Why this?
But because
the clouds
are too light
to carry me
away...
(July 23, 2001)
My recovery from anorexia was a dark, ugly time, yet now I experience it as one of the most beautiful, radiant stretches of my life thus far.
It was an opportunity like no other to decide if I wanted to live or die. I teetered at the crossroads for a long time, permeable to the forces around me encouraging one path over another. I listened to the rhythm of my pulse, counted my heartbeats, and measured the likelihood of my survival against a chart that hung on the wall.
I was an angry patient, railing against a diagnosis I didn't believe in, but one that kept me imprisoned. My voice was a drifting whisper in the cacophony of sound. Why did perfect strangers have the right to overrule my decisions, tearing every last bit of my control away? What made these people who didn't live under my skin more powerful than I was?
The doctor who treated me during my first stay in the hospital had an office climbing with plants, giving the room a fresh, wet smell of dirt. I would inhale the damp cool deeply and feel grateful for this reminder of the earth outside. But, I didn't agree with what the doctor had to say and I hated him for his haughtiness.
One afternoon while passing him in the hallway, I voiced a growing panic that I might die if I didn't exercise. Literally. I pleaded for a quick walk on the treadmill. Maybe only 10 minutes? How about 5? Not enough to burn off the toast I'd choked down for breakfast, but enough to ease this suffocation. Please, please, I begged, until I was yelling. I don't remember his words, but I do remember the shake of his head and quick retreat.
At one point during my hospital treatment, a fellow patient said to me, "I've seen thinner." Looking back, I'm sure she was trying to ease my mind, but at the time I journaled: "When I get better I'm going to write a book or develop a lecture so that I can expound on WHAT NOT TO SAY to a person struggling with an eating disorder -- especially if that person is sitting in a fucking hospital trying to come to terms with his/her problem."
Skipping higher
where
heaven awaits,
Fertility
breathing.
(June 7, 2001)
As I've mentioned, having a baby was the only pin that pricked my heart during the worst of my eating disorder. It was the subject my doctor would bring up when I was most deadened. She'd ask: on a scale from 1 - 10, how motivated are you to get better? I'd hover between 6 - 10. Then: on that same scale, how willing are you to get better? 2 or a 3. I knew deep down that I needed to get better, but I was unwilling to do the work...until she mentioned having a baby, and then my numbers aligned.
It amazes me how seamlessly and rapidly I traveled between denial and clarity, and what triggered the trips between the two.
What I'm most proud of, having just read through my hospital writings more thoroughly than ever before, is the fact that I did the hard work. The box I've held onto for all these years is a reminder of everything I thought about when it was hard to think at all. There is so much about my recovery that I wouldn't remember had I thrown away the words that were so meaningless to me at the time but now tell a story that astounds me. There is a reason for knowing this story, and perhaps for telling it.
Late last summer, I stumbled upon this poem:
Honeybee ~
Having traveled miles
with unerring precision,
he alights on mica wings,
to feed upon the hearts
of riotously exclaiming flowers.
There is doubt among those closest to me that I've truly emerged from the other side of anorexia, especially in light of my bare admissions here. Though it seems too simple and perhaps a little careless to say, I wouldn't appreciate the honeybee if I was still stuck inside.
Without a doubt, I fought my recovery tooth and nail; but, ultimately I grew tired and began to let go, piece by piece. It was during the fight and ultimate surrender that I primed myself for the lessons that would surface from the shadowy depths of real living. Had I simply gone through the motions of recovery, keeping my heart and mind disengaged, I would still live by anorexia's rules today. Of this I am 100% certain.
I know that I am miles from the girl who earned straight A's in high school and who was dubbed "Best Personality" in her senior class. I know that in making the choices I thought were right for me I confused and ultimately disappointed my family. I wish anorexia had never become the solution that it was for so many years. I wish I could go back, grab the time lost, and shove it into my pocket for safe keeping.
But...I can't.
