I nearly died from anorexia in my twenties and have come to refer to that time as "the dark decade."
But, those years weren't all dark. Somehow, amidst living while dying, I thrived in my career, learning how to manage details with a brain that couldn't compute; becoming an expert organizer because, frankly, when your short term memory is shot and your mind can't focus on anything other than surviving starvation, you have to develop tools to keep it all straight.
I also became a mother at the tailend of my twenties, quite by accident, with a body that had, for years, lived in a state of sustained infertility. When I found out I was pregnant, mere months after my last hospitalization and thus "final" medical intervention (as the doctor so forcefully put it as he released me back into the world), I was certain my body couldn't support the life growing inside of me. Instead, the ragingly powerful force of my maternal instinct took over, and nurture that baby I did until out she came, all 7 pounds 14 ounces of her, leaving me 70 pounds heavier than I'd been when she first came into being. That was the turning point for me.
Learning to save your own life when it is threatened by an eating disorder requires stamina. It requires perseverance, trust, steely determination, and a willingness to listen to your own heartbeat and accept that it just might stop for perfectly preventable reasons.
You will die from this, my medical team would say. You will die if you don't turn this around. You will die. And -- when one day my breath stopped coming in and going out and my heartbeat slowed while I frantically searched for my pulse and had to roll over and rock myself back and forth to simulate the involuntary act of breathing -- I thought I had. Thank goodness I was awake when this happened. If I had been asleep...........
Well, we're all going to die. We know this on some level. But grieving your own death while you're still alive, encased in a decade that is supposed to enable self-discovery and growth, brings with it a deeper appreciation of mortality. I marveled, during my feet-peeling years (more on this later), at how other girls in their twenties glowed while I scraped through my days, skeletal frame aching from the slightest contact with anything: clothes, chairs, my mattress...
Oh, the pain caused by the lack of that protective layer of fat I'd taken for granted my whole life! Even cushioned chairs could be too much. Worst of all was the press of my knees against one another, supporting the entire weight of my legs from hip to toes, as I curled into the fetal position at night. I'd wake up with bruises from where my body had made contact with itself as I'd slept. When people talk about anorexia they don't talk about the constant pain -- the inability to find comfort when nothing but a thin sliver of skin separates nerves from the outside world.
Yes, those were the feet-peeling years. When forced off my feet by broken bones or lengthy periods of necessary but deeply resented medical incarceration, the soles of my feet would peel off in thick pads. Years of callouses had built up from the constant strike of the pavement and trails I hiked, ran, walked, and climbed for hours. The peels would curl and roll tightly into themselves before finally letting go. Fresh new skin would then await abuse as soon as the ban on exercise was lifted until, once again, I'd show up to one of my regular appointments, lips cracked, eyes glazed, scary numbers, and the intervention would start anew.
Recovering from anorexia and reprogramming a starving mind is hard work. It can take years. I spent at least one year fighting and denying, the next year passing through valleys of terror as the veil slowly lifted, the next year understanding and growing a baby, the next year struggling to stay a priority when this tiny little creature needed me so much.
Yes, I was the patient in the hospital who knew better than the doctor what my body needed, who gave him a piece of my mind at the top of my lungs in the hallway. I fought to live in the only way I knew how.
Starvation isn't a body state, it's a state of being. Hunger is felt by the body, starvation is felt by the soul.
Sometimes, when I meet new people, I feel fresh shame. I'll wish, deeply, that the dark decade didn't exist. I'll wonder if they can see it in my eyes -- the years I lived in a kind of indescribable terror, a state of body panic that only those who live in starvation can understand. The kind of panic that anorexia turns into toxic fuel that, in my case, could only be expended through hours and hours of exercise; the kind of exercise that succeeds, in collaboration with the effects of hunger, in shutting down all emotional receptors.
This is how people with the type of eating disorder I had endure the slow death of starvation. And this is precisely why people like me resist treatment: they feel that they have found a way to survive something that might otherwise kill them. What they don't realize, because they can't, is that they are already dying. They fight treatment because they fear it will disrupt the balance they've achieved....and they think, with their hungry irrational minds, that without this delicate web of behavior and thought and endurance....and control....they just might die. Treatment, to someone caught in this nightmare, means death. You see, an anorexic person will resist help because she is trying to save her own life. This is why it is so hard, and sometimes ironically and tragically impossible, to chase this demon away...
The exhaustion that comes after hours and hours of exercise, day after day, numbing the incessant hunger, feels like bliss. When the doctors told me to stop exercising, and I knew I'd be left with the constant pain and fear of starvation, I couldn't do it. I'm still not sure, to this day, that my doctors knew what they were asking me to feel when they told me to stop exercising, but thank goodness they persisted. When I wandered into one of my regular appointments completely disoriented, saying I'd just been running and had to stop because I couldn't remember where I was...thank goodness they took the next several weeks out of my control.
