The sweatshirt draped along her pointed shoulders is a few
sizes too large and does nothing to hide her unmistakable disappearing act. Her
friends have their arms around her happily, though something about the way they
touch her looks as if they feel they must be delicate with her. She is angular,
breakable. Her smile seems forced and painful on her hollowed face that appears
both timeworn and youthful at once. A bag of grapes, one cup exactly, sits in
front of her on the lunch table.
Though pictures may be worth a thousand words, there are many words that cannot be seen behind the gloss of this photograph, but I remember. That girl chewed each of her red grapes thirty-six times, no more, no less, before she swallowed it and started over again. Inside the backpack by her feet hides a book, Life Without ED, a guide to eating disorder recovery, which her friend, Will, had given her just hours before. He was trying to reason with her, but she shoved the book into the depths of her backpack and his concern into the darkest corners of her mind before anyone could reveal her to herself. Though she smiled, there was a chill in her bones that served as an ever-present reminder of just how far she had fallen. Just before this picture was taken, she hurried to the nurse’s office to weigh herself, as she did every day since her mother took the scale away from her. Ninety-one. Ninety. Eighty-nine.
Days after this picture was taken, she would be rushed to the hospital with blood pressure too low to be read by any machine. She would spend the next few months narrowly avoiding hospitalization, desperate to reach a goal that I would eventually realize was an endless abyss. Three months after that picture was taken, I would call Will and admit that I needed help. I finally pulled Life Without ED out of the back of my closet and accepted that I couldn’t continue to live this way; I packed it with the rest of the things that I would take to an eating disorder treatment facility, where they would finally attempt to extinguish my fears of carrot cake and my own existence. As I nourished myself, body and soul, that girl began to seem as distant and faded as the photograph I hold in my hands.
For a while, everyone thought I was cured, and so did I. I went out with friends for dinner and even dessert when I wanted to. The layer of dust on the dark wood of my guitar cleared away as I used it as an escape when things got to be too much to handle. I asked for help when I needed it and was unashamed to admit when I was upset or hurt or afraid. I began to write in the journals that, for so long, had only contained numbers. For the first time, I was able to reach out for help without forcing my body to scream it to the world. After a few months back in the real world, however, I began choosing the lower calorie option on the menu, weighing myself every morning and night, smiling only when the number was plummeting. Months later, what had started as little, unnoticed slips had turned into a full-blown relapse. For a few years, I would find myself in a revolving door in and out of treatment and feared that I would never recover. My weight had become a roller coaster, sometimes climbing as high as one hundred and twenty pounds, sometimes plummeting into the nineties or eighties; what I ate was just as varied, sometimes two thousand calories a day and
sometimes nothing at all for days on end. I had lost myself in the numbers. She had taken over, promising that she could fix it all. I let her.
I was never quite capable of asking for what I needed. My memories of my childhood are littered with voices telling me that there were people that had it worse, that I should not complain that I had to leave yet another place I had called home, that another person in my life had walked out the door with no explanation. I was sensitive, and the people around me couldn’t understand how I felt; I learned to bottle it up rather than be ridiculed for letting it out. My family chose to brush everyone’s problems under the rug, and all of us learned to abuse something to manage the inner conflict that grew within us. My family was loving and their intentions were always pure, but just because people love us doesn’t mean they always know how to love us in the right way. I bottled it up, unable to tell anyone about the places my mind wandered at night, the things I hated the most about myself, the endless list of things I blamed myself for. I allowed my body to do the talking, my sharply protruding ribs screaming for help rather than my voice. I was constantly asking, “Am I skinny enough, yet?” Truly, I wanted to ask, “Am I good enough yet?”
I tried desperately to recover, but like a drug or an old lover you know you shouldn’t go back to, I told myself I would let her in again, just for a little while. Occasionally, I gave in for too long and when I looked in the mirror, there she was again staring back at me with a face that looked just barely human. After years of attempts to disappear and striving to recover, I began to create boundaries and allow myself to take control. Although I built walls to separate us, I still felt her in there somewhere, building a nest within my neurons, pulling at the axonal pathways in my mind. Mostly, she was a silent bystander, but she reared her ugly head when the eating disorder world and the real world met inexplicably. I would be forced to realize that although I am no longer her puppet, her voice still echoes in my skull, trying desperately to pull me back in, her last attempt to take my life.
After seven years of attempting recovery, I finally found a therapist that helped me recognize these remaining thought distortions and find what it meant to be truly healthy. Anne helped me shed light on the parts of my life that I had so long hidden in the darkest corners. Oddly enough, the more I cleared the dust away from my past, the more I was able to move on to a future when I didn’t need my eating disorder to survive the pain, something I had never accomplished in treatment. It’s sad that almost a hundred thousand dollars of treatment bills had done nothing but restore my physical health; that the people treating my disorder thought, just as I had, that it was solely about the weight. After years of rediscovering and recreating myself, I have realized that I did not want to disappear because I liked the void behind my collar bones or the valley between my hips, but because I felt inadequate and undeserving.
