It's easy for me to talk about my illness now. The word "anorexia" rolls off of my tongue with an ease I never would have imagined. Yes I was anorexic, yes I starved myself, yes I endured years of treatment before I began to heal my mind, body, and spirit, and yes I'm still experiencing the joys and challenges of surviving my dark decade.
An illness such as mine seems quantifiable. It appears to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It starts slowly with a loss of control, builds into a beast of its own making, and has to be dismantled piece by piece before the threat is gone. In my case, my symptoms were treated, my thoughts and feelings were rearranged, and my body was eventually restored. And that, it seems, is the end of the story.
So why, I've been asking myself, do I still feel compelled to write about it? What questions have I not answered? What is there left to tell? What I am coming to understand, as memories continue to rise and flatten out before me, is that my illness is merely a lens through which I can view my life as a whole thus far, and gradually begin to understand why I came so close to losing it all.
When I was a child, my grandparents lived on a farm in rural Petaluma. I remember leaving for home one night when I was 8 years old and looking back at their farmhouse glowing against the night sky. As we drove alongside the slotted fence leading down the gravel road, I struggled to see into their windows because I was sure, in the way children are sure of such things, that the people I knew as grandparents were now taking off their masks and turning into strangers. I wanted to catch them in the act because I was convinced that the entire evening had been a charade for the sake of the grandchildren, complete with costumes and facemasks and theater. What truth, I wondered, was being obscured? Soon after, my grandparents separated, and eventually divorced.
I remember laying in bed at night, too, and looking around my room and wondering if everything lost its color in the darkness. To me, my toys and clothes and curtains looked black, white, and gray in the moonlight. As I drifted off to sleep, I imagined that color lived only in the daytime, or perhaps only within light, but never within the objects themselves. In the morning I was always relieved and slightly surprised to find that my room was once again filled with shades of red and blue and pink and green.
It's almost as if I can hold up a looking glass and see the world now exactly as I saw it back then. I was not a naturally trusting child and kept myself in constant reserve, closely examining everything that came into view. When I encountered things I didn't understand, I stepped back and watched until things made sense again. I didn't entirely trust my environment and dealt with change by imagining that what I saw wasn't actually real. I felt that life, real life, was taking place just below the surface of what I could see, only I didn't have the tools to access it. I was on the outside, standing on the very top of my tippy toes with my young fingers curled into the splintered window pane, trying to see through the impossibly fogged glass.
Now, I find myself the mother of a child who bears the same kind of wonderment deep within her own mind. A soulful taking in of the world, bringing unsettled and unanswerable questions that skip out and about when night falls, testing me and teasing me, and leading me back to that very same seat of confusion.
This week, she and I are processing grief and trying to understand how the loss of a mother impacts a young family. Who will care for her children when she is gone? How will their lives change without her? When will we die? How can we be sure that an accident like this won't happen to us?
Cuddling with her at the end of the day, and doing my best to answer her questions honestly, we are merely two little girls trying to make sense of a world that doesn't make sense. Last night, after crying in the dark for a few minutes and snuggling up against me, she asked, "Mom, a long time ago, were things everywhere only gray? Because when I look at pictures, the only color I see is gray." I assured her there has always been color in the world, and that the gray only lives in the pictures, but I knew that her question was much larger than that, and that she was looking for an answer I haven't yet found.
In searching for peace and forgiveness within myself over these past years, I've often wished I could grab hold of the world, dig my fingers deep into its shoulders, look it straight in the eye, and make it understand that the symptoms of an eating disorder, or other such illness, are simply the waves of a vast ocean of confusion and unrest crashing onto the shores of our bodies. Starvation is nothing more than an expression of something otherwise inexpressible in its enormity.
Looking back on my own childhood, and now glimpsing life through the eyes of my daughter, I see how I've always grappled with an unending need to know where the road ahead curves, dips, and climbs. It is no wonder that I tried with all of my might to erase this unsettling hunger from my life during my twenties. As a parent now, trying desperately to protect my daughter from her own set of frights and worries, I see so clearly that this is a need that can never be met. For the same reasons I couldn't comprehend the world as a child, she can't either. The best I can do for her is hug her when she cries, tell her how much I love her, and try to help her understand the practicalities of an unimaginable loss.
I am devastated by the death of my friend, but am learning from her passing that one moment doesn't guarantee the next. Through this haze of grief, I am beginning to understand that I will take my questions with me to my grave, just as we all do when we pass. I don't need to chase them away or stomp them out, I simply need to tuck them into my mind and move on with my life. It is not my burden to seek a definitive understanding of the world; rather, it is my duty to give myself fully to the people around me so that we all have hands to hold when grief comes crashing down, and someone to smile with when a moment of bliss breezes through.
Given my lifelong struggle, I am not sure I will ever be without fear of the unknown or that I won't scramble around at times trying to find something solid to hold on to. I cannot promise myself that the lessons I am learning today will settle into permanence and become part of each step I take forward. But, what I owe to myself and to the precious people who leave us far too soon is a constant, often painful, surrender to what life delivers no matter how ready or secure I feel. There is nothing inside of today that guarantees tomorrow for any of us.
These sweet little moments that make up our days, whether they build upon or chisel away at the mystery of life, have to be enough...because they are all that we have.
~ Katie