There is something scarily deceptive about starvation. It can trick you into thinking that weekly shots, blood draws, vitals checks, hospitalizations, broken bones, and infertility are absolutely normal. The disease can so encircle you that such an abnormal existence seems normal. I remember finding a greasy napkin on the ground while running through a local picnic area one day. The visceral urge I had to press that dirty napkin to my lips, hoping to absorb some of the grease, was my survival instinct sending me a desperate message. There was nothing abnormal or even strange about the urge. I was starving, after all.
People in their twenties typically date, explore new ways of thinking, go to grad school, start families, begin their careers... People in their twenties with anorexia spend years in social isolation, find ways to work around a total loss of cognition in order to keep their jobs, lose vital connections with friends and family, and, if they're lucky, fall into treatment (in my case because the doctor who diagnosed my fractured hip became suspicious) and then spend years arguing about eating a raisin or adding 5 nuts to the quarter cup of oatmeal they've agreed to eat each morning before their 10 mile run.
People in their twenties with anorexia get into disastrous relationships and make bad decisions because they've alienated all the people who would, under normal circumstances, dispense listened-to advice. People in their twenties with anorexia lose more than just the opportunity to experience what their peers are experiencing, they lose the ability to care which is why it is so, so, so, so, so hard to reframe an anorexic mind.
I know these things. I was that patient. I heard my mother cry, sitting across from me at a table in the hospital, enclosed in a room with windows looking out onto the nurses' station, begging me to listen to my doctors. The vacant stare was mine. The periods of resistance and the cracks of horrifying clarity were mine. I know all of that.
But...
What do I do with it now? Where does it go? Where do all of those years go? Those thoughts? The pain and the memories that still haven't found a home and float at the periphery of my mind day after day?
As I've worked to rebuild my life, becoming a mother in the process, I've struggled to find a place for the dark decade in the story of my life. The shame is abating, slowly. Acceptance of the term anorexia is approaching, but finding a place for it in my life, and in my friendships, and in my understanding of my own power and influence, is difficult.
The dark decade is something I keep hidden from most people. It only comes out during periods of duress, for the most part. I never calmly share the story. Sometimes I tell the story in anger. Like, when someone is needling me about food or about eating, I'll fire off a humorous but aggressive warning to back off. Or, I'll allude to the fact that I practically have a PhD in nutrition and exercise science. You can't sit in a room with eating disorder specialists for hours on end, year after year, and not come away with a one-of-a-kind education on how the body functions and what it needs to survive.
I find it morbidly amusing when someone starts talking to me about nutrition. They'll share the latest on protein and carbs and fat...and I'll want to laugh. Don't talk to me about losing weight or about how to eat right, I'll think to myself, I'm an expert on those subjects. Don't talk to me about vitamins -- I've had them injected right into my backside in order to stay alive.
But, I really can't say these things because, in saying them, I'll expose the fact that I was once a card-carrying anorexic. And this confuses people who think, as most of society does, that anorexia is a phase teenage girls go through in order to lose a few pounds. Nope. Anorexia is a disease that many women live with their entire lives, enduring internal conversations about one more bite of yogurt, battling exhaustion to work off the banana they were too "weak" to resist. It is a type of horror, a soulless negotiation between the mind and the body, that invades every second and every thought.
I decided, once I was well enough to make such decisions, that I couldn't live my entire life with a mind full of conversations like these. That doesn't mean they don't still arise when I'm tired or stressed or anxious. You may see me at a party refusing to eat anything, accepting only a glass of ice water and a few carrot sticks from the vegetable platter. That's because something is overwhelming me, and my natural tendency following the dark decade is to slip into that "blissful" state for a while until I can endure whatever is going on. Sometimes, if I'm feeling shy, I'll refuse to eat in front of people, or I'll cancel dinner plans, choosing instead to come home to my couch and my TV so that I can eat in private in an environment of distraction. The ability to share a meal with someone in a restaurant is something I still celebrate.
These days, I live a normal life with a slight tilt to it. Once you get to know me, you'll begin to see the tilt. Near the end of my treatment, my doctors told me I'd recover but would probably live with "quirks." Yep, I'm a bit quirky.
I'm proud of myself, and I'm proud of what I've overcome. I've channeled all of the energy that once went into sustaining the disease into building the woman I knew, even during the darkest days of the dark decade, I could one day become.
But, amidst all of this healthy and skillful channeling lies an unsettled piece of myself that needs to put the dark decade to rest. Keeping quiet about the past doesn't seem to have buried the years I would prefer never to revisit; rather, a shamed attempt to hide those years has kept the memories fresh and present. And so, perhaps it is finally time to do what those closest to me have suggested I do for so long: put it out there. Live it. Write it. Be it.
~ Katie
