I don't want to go up to the mountains, I don't need to go down to the sea, gonna sit right here till we unravel the mystery. ~ Marc Cohn

My anorexia was an attempt to turn everything gray into black and white, to create sharp relief where the edges of my life blurred.

Starvation simplifies everything. It numbs the constant strike of life upon the skin and dims the roar of people, places, and time passing by. Hunger gave me purpose, it made me feel as though I understood myself. I was one with my needs and my needs were all I had.

It is only as life has softened from the constant palpation of uncertainty that I see how desperately I craved a kind of clarity that simply doesn't exist. I wanted everything in its place; neatly folded, stacked, and put away. For years there was no buffer around me, no room for error, no dreaminess, no confusion. There was simply right and wrong...black and white.

I did not stray from my routine. When my car broke down after work one day, I simply called my brother and had him drop me off at the gym. Life never delivered anything more important than my bruising schedule.

One night, after a particularly long stretch of starvation, and after hours of consideration, I bought myself dinner and left it in my room while I stepped out. At the time, I was renting a room from a family, and their dog came in and ate my food. Every last bite. I was devastated. Starving, exhausted, and aggrieved, I called the restaurant and begged them to stay open long enough for me to drive back. The trip took 40 minutes, but I couldn't change my plan. My calculations were set; I had to eat that particular meal.

When I made my lunchtime salads, I counted dried cranberries and shavings of carrots. I could pour exactly 9 nuts into my hand from the bag without even trying. I weighed, I measured. Everything was precise and there was absolutely no room for variance. Anywhere. Three slices of tempeh, two teaspoons of cottage cheese, 4 rice cakes, 5 mile run, 1 hour and twenty minutes on the bike, click, click, click...

Because of this, everything else seemed so clear. It was as if my lifestyle provided the kind of lucidity I needed. I had nothing but my workouts, my job, and the management of my starving body. I didn't shower, I hardly changed my clothes, I never wore make-up, and I paid no attention to my hair. If I was covered up, I was fine.

Easing from a black and white world back into color threaded through with gray has been very difficult. I find myself holding up my hand in the middle of conversations when things feel too heavy to bear. During weekends alone, I close off for days, drive for hours, burrow into my little world where there are no people, no sounds, no chance of misunderstandings or rejection. I settle in for long stretches of just me. That's where I feel safest.

Slowly, this is changing, but the silence of my own life still draws me in.

A friend recently told me about a personal loss. I couldn't wrap my mind around the magnitude of it and realized, for the first time, that pieces of life actually splinter off and can't be reabsorbed back into the body, or into the mind or heart. We lose things. We lose people. We feel despair. Huge crevaces open up inside of us and sometimes there isn't enough to fill them and so a little bit of breeze always slips through. Life isn't a series of stones set neatly aside one another, it's a patchwork of bliss, fear, sadness, peace...blisters, glimmers, holes, tears.

This kind of understanding wouldn't have been imaginable, or acceptable, 10 years ago.

Sometimes, though, I still find myself wanting to hammer these miscellaneous pieces back into place. Shove them down and sand the edges until everything is smooth again. Wipe away the dust, shine up the wood...good as new. But I can't, and so these messy fragments join the orbiting debris that encircles me and I have no choice but to move on.

It's nights like tonight, when the gray swallows me whole, that I wish I had a roadmap. I don't wish for the numbness anymore, or for the sharp delineation that comes at such a high price, but I long for something with a bit of demarcation and topography so that I know how far the road extends if I head west, and if there are any impassable mountains along the way. Is that a shallow valley to the north, or an ocean? How can I be sure?

It's nights like tonight that I remember how much easier life was when my heart simply slept.

Over the past week I've encountered two women with eating disorders. One was young, about the age I was during the height of my illness, and the other was an older woman whose starvation was extremely advanced and long-term. Unfortunately, anorexia can persist for a lifetime. In my treatment group, I met women who'd struggled for over twenty years with the disease, vacillating between a life of freedom and uncertainty and a life of safety and control. This is a nearly impossible struggle to overcome, and one that has very little to do with food.

And yet, it is possible to move past this struggle. But how? When I see those lost and closed faces I wonder why I'm here and not there anymore. What was the piece, or pieces, that saved me? Was it my doctors who had the same conversation with me day after day, month after month, year after year, never once losing their focus or patience? Was it the nurses in the hospital who talked to me about faith and confidence and persistence and forgiveness? Was it Rich who went grocery shopping with me every day? Was it my daughter who came along in spite of it all? Was it my distant yet penetrating love for my family and friends? Was it something inside of me...?

I wish I could capture those magical and elusive circumstances, bottle them up, and hand them to the women who struggle. They'd reject my help outright, I know, but I never fail to wonder what's going to make the difference for them, if anything. I wonder what's missing for these women. Why does starvation gain a toehold and hang on for dear life?

