretty full because of the swelling brought on by such frequent purging.
Most of the tooth decay and erosion he's built up over the past four months is only really visible if his mouth is wide open for inspection and someone knows what they're looking at—in which case, it's glaring. What's outwardly visible—say, as a smile of a little flash of teeth shows as he's talking—is a coffee drinker's mild discoloration and a peculiar translucence to the ends of his upper two central incisors. They lack the little bumps at the ends most people keep into middle age, and, viewed from the side, they taper down to almost chisel-shaped ends like a rabbit's as opposed to the equal-width, blunt ends of uneroded teeth.
Freddie's only physically identifying mark is a shallow, penny-sized indentation on the outer side of his right calf, smoother than the surrounding skin with no hair growth (though his body hair is already fairly light to begin with)—the scar from where a pea-sized piece of hard debris became embedded about a centimeter into his calf while he was standing in the shrapnel radius of an IS group mortar blast on the ground and subsequently had to have it surgically removed.
The great irony of his bulimia and issues with body image is that he’s not actually that overweight—he's only carrying the recent addition of some 40 pounds and was slim to begin with before that—and his metabolic issues stem almost entirely from prolonged poor diet, not body fat. On the whole, he’s still built fairly narrow; due to a combination of heredity and insulin resistance, he carries almost all extra weight as abdominal fat, giving him the appearance of a mildish beer belly (think: six months pregnant or so) without actually having much softness to his face or hands, and only a slight thickness to his arms and thighs—a dadbod. He's built kind of like the comedian Shapel Lacey. All of this said, though, Freddie’s cheeks still look pretty full because of the swelling brought on by such frequent purging.
Most of the tooth decay and erosion he's built up over the past four months is only really visible if his mouth is wide open for inspection and someone knows what they're looking at—in which case, it's glaring. What's outwardly visible—say, as a smile of a little flash of teeth shows as he's talking—is a coffee drinker's mild discoloration and a peculiar translucence to the ends of his upper two central incisors. They lack the little bumps at the ends most people keep into middle age, and, viewed from the side, they taper down to almost chisel-shaped ends like a rabbit's as opposed to the equal-width, blunt ends of uneroded teeth.
Freddie's only physically identifying mark is a shallow, penny-sized indentation on the outer side of his right calf, smoother than the surrounding skin with no hair growth (though his body hair is already fairly light to begin with)—the scar from where a pea-sized piece of hard debris became embedded about a centimeter into his calf while he was standing in the shrapnel radius of an IS group mortar blast on the ground and subsequently had to have it surgically removed.
medical status.
Freddie is doing very poorly. At the canonpoint I play him at, he's been bulimic for about four months, bingeing and purging three times a day between flights, and his insulin resistance and prediabetes are symptomatic and entirely uncontrolled. When he binges, he doesn't stop until he feels like he's going to vomit on his own and the things he binges on tend to be very sugary with little to no nutritional value. Because of the severity of the bingeing, he's eating long enough for some of it to begin to absorb before he purges everything left in his stomach—that, the insulin resistance, and his body adapting to a low-energy environment are the reasons his weight has only stabilized, not dropped—and subsequently spike his blood sugar. Then he purges, and his blood sugar crashes after its peak on an empty stomach. This happening multiple times per day is very, very hard on his body; Freddie gets frequent headaches and fatigue and has unpredictable bouts of hypoglycemia that present with nausea, sweats, trembling, lightheadedness, and pallor. His nutritional needs aren't close to being met; what he does eat is highly processed and very sparse in nutrients, so what little his body absorbs doesn't actually help it much other than to provide enough calories to continue functioning—which lends itself to his frequent feeling of just being run down and the gradual weakening of his immune system.
The bulimia is an animal of its own. Freddie is religious about brushing his teeth after he purges, but that's not enough to counterbalance the harm of bathing his teeth and the sensitive structures of his throat and mouth in stomach acid three or four times a day. He's had numerous cavities over the past few months and his teeth are very sensitive to cold; the acid has worn down the enamel until the tips of his front teeth appear a little translucent. The vomit has discolored them to a limited degree, but he can't whiten them because he already barely has any enamel to speak of. The insides of his cheeks are ulcerated, which leads to a slight puffiness that only further upsets him and aggravates his issues around body image, and his throat and soft palate are perennially inflamed; sore throats are frequent for him and sometimes his voice is a little hoarse.
Over the past month he's started to develop acid reflux and can be seen crunching on antacids from a little travel roll here and there throughout the day. He alternates hands when he induces vomiting—less common now, because the severity of binges and the overwhelming nausea by the time they end usually means a little pressure over his stomach is all it takes—and uses hand lotion liberally to minimize the irritation and scraping of the knuckles known by the medical profession as Russell's sign. They’re still a little pink, with occasional cracked skin or scrapes, but in isolation it can be passed off as dry skin.
