It's true that I am slowly coming to terms with my eating disorder. The ugliness of my body and my life, and the forcefulness with which I fought against everyone who was trying to help me survive, are things that I'm beginning to allow inside. I know now that so much of what I struggled with was a direct result of the anorexia itself -- the terrorizing adrenaline, the starvation, the stubborn resistance -- and not actually my fault.
But, I'm having a hard time coming to terms with the decisions I made while I was sick, and the memories of all the people I hurt along the way. I just didn't care about anyone or anything, and that hurts me to this day.
People have asked me, after reading my blog, what instigated the illness. I'm still not ready to talk about that, but I will say that it evolved as an antidote to depression. Before the blissful curtain fell, I wanted to live in a closet and collect trash for a living.
Growing up I was a pleaser. I worked really hard to make the people around me happy. I was a hard-working student, I excelled when I wanted to, and my standards were high. Sometimes impossibly high.
When the anorexia started, and shortly thereafter, I was still attuned enough to my family and friends to see the concern on their faces -- their confusion at how such a bright young woman with so much promise could go down this road. At first they complimented me on my weight loss then, as the weight continued to fall off, they grew quiet. Pretty soon no one said anything though my grandma once told me I looked like a "dishrag with pimples." I was horrified at the time but she was right. It makes me sad today knowing how hard she tried to get through to me.
As the anorexia progressed, I began avoiding everyone's concerned gaze and their pointed questions. Just the other day, I received an email from my best childhood friend who apologized for not being able to see through my tough exterior. I assured her it was my fault. I didn't let people in and that was part of the problem. I often look back and think that my heart could have stopped and I would have managed to keep it a secret.
To this day, I consider my tough exterior my greatest strength and my greatest weakness.
Earlier this week, a friend asked how low my body weight got during my illness and I surprised myself by sputtering something about not feeling comfortable sharing this detail. Up until that point in our conversation, I had been answering his questions freely.
During my anorexia I was ashamed that my weight never dropped as low as I thought it should. My weight was the one weapon I used against everyone who said I had a problem. It was the nutritionist who said, when I exclaimed out of frustration that I didn't weigh 57 pounds and didn't need her help, that I'd have already died if I'd only eaten more.
But...I couldn't answer my friend's question. Why not?
I remember sitting in the outpatient program and comparing myself to the other girls. Some were "better" than I was at their eating disorders. They had managed to lose more hair, their skin was more slack, their complexions more sallow, their energy lower. I would argue that I wasn't as sick as some of them, so why was everyone giving me such a hard time? I never weighed 57 pounds, but I wonder sometimes if I would have been less resistant to treatment if my weight had actually gotten that low.
I remember thinking during the worst stretches that the best way to be anorexic was to die from it. That'd show them. I'd have been perfect at it then. Anorexia isn't anorexia unless it kills you, right?
I'm glad I didn't prove myself right.
I wonder today why it took so much to get through to me, and where the doctors found the energy to keep chipping away at my impossibly closed and unreceptive mind. I fought and cried and argued with an absent articulation that certaintly wasn't streaming from a coherent mind, and I wonder sometimes what I actually said.
In trying to understand my stubborn refusal to see the disease, my mind keeps settling on a memory. I was in my lunch group and the team asked us to eat a raisin. They put a small pile in front of us and we were to each choose one. It was okay if we couldn't eat the raisin, but we had to try. During my treatment I went through this exercise twice. The first time, I got as far as putting the raisin in my mouth before spitting it out. The second time, much later, I was able to chew and swallow it.
These days, if I question my illness or doubt its impact on my life, I storm forcefully inside myself and scream, "BUT YOU COULDN'T EVEN EAT A FUCKING RAISIN!" If I need any further convincing I remind myself that I couldn't eat in public, I rode my bike with a fractured hip even though I could hardly walk, I passed out on my metal bed frame and damaged my ribcage, I was hospitalized, I spent YEARS sitting in front of two eating disorder specialists trying to convince them that I was fine while tearing my food into tiny bits and crying when I had to eat it, I lost friends, I railroaded people, I raged through my days, my hair fell out, my skin peeled off in great sheets, I bruised from touch, I was sick every morning, my bones began to disintegrate, my period stopped, my organs declined. At 25 years old I was a frail old person at risk of a heart attack, organ failure...death...
WHAT MORE DO I NEED?
It's interesting (though searingly painful) to journey back into my mind during those years. I thought everyone was crazy and that I should be left alone. But, my boss wouldn't let me work without a doctor's note, I couldn't seem to walk in a straight line, and I daydreamed about milk constantly. And yet, I stared at my naked self in the mirror and still couldn't see it.
I rail against the stigma of anorexia, even today. It infuriates me that the media blames its prevalence on skinny hollywood girls, as if I spent an entire decade suffering and nearly losing my life because someone in a movie wore a size 2. It is horrifying to me that the media puts the height and depth of girls' self-esteem in someone else's hands, as if we don't have significant thoughts and feelings and convictions of our own.
My problem with my flesh wasn't that it made me look different than hollywood actresses, it was that it represented the building blocks of a self that I loathed. The media's insistent correlation between hollywood and anorexia is an oversimplified, offensive excuse that succeeds only in infantalizing women (pardon the soap box moment). When anorexia struck me I was a successful college student who didn't care for a second what size jeans Jennifer Aniston wore. The media doesn't want to touch the real vulnerabilities that trigger this illness. It is so much easier to put a pretty, if emaciated, face on the whole thing and call it a day.
Maybe if I had known that anorexia affects all kinds of girls and women (and men), even the type of woman I was becoming, I would have been less ashamed and more inclined to accept help. Instead, I looked at the word and at what it meant to me and I refused to be aligned.
I see when I look back on my hospital writings that the hatred I felt toward my flesh wasn't aesthetic, it was far, far deeper than that. My disease -- and the pain that it caused me and my family, and the nature through which it changed the course of my life -- wasn't about clothing size. I am appalled at the suggestion that women kill their bodies in order to look like someone else. The tidal pull that forces so many of us out to sea, and drowns some of us in the process, doesn't come from a magazine or a movie...it comes from within. Maybe that's what's so scary about anorexia: nothing stronger than ourselves can pull us down.
And yet, nothing stronger can pull us out.
~ Katie