What I love most about Honeybee is the word mica. It means thin, tough, often transparent, and usually elastic, which I'd like to think is a result of miles and miles of travel. Then, not only does the honeybee alight, it feeds, and not just on what it needs to survive, but on the hearts of riotously exclaiming flowers.
I believe that we admire in others what we most admire in ourselves, and that as I travel the sometimes strange and winding passages ahead I'll seek out fellow honeybees.
For I know that along our winged and luminous journey together, unerringly precise or not, we'll find the sweetest nectar.
~ Katie
Monday, March 29, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
If my ship sails from sight, it doesn't mean my journey ends, it simply means the river bends. ~ John Enoch Powell
When Rich and I separated at the end of 2008 I felt relief. When we battled over custody last year I felt fear. When the settlement agreement arrived last month I felt grief. When the divorce papers arrived last week, dated and filed, my heart finally broke.
I didn't see this coming.
Our life together as full-time co-habitating parents ended in December of 2007. A year later we were maintaining separate residences. The following year we were coordinating holiday schedules so that we could spend Christmas with our daughter. What sort of power did this little piece of paper have over me?
Last week I spun in agony, wearing tiny crystalline shards of pain on my sleeve like sequins. I cried at the office, I cried in my car. I was unable to articulate the impact of this latest milestone and closed myself off. For the new man in my life, this was unnerving and left him examining our still "under construction" relationship. Over a period of days I went from managing it all to dissolving at every turn.
And, for the first time since that late August afternoon when Rich lay crying on our bedroom floor while I flitted nervously between him and our daughter in the next room, my healthy mind and body rebelled.
Food became the enemy once again.
Luckily, I have 4 years of behavioral therapy under my belt. My anorexia doctors taught me how to beat the demon by opening my mouth and putting food inside. What I didn't have time to learn once my baby came along and I was thrust back into the working world, was how to make peace with taking those bites when the going gets tough.
The good news is that my recovery is so well established eating is a non-issue. Sure, my ability to share a meal with friends may disappear at times, but there is always eating taking place sometime, somewhere. What I haven't experienced in a long, long time is the relentless pounding of my inner critic who, thankfully, has been silent all of these years.
With the slightest bit of distance, I can see so clearly when and how the cycle begins. After the settlement agreement arrived I wasn't pleased with how I looked in my clothes, my appetite decreased, and I spent less time getting ready in the morning. By last week I was ashamed of my body, too shy to eat in front of most people, and had cut my clothing options down by half.
Anorexia starts with a spark and spreads like wildfire. It is a tenacious thief who steals good sense and reason. Once nutrition falls away everything else follows, which is why no matter how harsh and unforgiving the landscape of my mind becomes I will always eat. No matter what.
This recent storm, short as it was, raged invisibly within the confines of my mind. Perhaps the evil little dictator wore herself out too quickly; perhaps she wasn't getting the response she sought. The truth is, these tiny corrective steps I'm taking day after day are leading me in the right direction.
I'm in the driver's seat now.
But, where do I stow this grief so that I can return to my life? Maybe it isn't something I can bury and forget as I've tried to do with so much of my past pain. This ache lives under my skin. It's the reason I'm here. It's the answer I give to my daughter. It's the choice I've made and the path I'm on. It's my every breath.
Rich and I searched for peace together and apart this week. We passed our feelings back and forth and hoped, I'm sure, for some sort of closure. There isn't any. We share a small, impressionable child who needs these lines to remain open for her own health and survival. What passes through them now is goodwill, frustration, tension, hope and...still, this hurt. To give her the life and love we want her to have we must stay permeable.
In 1999, during the year of my first marriage, I considered creating a compilation of all of the things I wanted my eventual daughter to know. It is sweet to look back on my earnest yet troubled 21 year old self and imagine how knowledgeable I thought myself to be. But as young as I was, I wanted to capture and preserve something precious before it was gone -- an innocence I could see fading right before my eyes.