For the most part, he ended his military service without any lasting trauma. However, he has a very conditioned response to alarms because of how frequently the Al-Asad airbase dealt with incoming missiles and mortar fire and the fact that he was hit and experienced pain while an Alert Red was playing across base. Hearing a recording of it or a similar sound isn't enough to trigger a real breakdown, but it makes him tense and cagey.
Freddie is also mildly hard of hearing—as gauged by his VA audiologist, he lost about 20% of his hearing ability in the military—and has occasional bouts of low-grade tinnitus thanks to his repeated deployments and time around massive aircraft engines. It's not a concern for him in passing his medcert, and he isn't at the point of needing hearing aids, but he does sometimes have to ask characters to speak up, needs subtitles, can't pick out individual words when people mumble, and struggles to understand quieter voices in busy settings. If your character has a quieter/softer voice and/or is prone to whispering or mumbling, lmk!
The bulimia is an animal of its own. Freddie is religious about brushing his teeth after he purges, but that's not enough to counterbalance the harm of bathing his teeth and the sensitive structures of his throat and mouth in stomach acid three or four times a day. He's had numerous cavities over the past few months and his teeth are very sensitive to cold; the acid has worn down the enamel until the tips of his front teeth appear a little translucent. The vomit has discolored them to a limited degree, but he can't whiten them because he already barely has any enamel to speak of. The insides of his cheeks are ulcerated, which leads to a slight puffiness that only further upsets him and aggravates his issues around body image, and his throat and soft palate are perennially inflamed; sore throats are frequent for him and sometimes his voice is a little hoarse.
Over the past month he's started to develop acid reflux and can be seen crunching on antacids from a little travel roll here and there throughout the day. He alternates hands when he induces vomiting—less common now, because the severity of binges and the overwhelming nausea by the time they end usually means a little pressure over his stomach is all it takes—and uses hand lotion liberally to minimize the irritation and scraping of the knuckles known by the medical profession as Russell's sign. They’re still a little pink, with occasional cracked skin or scrapes, but in isolation it can be passed off as dry skin.
For the most part, he ended his military service without any lasting trauma. However, he has a very conditioned response to alarms because of how frequently the Al-Asad airbase dealt with incoming missiles and mortar fire and the fact that he was hit and experienced pain while an Alert Red was playing across base. Hearing a recording of it or a similar sound isn't enough to trigger a real breakdown, but it makes him tense and cagey.
Freddie is also mildly hard of hearing—as gauged by his VA audiologist, he lost about 20% of his hearing ability in the military—and has occasional bouts of low-grade tinnitus thanks to his repeated deployments and time around massive aircraft engines. It's not a concern for him in passing his medcert, and he isn't at the point of needing hearing aids, but he does sometimes have to ask characters to speak up, needs subtitles, can't pick out individual words when people mumble, and struggles to understand quieter voices in busy settings. If your character has a quieter/softer voice and/or is prone to whispering or mumbling, lmk!
history.
I. PAPAOUTAI
childhood — 1992 - summer 2010
early childhood — an unplanned pregnancy interrupts a relationship on its way out; marriage for appearances; divorce, a child's unanswered prayers, and the end of freddie's catholicism
Freddie was born Frédéric Ian Lavoie in Rochester, New York on October 11, 1992, about seven months after the chapel wedding that bound his 25-year-old Irish Catholic mother and 26-year-old Québécois father.
Freddie was unplanned, not premature. His parents, both practicing Catholics, had been using the notoriously ineffective “rhythm method” of contraception to avoid using a condom or birth control, and the relationship was on its way out, its initial spark now little more than a smoldering ember, when it came to light that his mother was pregnant.
Patricia, a liberal Catholic, privately considered an abortion, but she decided against it in part because she'd heard that having a baby together makes couples stronger (this is in fact the opposite of the truth). So they kept the embryo and scrambled to assemble a planned-looking wedding and a matching story about premature labor for use down the road. They had been dating for six months and 9 days on the day they promised each other eternity before a priest. That October, they told the family Freddie was born two months early, but that the baby was doing fine.
Patricia and Matthieu were fundamentally incompatible. Matthieu, who had never particularly wanted a child to begin with, became more withdrawn under the stress of raising an infant and never 'came back' to the relationship emotionally even once Freddie left the 'terrible twos'; after that, he was somewhat involved in Freddie's childcare, and Freddie has some positive memories with him, but he was more distant, the less present of his two parents.
Even though Freddie was never told that he wasn’t a planned child, or one brought into this world because his parents wanted a child, he began to come to this conclusion on his own around age ten. His parents had no stories about how desperately they’d tried for a baby, or how excited they were waiting for him to arrive; they did what they had to and didn’t make him feel unwanted or burdensome, just… present, neutrally, as a fact of life. His mother had her loving moments, and expressions of genuine affection; Christmases were nice. But she didn't do the little extra things his friends’ parents did, the little touches that can only be explained by love. There were hardly any pictures of her during the pregnancy in their already slim family photo album, or of his father engaging with him. He wasn't unwanted, he wasn't neglected—but he wasn't expressly wanted, either. By the end of elementary school, Freddie understood that he had just sort of happened.