The truth is, I know what's missing. I know the question that starvation answers. I know the silence that anorexia speaks.

It is interesting to look back on my twenties and find that my desires and passions often traveled no further than the pages of my journal. My feelings, fresh and unspoken, were somehow too shameful to share and so I tucked them away and kept them hidden. The moment my heart left its safe little corner, I grabbed it, scolded it, and wrestled it back into place. I afforded very little leeway to what felt potentially damaging and hurtful, but what, in retrospect, looks like little more than love.

In my most nervous, uncertain times I am silent, shut down, afraid that one loose word will send me hurtling into the wild river thrashing its way through the canyon. And so I stay quiet, watchful, distant. But I'm learning that as I let people in, and let my heart do some of the talking, the frighteningly powerful river below thins to a gentle stream and I'm not so afraid anymore.

Maybe there is no going back, but there has to be more than standing still. There are words left to be spoken, and I'm finding the courage to speak them.

~ Katie

You may not see it when it's sticking to your skin, but we're better off for all that we let in. ~ Emily Saliers

I wasn't one of those little girls who dreams of her perfect wedding day. It was almost as if I had no illusions; a big white wedding wasn't in my future. So it's strange to me that I got married so young.

When I was 19, a good friend married her boyfriend. He was stationed at Pendleton while she and I went to school in San Diego. They moved to an apartment in Oceanside and although she finished her degree, we hardly saw her after her wedding.

A co-worker friend came over to my apartment one night during my sophomore year and told me that she and her long-time boyfriend were married for two weeks before they called it quits. A year later she met the boy she'd marry for real.

Another co-worker friend was already married with three kids. She was in her mid-twenties and supervised the college girls.

There was something about marriage that I craved. It seemed so safe, like nothing could hurt me. I don't remember imagining for even a moment while making plans to marry the first boy that we'd spend the rest of our lives together. It was as though my imagination didn't stretch that far into the future, though now I know it wasn't about the rest of our lives but about reversing a downward spiral.

Before I met the boy, I was deeply unhappy at school. I'd had a relationship during my first year that sent me into self-imposed hiding. This kid wasn't violent, but he had a dark streak that frightened me. My knees would buckle and my heart would pound in fear when I saw him on campus. Something about our dynamic knocked me too far off course, and I wondered who I was to enter into something so wrong. I stopped seeing friends and hid at home. I was always scared of running into him at a party so I never went anywhere. It was hard to explain my fear and avoidance at the time which probably had more to do with my own sense of vulnerability than with him. He didn't seem so bad...so why was I terrified?

I don't even remember falling in love with the first boy I married. In fact, I don't think I ever did. It was like a puzzle I was piecing together, trying to make myself whole again, and he was part of the picture.

During our courtship I shaved my head, pierced my nose, and got tattoos. I'd left for college as a sweet-looking girl who managed, in just two years, to strip herself of any trace of femininity. When I walked into women's restrooms I literally heard gasps.

And so, at 21, marriage intersected with a loss of self that was already well underway. When I look back, I see a girl who'd already begun to dismantle herself before starvation even entered the picture. I'd cut off my hair, stopped wearing make-up, covered my body with used rags, and set my expression in a "don't talk to me" way.

I wonder now how it was possible for the boy to even like me then. My tender fragile self was covered over by angry self destruction. I was proud and embarrassed by the fact that I didn't look like anyone else, except for the handful of kids who'd entered college either already lost or found in their own unique way.

Looking back, the depression is clear. My self hatred is apparent. I'd already gotten rid of everything that made me feel desirable, and had cut off all access points to myself. I can see now how this may have frightened my family. I transformed into someone they didn't recognize in so short a time and I didn't want help or advice or love or concern...but really, I was dying for it.

And so that morning, when I woke up to find that I was married, I'd already started down the path that would lead me straight into the heart of my illness. It would take years from that morning before the hardened shell I wore finally softened and people could reach inside of me again.

So much of what I feel now comes from that severe retreat from friendships and civility, almost moreso than from the havoc my eating disorder wreaked. Honestly, sometimes I look in the mirror and am shocked at how normal I appear. I always wonder in those moments...what am I expecting to see?

How I wish now that my twenties hadn't been so destructive! I still carry pain for that person who dropped out of everything and crawled along the margins on her hands and knees. I wish I'd had the calm serenity in my mind to carry me through the rough patches a bit more unscathed. Instead, I wore my pain like a new set of skin.