As I do with many dreams I nurtured at the start of my illness, I wonder what would have happened had my mind not slipped away. Would those writings have changed the course of my life as these are doing now?
Instead, I've unknowingly accumulated pages and pages of writing I'm not proud of. Notebooks full of questions and cries for help; margins packed with wild and desperate scribbles. Sentiments I hope never to share with my daughter in life or after my death. I don't know the girl who wrote them and I don't want her to either.
And yet...
On May 30, 2001, in the midst of anorexia's steep climb, I wrote:
The contents
of my story
done then
to bring about
another story.
I
am
waiting
for
her...
In these last few weeks I've plumbed far too deeply into my psyche. I've gone places that don't need to be revisited when there is peace to be found in the sun and the sky and in simply watching the trees blossom and the grass blanket the hills. If nothing else, there is so much richness in each moment with a child that no other journey need be made.
But there is a hazy, undeniable noise building within me as Rich and I pass into our epilogue. It's almost as if our river has ceded another that is forcing its way through the roughage unbound. There is a new truth to my life now and, rather than hide behind its accompanying shame and regret, I am letting it in.
This chapter is over, but the story won't be complete without it.
When I was a little girl, a doctor told my mother I was fortunate: my perpetual stomach aches were a clear signal from my body that things were not okay. Years later, my body would broadcast this same message to the world, teaching me in the process how to listen when it speaks.
These days, I may not hear anything at first, or I may ignore my body's inconvenient little lectures, but eventually the message comes in loudly and clearly. And while I may not be the first to jump when the alarm sounds, I always respond.
Over this week, as I've tried to heed my body's cry and find my sane and lovely voice again, I've realized that I have a whole life ahead of me to craft a story for my daughter. It won't stem from my innocence and it won't center in my regret. In many ways, it has only just begun.
I've often heard the phrase, "life begins at __," applied to varying decades of life. Frankly, I'm starting to think that life begins when you let it.
Dearest life, I'm pleased to inform you that nothing stands in your way.
~ Katie
I didn't see this coming.
Our life together as full-time co-habitating parents ended in December of 2007. A year later we were maintaining separate residences. The following year we were coordinating holiday schedules so that we could spend Christmas with our daughter. What sort of power did this little piece of paper have over me?
Last week I spun in agony, wearing tiny crystalline shards of pain on my sleeve like sequins. I cried at the office, I cried in my car. I was unable to articulate the impact of this latest milestone and closed myself off. For the new man in my life, this was unnerving and left him examining our still "under construction" relationship. Over a period of days I went from managing it all to dissolving at every turn.
And, for the first time since that late August afternoon when Rich lay crying on our bedroom floor while I flitted nervously between him and our daughter in the next room, my healthy mind and body rebelled.
Food became the enemy once again.
Luckily, I have 4 years of behavioral therapy under my belt. My anorexia doctors taught me how to beat the demon by opening my mouth and putting food inside. What I didn't have time to learn once my baby came along and I was thrust back into the working world, was how to make peace with taking those bites when the going gets tough.
The good news is that my recovery is so well established eating is a non-issue. Sure, my ability to share a meal with friends may disappear at times, but there is always eating taking place sometime, somewhere. What I haven't experienced in a long, long time is the relentless pounding of my inner critic who, thankfully, has been silent all of these years.
With the slightest bit of distance, I can see so clearly when and how the cycle begins. After the settlement agreement arrived I wasn't pleased with how I looked in my clothes, my appetite decreased, and I spent less time getting ready in the morning. By last week I was ashamed of my body, too shy to eat in front of most people, and had cut my clothing options down by half.
Anorexia starts with a spark and spreads like wildfire. It is a tenacious thief who steals good sense and reason. Once nutrition falls away everything else follows, which is why no matter how harsh and unforgiving the landscape of my mind becomes I will always eat. No matter what.