Patricia and Matthieu brought their son up to be Catholic like them from birth, and by age 5, Freddie understood that the relationship between his two caretakers was under a tremendous amount of stress. His parents tried to keep their voices low when they argued, and limited their disagreements to being snippy with each other while their child was in the room, waiting until he was in bed (lying awake and listening to them) before they dove into the night's arguments about anything and everything.
So, every night for two years, Freddie got down on his knees at the edge of his bed and prayed like the nuns in his parochial school had showed him, always with the same request: for Mommy and Papa to get along. He tried to be patient, and kept asking. Then, one November morning about a month after his seventh birthday, he came out of his room, proud of having dressed himself for school and ready to grab his backpack, only to find both parents sitting stone-faced at the dining room table—Matthieu hadn't gone to work in the morning before he’d even woken up for school, as per usual. They told him he wasn't going to school today, and didn't need to worry about catching the bus. He didn’t feel the excitement a normal child would. Something was looming, even if he didn’t understand what.
He sat down, his mother poured him a bowl of Chex, and his parents explained to him about twelve hours after his most recent plea to the loving God he'd been taught about that they were getting a divorce. Papa would be moving out, but he would still see Freddie on the weekends. Did they still love each other, Freddie asked, and felt ridiculous for asking it as soon as he did without completely understanding why. No was the answer, but they were still friends and still loved Freddie. Both felt like half-truths.
This singular event was pivotal in his life — and all it took for Freddie, age seven, to feel with absolute certainty in one fell swoop that God was not real, although he'd spend the next 11 years of his life going along with the Church's rituals and pageantry anyway, taking the path of least resistance by pretending to believe while still under his mother's roof.
The divorce was incredibly stressful and traumatic, even if his father’s absence during the weekdays wasn’t actually felt that much; it was the worst thing that had happened to him up until this point in his young life. Freddie wasn't able to make sense of what had happened, and as he got older, he began to learn that it was commonplace for couples that didn't love each other to stay married anyway "for the kid's sake" until the child turned eighteen and then divorce — so what was the difference between himself and the children whose parents stayed together for them? Why hadn't he been good enough for his parents to hold on for 11 more years like these kids' parents—what did they have that he didn't? He saw the elementary school counselor once every two weeks for the remainder of that school year, and that was the extent of the support he got. His malignant feelings of inadequacy were never truly addressed, and gradually began to spread as he grew into a young man.
Matthieu stayed in Rochester and shared partial custody for the rest of Freddie’s childhood and adolescence. His father liked him, and seemed more interested in him once he had outgrown some of the inconvenience of being a child, but he wasn’t really a parent when Freddie stayed with him. They got closer in Freddie's teenage years and flew RC planes together on weekends, some days, but Matthieu never really felt like a father in the traditional sense—more like an uncle who threw a Kid Cuisine or Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Cup or Spaghettios in the microwave for him or sometimes ordered a pizza and let him watch Nickelodeon when he came over.
Initially, Freddie made efforts to solicit affection from his parents, to make them like him more, as is typical of any child in that situation—but over time, a sort of learned helplessness set in as he realized that it would only ever yield disappointment. They just weren't that interested in him, not as deeply as he needed them to be. So, by his teenage years, he stopped trying; he wasn't in a position to get back at either of them with the exception of one thing: shunning his French-Canadian ethnic and cultural background because he knew it mattered to his father.
Matthieu wasn't interested in him, so he wasn't interested in being French-Canadian like Matthieu. Freddie went through a phase for a few of his teenage years in which he began to refuse to speak to his father in French, no matter how many times he was addressed in French; now he began to assert that no, it's just Freddie every time his father called him Frédéric, as he had since he was first born. This lasted for a few years; eventually he went to college and it became easier to bear once he was no longer under the same roof, being reminded of his caretaker's lack of interest; he began speaking French again on his fathers very, very rare phone calls and in response to his equally rare Facebook messages. To this day, Freddie still harbors some degree of unconscious desire to separate himself from that aspect of his own cultural heritage to retaliate against his father.
II. WHAT (THE FUCK) DO YOU DO WITH A B.A. IN ENGLISH PHYSICS?
summer 2010 - spring 2014.
college — the discovery of a life's passion three-and-a-half years into the wrong degree, $100,000 in student loans, and a 6-month forbearance
In 2010, Freddie, an eighteen-year-old bilingual dual citizen, enrolled in Rensselaer Polytechnic for a four-year degree in physics. By his third year of the degree, however, aeronautics and the physics surrounding flight were becoming an all-consuming interest. Senior year, he took a passenger flight to Québec to visit his paternal grandparents, and while it wasn’t his first flight, it was the first since the explosion of new knowledge about how the tremendous metal beast he was riding in worked. Something clicked into place this time. It was a thrill, being in the air, thinking about all of the forces at play, all of the controls the pilots were operating. Freddie realized that he wanted to fly, not teach Physics.