“It’s not about the number.” That’s all Anne would tell me. I stepped on the scale every morning and every night, sometimes a few times in between, and wondered if it’s not about the number – then what? Why did I stand on this slab of glass day in and day out desperate to see a lower number? What did the number symbolize that made me so desperate for a change? For a while, I had no idea what those glowing red numbers staring back at me could have meant. After years of treatment, I would find that the number was a way to cope with fear. It was two digits that I could control rather than a chaotic, disappointing world that I couldn’t. I was afraid of ending up like the many loved one’s whose talent, personality, happiness and beauty had been leeched from them, sucked into the black hole of mental illness. With a long history of mental illness in my family, I felt I was doomed to follow suit. I could never allow myself to be happy because in my mind, I knew it was too good to be true. My life was spent waiting for the other shoe to drop. The number was not just my relation to gravity, but a way to consolidate the overwhelming anxiety. It was my fear of losing control, my fear of loved ones leaving, my fear of never getting anywhere with my life, my fear of not being good enough for anything or anyone I wanted. It was wanting control when people continued to inexplicably walk away. It was being afraid that I wasn’t the one in control of my own destiny. It was my fear of being, somehow, simultaneously too much and not enough. The funny thing was, even after I knew all of this, it didn’t make it easier to recover. It’s never enough to know what’s plaguing you – that would be too easy. You’ve got to learn how to heal, too.
I chose to take the control back, channeling that energy into something more productive. I decided that the best way to control what was happening to me was to understand it. I dove into the research, hoping to find answers. Although I never found a cure, I found hope, inspiration and purpose. I discovered that there is a neuronal galaxy within me, a symphony of action potential melodies to make sense of this chaotic world. I was amazed at the miracle it is to be breathing, to be thinking. How unlikely is it that billions of neurons can communicate just perfectly enough to appreciate the beauty of a sunset, to tell someone that you love them. I found hope in the miracle it is to be alive.
As I read through the research, I realized how little we truly knew about the miracle that exists within us. I found that research, although much better than it was just ten years ago, still doesn’t know enough about mental illness to effectively treat it. In finding this, I realized that I needed to stop blaming myself for not being cured yet. I was being treated by a flawed system that was simply doing its best. I dedicated myself to finding answers and pursued a degree in psychology with the hope of going into neuropsychological research. I was desperate to help the many men and women that I had met who were struggling, but in the process, I also saved myself.
I tried to destroy myself because I could not find something to like. I could tell you that I hated my thighs and my high pitched voice, but I couldn’t tell you one quality I appreciated. Until I discovered the woman I aspired to be without the disorder, I was only my eating disorder. It took me years to realize that instead of being “the girl with the eating disorder,” I could be anything, so long as I could rid myself of those demons. In discovering my passion for research, I had finally found my purpose and could finally let go of the disorder that had plagued me for so long. Recovery was not about the weight gain, but about defining myself as a scientist, a writer, a musician, a loyal friend, a survivor.
Most people view recovery linearly: lose weight, get sick, gain weight, get better. I was often pressured to “just do better” because I had “gotten too much help to be this stupid.” Yet it wasn’t stupidity, it was an addiction. Just like an addiction, I wouldn’t be able to stop abusing my body until I dealt with the many reasons I felt I deserved to suffer. I would have to pick up my guitar, write until my hands ached, discover my favorite neurotransmitter and help others until I realized that I no longer needed “eating disorder” in the list of what defined me. There was no straight line from dying to recovering, but a series of highs and lows, sometimes falling from the highest of highs to rock bottom. Eventually, I would find a middle ground that my treatment team called “recovery.” The thoughts still echo quietly in my head, telling me that I have to fall back, but unlike before, I know now that it is my decision.
Next to the picture of her collapsing in on herself is a picture of me, seven years later. While her face was hollowed and struggled to smile, my face is full, my cheeks flush with excitement and can’t seem to hide the smile that is spreading across my face. My little cousin sits on my lap, my blonde hair brushing against her rosy cheeks, my graduation cake on the table beside us. I don’t worry about the size of my body in the picture, but about ensuring that I can capture this moment to remember forever. Just the day before, I had walked across the stage as they announced my name in the list of graduates in Psychology. For the first time in my life, I felt proud of my accomplishments instead ashamed of my shortcomings.
I spent the weekend with friends and family, moved by their love and support, something that would have overwhelmed her. We stayed up until the break of dawn, laughing and reminiscing about just how far I’ve come, while she would have been long gone by now. My friend Meg and I spent a day on hiking trails, something that would have caused her legs to give out and the world around her to go black all those years ago. We sipped coffee by the sea, something that may have caused her heart to take its last beat. My recovery has not been simple, nor has it ever been about my weight; in finding joy in that there was so much more that life could offer, in finding a relationship, a career and friendships that gave me a reason to live, I decided that she and I could no longer coexist.