A few years into recovery, I threw away all of the clothes I'd worn during my illness because I couldn't stand to see evidence of that girl any more. The green pants, the gray sweats, the tattered blue sweatshirt with the "D" embroidered in yellow thread. I used to wear those clothes to work. In fact, I'd wear them to the gym in the morning and they'd dry out a bit while I stood on the BART train platform on my way to Berkeley. It disgusts and embarrasses me now how I used to get on the commuter train in the morning absolutely drenched with sweat while other professionals headed to San Francisco in their suits.

It's those moments, those flashes of memory, that make my skin crawl now. Feeling like an absolute alien for so long can still make me uncomfortable when I enter a room. In some ways, I've left that old awkwardness behind by reminding myself that nothing about me now is going to catch that kind of attention. I'm not displaying that horrific internal unrest anymore, not only because it isn't there but because I have the ability to smile at people on the street if I want to. I spent years unable to look anyone in the eye for fear of what I saw looking back at me.

Maybe this sounds overly dramatic. How could a cute young girl transform herself into a monster who skimmed the periphery of society hoping not to get noticed? But, that's just what I did.

Anorexia treatment didn't just expose the fact that I had severely disordered eating and exercising habits, it also illuminated the fact that the body and face I'd always known had changed, too, unbeknownst to me. The bursts of clarity I've mentioned weren't just an acknowledgement of my inability to eat a raisin, they encompassed the realization that I'd become a shadow of my former self. The first chinks I'd knocked out of my exterior had been intentional, but this had gone far beyond my control and now even I didn't recognize myself.

And so, my dark decade wasn't just about eating or exercise, it was about a total loss of everything that made me who I was. It was almost as if I took a knife, at 21 years old, and slowly carved myself down to the bone, removing every bit of my spirit and my humor and my dreams in the process.

I'm grateful, at 33, to have a head full of dreams once again and a spirit that perseveres even when the world outside feels damp and spongey and cold. As the circumstances of my life continue to change I am astonished sometimes at my ability to bend with the wind instead of break. Sure, I get whipped around in the worst storms that blow through, but I'm still standing when they're gone.

So much of my strength now comes from the people I've chosen as friends. Without them, I wouldn't have a place for my troubles, my joy, my fears, my confusion. I live alone with my daughter and though we have the most wonderfully sweet, and sometimes challenging, existence, I am buoyed by the people who give me hugs and ask with sincerity, "How are you today, Katie?"

I spend a lot of time by myself when my daughter is with her dad. Sometimes I close off for entire weekends, making tentative plans that never materialize. Sometimes all I need to know is that there are people out there in the world who care about me, and then all is right within.

Over the last couple of months, I've watched myself grow tentatively into new friendships, opening up and learning how and when to trust. And though I sometimes still wear the badge of shame that exclaims I'm made up of broken bricks, I know that these people see and appreciate what I've built. And those who know I'm in the process of putting all of these errant pieces of myself into a manageable place so that my past is with me but does lead me, share their journeys with me, too.

It's pretty incredible to look around and find that everyone else is making their way through life just as I am. Despite how we look on the outside, we're all just a bunch of people with flashlights in our hands, making our way through the darkness one step at a time. And when we come upon kindred spirits, we reach out and link arms for a while and travel together.

As much as I doubt and question and worry and regret, I'm happy with my life. I don't struggle nearly as much as I used to. I'm kinder to my body and my heart and my mind now, and I'm finding little bits of sparkling pride within me that are bright enough shine through. I notice the seasons and I watch the sky. I take deep breaths and look up through the trees. And when my daughter is away I ride my bike through the hazy glow of sunset and feel just about as complete as I can.

The calm serenity that I desperately craved for all those years is slowly but surely becoming a faithful companion of mine. And looking ahead into the vast unknown of my life, nothing gives me more peace.

Life never stops giving us chances.

~ Katie

Title quote: All that we let in, Emily Saliers, 2004

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination. ~ Mary Oliver

For the most part, I've always considered my compulsion to write a curse, something I could never escape. Growing up, the need was an intricate web I fought my way through: a dense, sticky net of feeling and color and sound that stretched itself out in a flagrant, uncomfortable display. Writing wasn't something that sat easily within me, and it regularly forced its way out.

Early on, writing poetry helped me make sense of myself and the world. In grade school, I scribbled rhymes in my awkward, unformed handwriting on scraps of paper. Somewhere under my bed, in one of my memory boxes, is the first poem I ever wrote -- a tiny time capsule of my earliest dreams and humor. The subject matter: boys.

In junior high my writing took a dark, forested turn and I lost touch with the depth of my expression. In high school, I was finally old enough to carry the weight of my words and kept a notebook with me at all times.