And then he graduated four months later–May 2014–with a hair over $100,000 in student loan debt and a six month grace period to find a job before he needed to start paying it off. Job search prospects for a baccalaureate in physics were utterly abysmal, and every Indeed search was haunted by the itch of his realization that this wasn't what he wanted to do. He just also couldn't afford flight school, and the idea of being approved for a second educational loan with no job and $100,000 hanging over his head was laughable.
III. ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE RICH, THEY'RE PAYING THE BILL LIKE IT'S NOTHING
autumn 2014 - winter 2016.
the air force opens its checkbook; freddie lavoie learns to fly and to kill
But there was one party who could easily afford it and would be happy to pay the bill in full for a price of a less monetary kind: time, and possibly his life. He'd get a job, and some degree of loan forgiveness, and he'd learn to fly; he'd get a housing allowance and healthcare and great dental and make friends. Freddie thought about it in secret for about two months, mulling over the pros and cons, reading accounts of life on the inside online - and then picked a sunny Thursday to drive down to the Air Force recruiter's office at the strip mall after an Iraq War childhood and signed the devil's bargain on the dotted line: free flight school for a decade of his life.
A few weeks later, to his parents' shock, Freddie caught a flight to Atlanta and reported to Officer Training School at the Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama. Freddie didn't put a whole lot of thought into what he'd be doing overseas; his view was sanitized, myopic, and a little unconsciously self-serving—the Gulf War and Iraq War started and ended while he was younger, and American operations in the Middle East mostly seemed like monitoring now.
One month after he signed his contract, Operation Inherent Resolve—the United States' campaign against the IS group (then ISIL or ISIS; Freddie still calls it ISIS out of habit) was announced, but Freddie still had a tremendous amount of training to get through before he'd be allowed to fly anything. After his 9 weeks of Officer Training School were up, he graduated as a second lieutenant, passed through Initial Flight Screening, then spent the next two-and-a-half years learning to fly with increasing specificity—first training planes, then heavy bombers (at 6 feet even, he was too tall and lacked the necessary tolerance of high-G environments to make the cut for a fighter), then his bomber (the B-52 stratofortress; to him and everyone else, the BUFF: Big Ugly Fat Fucker), graduating a first lieutenant ready for deployment overseas.
During the last ten months of his two-and-a-half years of schooling, Freddie met Sarah, a girl his age who would end up being the first person he ever had a serious relationship with, at a concert put on for 'the troops' (she got in with her brother, whom Freddie had never met and never did meet). She was cute. Funny. Very nice. They hit it off, started dating, and four months before he deployed, the two of them moved in together in his on-base duplex.
By this time he finished Advanced Flight Training on his assigned B52, the so-called Operation Inherent Resolve was well underway in Iraq and Syria. Within a couple of weeks of his graduation, Freddie was informed that he was to pack his shit, organize his affairs, and get ready to go to Iraq.
IV. GUERNICA, REVISITED
iraq, spring 2016 - spring 2017
freddie joins the so-called global war on terrorism; a first deployment and first serious relationship
At various points over the next ten years, he'd be stationed in Iraq and Syria for 12-month deployments followed by 20-month stints back in the states. He saw disturbing things while overseas, but it has to be emphasized that Freddie's war was not the war that was being shown on television—he was dropping bombs on the abstract squares of buildings and antlike dots he was told were IS group insurgents, and he never actually saw civilian casualties up close with his own eyes. There was no way to tell at 50,000 feet which dots were civilians and which were insurgents, and Intel told him with confidence that they'd been much closer and these were insurgents, so Freddie took their word for it and kept dropping bombs.
His interactions with civilians were largely limited to contractors on base, but there was enough interfacing between himself and civilians, and exposure to what the IS group did on the ground, that he really did feel a moral imperative to get the IS group out within a few months of getting deployed, and he trusted that the military knew the best way to do that.
Freddie's first deployment was to Iraq, shipping out in February 2016 with a promised return date of February 2017. It was a long deployment for a first, but he was told that at times he could be allowed to return stateside, that he wasn't going to go an entire year without seeing his family (or his girlfriend, with whom he videocalled once a week and messaged back and forth on WhatsApp most days). Freddie thought things were going great; he didn't initially catch the cooling of the relationship about 3 months into his 12 overseas, but eventually began to feel like she was losing interest. It wasn't a great feeling, but he figured that all they really needed was some time together again, and that maybe the two of them just weren't the ideal pair for a LDR. This was temporary, though. All relationships have rough patches. A lot of guys were going through the same thing. And besides, he had far more immediate, pressing concerns to occupy most of his focus.