This recent storm, short as it was, raged invisibly within the confines of my mind. Perhaps the evil little dictator wore herself out too quickly; perhaps she wasn't getting the response she sought. The truth is, these tiny corrective steps I'm taking day after day are leading me in the right direction.
I'm in the driver's seat now.
But, where do I stow this grief so that I can return to my life? Maybe it isn't something I can bury and forget as I've tried to do with so much of my past pain. This ache lives under my skin. It's the reason I'm here. It's the answer I give to my daughter. It's the choice I've made and the path I'm on. It's my every breath.
Rich and I searched for peace together and apart this week. We passed our feelings back and forth and hoped, I'm sure, for some sort of closure. There isn't any. We share a small, impressionable child who needs these lines to remain open for her own health and survival. What passes through them now is goodwill, frustration, tension, hope and...still, this hurt. To give her the life and love we want her to have we must stay permeable.
In 1999, during the year of my first marriage, I considered creating a compilation of all of the things I wanted my eventual daughter to know. It is sweet to look back on my earnest yet troubled 21 year old self and imagine how knowledgeable I thought myself to be. But as young as I was, I wanted to capture and preserve something precious before it was gone -- an innocence I could see fading right before my eyes.
As I do with many dreams I nurtured at the start of my illness, I wonder what would have happened had my mind not slipped away. Would those writings have changed the course of my life as these are doing now?
Instead, I've unknowingly accumulated pages and pages of writing I'm not proud of. Notebooks full of questions and cries for help; margins packed with wild and desperate scribbles. Sentiments I hope never to share with my daughter in life or after my death. I don't know the girl who wrote them and I don't want her to either.
And yet...
On May 30, 2001, in the midst of anorexia's steep climb, I wrote:
The contents
of my story
done then
to bring about
another story.
I
am
waiting
for
her...
In these last few weeks I've plumbed far too deeply into my psyche. I've gone places that don't need to be revisited when there is peace to be found in the sun and the sky and in simply watching the trees blossom and the grass blanket the hills. If nothing else, there is so much richness in each moment with a child that no other journey need be made.
But there is a hazy, undeniable noise building within me as Rich and I pass into our epilogue. It's almost as if our river has ceded another that is forcing its way through the roughage unbound. There is a new truth to my life now and, rather than hide behind its accompanying shame and regret, I am letting it in.
This chapter is over, but the story won't be complete without it.
When I was a little girl, a doctor told my mother I was fortunate: my perpetual stomach aches were a clear signal from my body that things were not okay. Years later, my body would broadcast this same message to the world, teaching me in the process how to listen when it speaks.
These days, I may not hear anything at first, or I may ignore my body's inconvenient little lectures, but eventually the message comes in loudly and clearly. And while I may not be the first to jump when the alarm sounds, I always respond.
Over this week, as I've tried to heed my body's cry and find my sane and lovely voice again, I've realized that I have a whole life ahead of me to craft a story for my daughter. It won't stem from my innocence and it won't center in my regret. In many ways, it has only just begun.
I've often heard the phrase, "life begins at __," applied to varying decades of life. Frankly, I'm starting to think that life begins when you let it.
Dearest life, I'm pleased to inform you that nothing stands in your way.
~ Katie
Sunday, January 31, 2010
The sum of human suffering is a purely mental accretion, the contemplation of which is futile because no one ever suffered it. ~ C.S. Lewis
This past Friday morning, I signed my settlement papers. Though it's been a long time coming, fresh grief knocked me over and I mourned all week in the dark stormy weather, waiting for the sun to come out.
My sadness stemmed not from this decision we've made, but from the journeys we'll have to take back to this place to explain. Our relationship isn't something we can leave behind; it's our daughter's story. From now forward, we are equal yet distant shepherds of her childhood and acknowledging where and how we once stood together won't always be easy for us or for her.