While in college, I published a poem and wrote another piece that was incorporated into the medical anthropology curriculum. During lecture breaks, I leaned against cool concrete buildings and wrote line after line of silly, angsty musings. I sent long, languorous letters to friends afar and squeezed poetry from every inch of myself. Writing was a listless yet appropriately cerebral pastime in those days. I was a lost and wandering poet.

During the following years when my illness left me with no energy or inclination to make conversation and my mind compressed into a heavy, dead mass, the compulsion to write remained alive. The infrastructure of my poetry buckled, however, leaving verbs touching verbs touching adjectives with little or no punctuation. Messy phrases, chaotic juxtapositions, crass, weathered, profane words all intertwined with recountings of my bizarre diet: "carrot juice for dinner tonight and sixteen million brown rice cakes and sushi and peanut butter and a peach."

I can't make sense of it now: "a galloping leap of self into the space created by distance, laying down its highway in passing."

Sometimes, though, I see an attempt to make real the very, very unreal: "today it is the whipping of moods, brain-frothing switches inverting all parts (her eyes, minds, hands) once semi-solid, footing the breakage, damning serenity, but all in jest."

Some of it is sad: "The mirror doesn't reflect me anymore. I look to it for guidance, to let me know when I've gone too far. But often, it will only tell me I have not gone far enough."

And some graphic: "My insides are coming out of hiding."

But something in me changed during the final months of my treatment and I stopped writing all together. The flow of words that never ceased suddenly dried up and I was left with no inroad, no sense of evolution, no hold on space.

It was a relief to be released, frankly; no one could get to me, nor I to myself. My life cast no more ugliness. There was no drifting line in the water, no glinting lure, no net waiting by the side of the boat, only still waters lapping a calm shore, obscuring what lurked below.

Something about the recovery process silenced me, made me hate and distrust myself and reject what already seemed like a curse. I threw away my lined notebooks and writings from adolescence on. Pages of words typed in fading ink, crudely marked with my edits and notations, went into the trash. I held onto a few journals, but only because the books were of such fine quality I couldn't throw them away. I kept the rubber-banded stack of papers from the hospital in case one day I needed a road map back to the place I'd already forgotten.

Every once in a while, though, that strike of lightening would flash on the horizon and I’d look into the distance and wonder: Is it time to start again? No, I'd quickly decide. It was easy, for a while, to lose myself in the rush and pull of daily life and ignore the familiar and growing pressure...that voice...my voice...

Last summer, however, after my world tipped upside down and everything spilled and splattered out, I sat in front of my computer for a long, long time and called for the storm. Though it brought deep pain, I let the coursing rawness move through me once again until I arrived at a single poem -- one with just enough weight to snap the lock on my emotions. It ripped me wide open.

The Gardener

with his hands
he turns over her earth,
a barter to upend convention -
plaiting seed rows,
guiding roots
downward until
her land has no choice but to
flower and sprout.

his love affair with
her soil
is clean,
rapturous -
unspooling questions in me about
my own hands,
their work,
and the seasons bringing change;
how the space between two people cannot be
harvested,
held,
understood.

and my own heart breaks
knowing
that the seeds of this life, lovingly tended,
bear seeds of their own in time that will
one day
take to the wind.

watching the reach and tangle of his devotion,
I wonder if there is wisdom
in cultivating dreams
this way,
amassing the treasures of a farmer -
fruit heavy on the vine,
bitter to sweet to rot,
single moments in perfect
fleeting suspension.

but at dusk,
after the day has claimed its newness and yields again,
I realize that
no answers grow here -

only gifts for which
we could not have known
to ask.

In the months after writing this poem I allowed the need back in, sometimes hesitantly and sometimes with punishing regret. There is nothing painless about tacking oneself to the wall for casual observation, and I often resent this ridiculous desire to drag my feelings into the light. After all, I try to make good use of my time and this seems like the worst kind of waste.

And with this vulnerability comes a rolling sense of loss, too, an unending feeling that whatever solidity I’ve offered the world is now softened and blurred by my writing. What is there of a woman if she ebbs and flows with the tide? Who is she really? I’m confronted over and over by the realization that nothing is as sure and as sturdy as it looks on the outside, certainly not me.

In Dogfish, Mary Oliver writes:

I wanted
the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.

Perhaps Mary Oliver doesn’t feel the same burst of shame I experience every time I push my tender thoughts and feelings out of the nest. Maybe she doesn’t squirm in the presence of her self-knowledge, or shield herself from the blinding glare of her inner beauty, dignity, grace, confusion, and despair as it reflects off of her work. But, perhaps she does.

I am always grateful, after reading bits of published poetry, that writers fight and win this war. After all, without the courage of those who take the time to explain the world and themselves in it, I would know very little.

And so I choose to share.

~ Katie

Quotes: Wild Geese and Dogfish, both by Mary Oliver (Dream Work, 1986)