V. WHAT'S THE POINT IN GETTING DRESSED IF THE TWO OF US ARE OVER?
august 2016.
freddie's homecoming isn't what he expected; a man scorned returns to iraq early with a new lease on commitment and fraternization; homosocial comfort becomes homosexual activity
In August, halfway through his deployment and eighteen months into his relationship with Sarah, Freddie was granted the promised two weeks of leave stateside, and was excited to go home and re-establish their connection, seeing it as the answer to the slight distance he'd been feeling from her. She threw her arms around him at the airport, kissed him hello in front of people, and it was a joyful moment. Something felt off during the car ride back to the shared duplex, but he told himself it was just because they hadn't seen each other in a while. That was bound to be awkward.
When she parked in the driveway, she pulled the key from the ignition but didn't get out. "Freddie, we need to talk," she said, and he felt the same wave of cold dread he'd felt sitting down at the kitchen table with his parents when he was seven. He knew, but he didn't know the extent.
He vacantly listened to Sarah explain that they just weren't compatible and that it would be better for both of them without saying anything, at least initially—just trying to process the massive life change that hadn't really come out of nowhere but certainly felt that way. But then an impulsive desire to twist the knife crept over him before he could push it away. He knew what had happened to some of his buddies, the same thing they were all afraid of. So he asked if there was anyone else.
Sarah reacted with sudden hostility, over-the-top defensiveness disproportionate to the question. She started saying he'd never trusted her, that this was why the relationship was never going to work, that he was only saying that because he'd probably cheated and felt guilty about it and was projecting it on her, then men who accuse women of cheating are doing that because they cheat and think everyone else will too. The diatribe he'd unleashed was as damning as a yes, but more painful. Freddie pressed her. She broke down and confessed - yes, there had been other guys. Plural. She was crying. He was crying.
Sarah explained to him him that she hadn't wanted to break up with him while he was overseas; that it had felt kinder to do it this way. All Freddie could muster was a bitter laugh. He didn't realize the extent of it, but her primary motivation had been the feeling of guilt, and the image she would project to others, breaking up with her boyfriend while he was on deployment - something extremely taboo on a military outpost. And what if he did something drastic? Wasn't it better to give him something to hold onto while he was overseas and needed it?
Freddie told her to move out. In two days, she'd packed—he helped her in silence—and left, ending the longest-running and most serious relationship he'd had in his life until that point. Freddie stayed in the States for the rest of the week, went out drinking, tried to have a good time—but he was utterly miserable, staying in a house full of memories of the relationship that had just ended and wondering if he was sleeping in a bed his girlfriend had fucked other men on, and all of the friends he would lean on to help him through this were still in Iraq.
He saw no reason to stay, so after his week stateside, Freddie voluntarily returned to his duty post overseas, still heartbroken and desperately seeking an escape, a distraction, and homosocial comfort. That homosocial comfort from his best friend, Landry, ended up turning into homosexual activity after about a week—jacking him off (in the name of making him feel better, of course), frottage while telling him Sarah was a slut anyways, a dependa, and that he needed to forget about her. It helped him forget, and the sex felt good and was comforting in a way he could stomach.
This started Freddie's abandonment of any hope of a longterm relationship, and his several years of hooking up (mostly with men, having been burned by a woman and soured on the idea with a heaping dose of misogynistic beliefs on the faithfulness of women) around base. Freddie had a lot of sex. A lot of sex, only ever a few times with any one person before calling it quits, always on his terms, not theirs. He was a handsome 6' pilot, well-liked, a nice guy—he could have whoever he wanted. And if he got drunk and cried about Sarah in private, or needed a buddy's shoulder to lean on, or even—on one occasion—broke down and messaged her a diatribe containing everything he wanted to say capped off with insisting he could have had anyone for those first few months after the breakup, well, at least he was doing fine without her.
VI. SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES
sept 2016 - autumn 2024.
iraq, syria, and iraq again; the battle of mosul; an unwanted purple heart
Walking back to October 2016, Freddie had been in the country flying bombing runs for eight months when the Iraqi government and allies besieged the ISIL-controlled city of Mosul, starting the prolonged offensive that would be called the Battle of Mosul by Western forces. Freddie was a participant in the numerous airstrikes over the city until he was sent back to the States at the end of his deployment in the spring of 2017.
The Battle of Mosul would become a nine-month-long humanitarian crisis that quickly cemented its own infamy. The U.S.-backed Iraqi coalition government would further fan the flames of the rest of the world's horror by underreporting its almost one-to-one civilian casualties by thousands of lives: nine to eleven thousand Iraqi civilians were killed, not the reported 2,500, and by the time the Coalition and ISIS had finished, Mosul had been all but leveled to a burnt husk. Freddie was more than complicit in the creation of this situation - he was Pilot In Command over numerous airstrikes, and even if his hand never touched the bomb release, which made the situation easier for him to rationalize, he was the one who took those weapons to the place they were supposed to be dropped, over and over and over.