But there is more here, and that's why grief has me by the throat. The other layer, a heavy cloak that drapes me inescapably, is the fact that this isn't my second divorce...it's my third. And sorting through the shame and exhaustion of a life lived in so many iterations in so short a time is my work now.
I have to look back to move forward:
As I have shared, three weeks before graduating from college, nearly a year into my first marriage, I took a trip home. Walking 16 miles a day to and from campus, running for hours at night, eating Saltines and drinking water for dinner -- I'd intentionally lost touch with myself. I'd stopped cooking, bought a stairmaster, and faded out of the friendships I'd made in college. I lived in an apartment with my husband, spent time with my in-laws, and tried to relate to my life. I didn't know who I was. During that trip home I decided to leave it all behind after graduation. This marriage, never really a marriage but a brief and damaging experiment, was over.
Two weeks later, I returned home with my degree, a life torn apart, and my first dose of asphyxiating shame. I wasn't able to slide back into the family slot I'd left 4 years earlier for it had grown closed when I got married and would not reopen. Too many words spoken, too many promises broken, no more trust. Turns out this wasn't home either but a temporary and tolerant shelter.
During those first weeks back, I drove all of my belongings further northward -- wedding gifts still shiny and new, untouched wedding albums, favorite books, photos of my first years on campus -- and sealed them away in a closet at my dad's house where they stayed for ten years. Just last summer, after I'd barely righted my house again, my dad brought my boxes back and stacked them in my kitchen where they haunted me until I tore them open. I sifted through the sands of a life I thought had already washed away, and disposed of nearly everything.
After I left San Diego, the boy and I did the paperwork necessary to end what we'd barely even started. I went to the post office and the county offices a couple of times and then I was done. We were done.
One autumn night, three months after moving back, I was admitted to the hospital. There, my heart rate and blood pressure were checked for the first time since my illness began and I was forced to eat a cookie and drink Ensure. While the other patients slept, I scribbled in the margins of my book.
My grandfather was slowing succumbing to Alzheimer's disease during this same period and lived in a treatment facility a few hours north. On the inside front cover of my book I wrote, "Papa is out there in a place like this. His room, particularly by his bed, probably smells like urine, too...He is lost in the jungles of his own head just like I am; but our maladies have different names." I went on, "The walls here are the same color as the walls of my dormitory during my freshman year of college: mint green. The two places seem eerily similar in my mind tonight. Vacant, unfeeling rooms for misplaced persons to sleep. My dorm room, though, was encased within a University. Here, I am surrounded by Hospital. Saying this causes my mind to stir and skitter." Later, "One thing is for sure, when I am older and looking back on this moment I will feel pain, albeit distant and answered."
When I was released, I packed a few clothes and went to live with my dad. Every day for weeks, while he was at work, I went to a bookstore and read chapters of Vinegar Hill. Then, he'd come home, I'd shrug off dinner, and sleep in the room I once shared with my sister on the weekends. I was 21 years old and had, in one short year, built a life I couldn't lead.
This next chapter is the most painful.
At 26, I got married again, to a boy who'd been a dear friend since high school. His thorough familiarity with, and acceptance of, my illness and first marriage made me feel understood and loved. I would be okay here, I thought. Maybe even safe.
Whereas the first time I had the mental acuity to register regret, my mind was now too numb to think. I don't even remember the first couple of weeks after the courthouse ceremony. In fact, I don't remember anything up to the drive we took that February night, just two months into our marriage, on the eve of my next hospitalization.
Eventually, I became too sick to work and crawled through the house we'd bought together. I ran wildly between bouts of total collapse, trying to escape the silence of my starving mind and quiet the intuitive stirring of my heart.
Rich was gradually launching his own intervention during this time and, not long after, my memories turn to noise: the doctors, Rich, this second boy who was losing hope and then throwing it away, my family, the patients in the hospital. The madness, the madness, the madness. The crying and the food. The despair and the demands. The nurse who argued that my shame, now compounded a second time, wasn't worth my life.