Freddie demonstrated a remarkable ability to compartmentalize while at war, and was happy to unquestioningly accept the more palatable estimates of potential civilian casualties the U.S. military gave himself and his crew prior to bombing runs. Remaining alive and completing the objective were his two major points of focus, allowing him to tune out all else while in the air, and once he returned to base, he was immersed in a validating environment in which moral questioning was socially punished—for one person to question whether the level of civilian casualties or destruction to the Iraqi infrastructure in the pursuit of the ultimate goal of an ISIS defeat was morally justifiable would be to implicate all of their social support system in the same question, and if Freddie were to choose to think about it and come to an answer he wasn’t comfortable with, his only option to then stop actively participating in something he had decided was unjustifiable would be to go to prison for desertion. It wasn’t an emotionally safe environment to ask these questions, so he repressed and compartmentalized to avoid the threat of moral dissonance until he left the Air Force in 2024 after his contract was up.
The ultimate victory over ISIS and retaking of what was left of the city of Mosul and its surviving inhabitants in 2017 further helped quell some of Freddie’s discomfort, and it allowed him to accept and internalize the greater good narrative: he was a foreign crusader sent to liberate the Iraqi people from ISIS even at the risk of his own life because it was the right thing to do, and his actions kept far more people from dying under caliphate rule. It allowed him to keep going.
In 2018, Freddie was promoted to Captain; the winter of 2019 marked 20 months since his return from his first deployment to Iraq and the start of his second, this time to Syria, where he would spend the next 12 months garrisoned as part of the continued U.S. presence following the formally announced withdrawal. This was the last deployment in which he saw major, frequent combat, but it was while he was on the ground, just—in Freddie's word's—"standing around" on base, that he finally was injured in a way other than his gradually building hearing loss.
An IS group shelling, part of the 2019 resurgence, took him off-guard while he was in the open, and a mortar blast hit close enough to where he was standing that the explosion propelled a pea-sized piece of shrapnel into the side of his right calf while he was in the shrapnel radius of the blast.
The debris was about a centimeter deep, so it needed to be surgically removed during an outpatient, conscious procedure with local anaesthetic. Freddie was on a crutch for two weeks while the surgery site healed, but he saw no permanent disability from it—but because it met the two criteria of requiring medical treatment and being the direct result of an enemy offensive, he was put in for a Purple Heart just like someone with a much more seriously disabling injury, the kind people think of when they hear "Purple Heart"—in the same bolus of incident reports as someone who had taken so much shrapnel damage to one arm that it had to be amputated in the same attack.
Freddie was mortified - he felt guilty accepting it, like it devalued the recipients with “real” injuries like limb loss, and it drew attention to the fact that he got hit, that the enemy, in his eyes, got one over on him while he was just standing around. Freddie confided his guilt and embarrassment-driven intentions to decline it in his buddies after command filed for it, but his friends managed to win him over and keep him from trying to reject it by pointing out the very pragmatic benefits: preferential consideration for federal employment, zero-copay healthcare from the VA, and continued access to the on-base commissary and exchange after leaving the service. It would be a bad financial decision to turn it down, they said, and he wasn't the one who made the rules so lenient. With all the times he'd gone up in the air, it could be something much worse, they reasoned—this just happened first.
While he accepted their reasoning and accepted the medal as a result, once Freddie got out, he never mentioned the medal on job applications, and he doesn’t bring it up unless he is very explicitly and directly asked about it. When partners have asked about the scar—a rare occurrence to begin with, given that it isn't that noticeable—he just tells them that it was a "bad scrape" he got in Syria and leaves it at that.
The remaining portion of Freddie's ten years in the military proved to be unremarkable. Over a period of years, he sustained largely unpreventable hearing damage–around a 20% reduction in his overall ability to hear–from a combination of sustained mechanical noise coming from things like engines and turbines, gunfire, and explosions; by the time he got out, he wasn’t HOH enough to disqualify him from commercial flight or require hearing aids, but he can’t distinguish individual words when people mumble under their breath, needs subtitles when he watches things unless the room is completely silent, has trouble following things like television or quieter voices in busy/loud areas, has his occasional bouts of tinnitus, and has to ask quieter-than-normal people to speak up.
His deployment to Syria ended in the winter of 2020; twenty months later he was sent to Iraq again for a pretty uneventful one-year term contributing to ongoing U.S. presence in the Summer of 2022. Midway through that deployment, he was promoted to Major, then he went home unscathed (other than the shrapnel scar and hearing loss) in the spring of 2024.
Freddie chose not to re-up his time in the military when his promised 10 years were over, having had enough of the frequent deployments and living in Louisiana. He’d never lost sight of how much a commercial pilot makes, and that had always been the ultimate goal—while the military gave him a sense of belonging and purpose, he never intended to be a career officer. Freddie left the service with an honorable discharge in autumn 2024, ten years after he'd signed on, and re-entered the civilian world with thousands of flight hours under his belt and quite a few decorations, some of them combat-related.
Now that he's out of the military echo chamber, Freddie is beginning to feel a little uncomfortable with some of his participation in the varying US occupations, but he's in the very early stages of that. He simultaneously carries a degree of survivor's guilt and feels out-of-place and uncomfortable when other guys talk about their deployments because he feels that all of his really “weren't that bad” or that traumatizing—sure, he got anti-aircraft fire, but he largely got a thrill out of his flights because he simply loves to fly. He enjoyed flying missions, and all he had to pay the piper was a nick on one leg and a little hearing loss.
VII. NOBODY'S GONNA TELL ME WHAT I CAN AND CAN'T AFFORD
autumn/winter 2024.
the dream job — freddie goes commercial
Once he had the credentials, getting a good position was easy for Freddie. He was a decorated officer, a combat veteran with 10 years of service who got preferential hiring status per American law. He moved back to New York as soon as he got out, briefly flew a regional airline, then got the dream job flying for an upper-echelon airline out of Laguardia International Airport in New York City, complete with an apartment in Queens.
This was a very dramatic lifestyle change for him. Adjusting to the new position was a whirlwind that took up most of his focus; he was no longer in PT, and he was eating airport fare—which, at Laguardia, didn't leave him with many fresh options, or many "healthy" options—and going out to eat on layovers or ordering in at hotels, occupying himself drinking the sweetened coffee beverage du jour on long flights, et cetera. Over the course of the next year, Freddie gained about forty pounds, which was an unprecedented shock for someone who had been very lean for his entire life, from a family of lean people. He was aware of the weight gain, and not thrilled about it; his mentality was sort of an 'in an ideal world, I'd slim back down, but I have time, I'm going to get set up here first and then focus on it', et cetera et cetera. He thought he didn't look his best, and it was a little knock to his self-esteem, but he wasn't self-loathing or obsessive about it, either. Yet.
VIII. THE FUCKIN' PRESSURE I WAS UNDER TO LOSE MY APPETITE
spring 2025.
the seed is planted.
Every 6 months, a commercial pilot has to have a medical certificate issued by the FAA declaring them still fit for flight. Freddie was aware that he'd gained weight, that he 'really should be eating better', etc., and going up a few sizes had affected his self-confidence a little bit, but the triggering event for his bulimia was actually his most recent FAA medcert exam. The doctor told him in no uncertain terms that he was quote-unquote "seriously overweight", that this was the worst type of overweight to be (he carries almost all of his weight on his belly, mostly visceral fat), and that his blood pressure and A1c and cholesterol were all higher as an effect of genetic predisposition and his diet for the past year. Freddie was diagnosed with metabolic syndrome—and insulin resistance, and symptomatic prediabetes very close to the cusp of Type 2. Depending on genetic factors, some people can handle the sort of daily sugar intake he had for a prolonged period of time; Freddie wasn’t so lucky, and was just born with a lower threshold for the development of IR or metabolic syndrome. His A1c - a measure of one's blood sugar over the past three months - had risen from a normal range to 6.1 over the past six months, and the cutoff for a Type 2 diagnosis is 6.5 or higher.
A diabetic pilot who needs insulin loses their license to fly, or, in Freddie's case, their greatest joy in life, the interest their entire world revolves around. The doctor grimly told him that if he didn't get his lifestyle under control and his numbers continued to escalate at the rate they were going, he'd be "obese and Type 2 diabetic in a year". So Freddie, shellshocked and feeling a deep sense of moral shame, panicked.
IX. IT'S GETTING HARD TO BREATHE, THERE'S PLASTIC WRAP IN MY CHEEKS
spring 2025 - current canonpoint.
calorie restriction becomes bulimia.
Freddie was prescribed metformin, an insulin sensitizer, to get his insulin resistance under control. Insulin resistance causes, among other things, overwhelming cravings for sugar that last for hours, insatiable hunger and an inability to feel satisfied even when the stomach is full, and for excess glucose in the blood to be immediately converted to fat, usually abdominal, as is Freddie's case. It creates a cycle, and is aggravated by the presence of visceral fat - a feedback loop that Freddie, at this point in the disease, would need external intervention and medication to break.
But 'just taking a drug' felt like taking the easy way out, and he was convinced that he could simply focus hard and fix his diet - he was in the Air Force for ten years after all, an officer. The internet and magazines are rife with stories of people reversing their Type 2 diabetes and losing dozens of pounds simply by buckling down and exercising willpower, as though they hadn't before and that was why they were fat. This was the trap Freddie fell into, the fantasy that he was sold. He doesn't recognize his insulin resistance as an endocrine disorder; to him it's a moral failing, a consequence of his actions, a punishment for 'letting himself go' and enjoying food too much.
For about a week, he tried to 'eat healthy' and eliminate every single 'bad' food from his diet at once, heavily calorie restricting and trying to ignore his hunger. Options for a 'healthy breakfast' at a place like an international airport are abysmal - breakfast for that week was usually just a small, compact, tasteless protein bar that wasn't remotely filling; lunch was always something like an 8.00 plastic clamshell of iceberg lettuce and one cherry tomato being passed off as a 'salad' in some airport bodega cooler. This would be intensely stressful and cause a lot of hunger for someone whose endocrine system was functioning as it should - and for Freddie, with completely unmanaged insulin resistance, it was utterly miserable. He held out for a week, constantly feeling like he was starving, never satisfied by any of the things he had decided he was allowed to eat. The hunger and cravings caused by excess insulin molecules in the blood, unbound to glucose and screaming out for it, were a severe distraction.
And, as is usually the case with severely restrictive dieting attempts, Freddie folded under the intense pressure and yielded to the cravings and the hunger as soon as his workweek was over. Having deprived himself for a full week, he found himself unable to stop eating once he finally allowed himself to do so. A regular meal wasn't enough. This first episode of compulsive overeating extended far beyond the initial point of painful fullness and to the point that he was sick to his stomach and trying not to vomit by the end. He'd felt no control after the first bite, as though his body had taken the wheel and he was just along for the ride regardless of what he wanted, long past the point of pain—it was a loss of control he’d never felt before, even when he was military property. He burned with humiliation and a wholly unfamiliar kind of self-loathing.
Still feeling godawful the next morning, Freddie called out. He started anew with the calorie restriction attempts, but his body simply wasn't having it. By the evening, he gave in and ordered far too much doordash and repeated the pattern, binging for several hours. The guilt was worse this time—and the panic. He thought about how many calories he'd just ingested, and how much sugar, and what it would do to his blood sugar if he didn't do something. He was overwhelmed with anxiety and genuine fear he lacked the emotional resources to sit with, and he physically felt terrible. So Freddie crossed an invisible line in the sand out of sheer desperation, went into the bathroom, stuck his fingers down his throat like he knew some flight attendants do, and brought it all up.
One time was all it took for him to become entirely hooked on this behavior. A calm washed over him. The anxiety was smoothed over, soothed. He was empty. The crisis had been averted. His sin had been given absolution. He'd undone his mistake. Tomorrow he could start anew and do better. He brushed his teeth vigorously and went to bed thinking this was the only time he'd do it, a hard reset. Tomorrow he was going to start fresh and diet correctly.
That, of course, did not happen.
This is a key feature in Freddie's bulimia: he doesn't start the day planning to binge. Every day, he tells himself that it's different, that he's going to 'eat healthy' and calorie restrict and get over it. But he doesn't, and the feedback loop continues. Each purge feels like the last purge, undoing the binge that preceded it so he has a clean slate. He has a degree of myopia about it - within about a month he had reached a level of severity in which he was binging and purging three to four times a day between flights. He almost never, ever eats normally.
But he's also clever about it. He's escaped notice—in no small part because he doesn't 'look' like someone with an eating disorder. He's stopped gaining weight, but he's still chubby. The abrasions on his knuckles are minimal. He's a very successful 33-year-old pilot who seems to be in control of his life. He has a great job, an apartment with no roommates in Queens, and an air of confidence to him. He just doesn't seem like someone whose life has been completely taken over by an eating disorder.
A few weeks prior to the canonpoint I play him at, he finally was caught—by a young female dental hygienist during a cleaning. Since his last visit six months prior, he'd developed severe acid erosion on his teeth, multiple cavities, ulceration and swelling on the insides of his cheeks, and inflammation in his throat and soft palate. His hands—which look like dry skin in isolation—were the final damning piece of evidence that made it clear this wasn't just severe acid reflux in his sleep. This was deliberate.
The hygienist reported it to the dentist, who then called Freddie into his office for a private conversation about it. He was stunned that he'd been caught - and denied, denied, denied. Acid reflux, he said. Sometimes it upsets his stomach to the point that he throws up during the day, but he wouldn't do that on purpose. Look at him. And he laughs. Gestures to himself. Does he look like he has an eating disorder?
It didn't work. The dentist googled some outpatient treatment options and wrote them down for him. Freddie can feel his body beginning to buckle under the strain of this behavior, and it’s a scary feeling, one he represses just like he did his moral discomfort during the Battle of Mosul. He never unfolded the paper after putting it in his pocket and thanking the guy and saying he’ll “look into it”.
It's controlled, he thinks. It's not an eating disorder, because he's choosing to do this—for his health. To keep flying. To control his blood sugar. And even if he's failing at that, too, if he hasn't managed to lose weight despite barely allowing himself to keep down anything at all, at least he's not gaining, regardless of the cost.