After my last hospitalization, when alliances changed, I pleaded to have my job back, found a tiny studio apartment in my favorite town, gathered a few things out of the first house I'd ever owned, and started again.
It seemed frivolous to mourn the little things when so much was at stake, but I missed the antiques I'd collected and the furniture I'd so carefully selected for the house. This second attempt at settling down had been a fully realized home. But, an irreversible change had taken place within those walls and I couldn't go back. In the house, I went from sick to dying and I couldn't stay.
With Rich, the intervention turned into its own attachment, and we built something different. A very complicated relationship grew out of the heightened chaos of my illness and, ultimately, a treasure we share made it nearly impossible for us to walk away when it was clear our journey together was over: our daughter. This child whose beginning was an indelible triumph, and whose tiny spirit was so determined to get here that she rebuilt her mother's body in the process.
In so many ways, I feel I've made a mockery of my life thus far. I've embarrassed myself and my family with so many false starts. With all the nets I've cast into the sky, I'm ashamed that I haven't pulled down a single star. But, and I think Rich would agree, together we found something that forever altered our separate skies for the better.
If forgiveness toward myself washes over me occasionally, it is often born of bitter frustration. I am angry with myself, yet I am tired of carrying this. I've slipped in and out of families, bought trust on credit and returned it, taken names and given them back. I don't allow many people to get close because I can't reconcile myself with, or explain, the speed and tumult of these changes. I can't admit how often I've tried and failed, and how I feel at times that I don't deserve another chance.
Here we are now, ten long and tangled years later. Years that were liquid in their pain but now live solidly in my mind. A big weighty mass that chases me in my dreams and wakes me to this latest grief.
But, the moments in my life that are beautiful now are of such heartbreaking volume they dim the insolent roar. Watching my daughter learn and laugh and play, and feeling myself grow toward the sun again...this is the music I hear.
Still, as I navigate new waters, I wonder: what do I have to give but a decade of mangled time? I am ashamed that one day I'll have to tell my daughter how many times I've fallen and how many people I've hurt along the way. And how the path I chose to move through those years nearly killed me.
But, what is the alternative?
Langston Hughes wrote:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-- And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
I guess I don't want to find out what happens to a dream, or to a life, deferred.
I am 33 years old and I've been married 3 times. Why I searched for myself inside those relationships is another story entirely, but it is fair to say that as soon as I stopped looking, I began to find what I need.
During my final hospitalization, when the nurse knelt down next to me in the hallway, I told her I wouldn't be admitting the same mistake twice. My second marriage would not end in divorce; I could not bear the shame. She asked if my life was worth making the changes necessary for my survival, and I said no. Luckily, I was in a hospital surrounded by eating disorder specialists and I didn't have a choice.
When Rich and I neared the end of our road I asked myself the same question. This time, my answer was yes. I had the clarity and maturity to understand that I still need to make the changes the nurse had been referring to all those years ago. It is time to move through this and get better. It is time to do the hard work.
I'm finding that the true miracle of life is the soul's tireless ability to get up and keep moving forward, even when every sign points in reverse. I don't know what's ahead, and part of me is ashamed to wonder and to hope and to dream. But, perhaps this body that I've tortured and this mind that I've rejected time and time again, are much stronger than the will that has beaten them down.
One of these days, I will find a way to be proud of myself so that when my daughter falls and makes mistakes of her own, she'll stand up and be proud of herself, too. Yes, I'm embarrassed, and yes I'm ashamed. And, yes I'm a bit tired, and yes my faith is shaken. But, sitting here at my computer, with the sun finally coming up, my hope feels familiar and welcome.
Looking back, I do feel the distant pain my young self prophesied in the margins of my book. But, I don't have all the answers yet.
Early in my hospital journaling, I asked,"Will I meet people in the future and refer back to this time in my life?" I guess time has answered that question, but why I refer back I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps I need a few more years to figure that out.
In the meantime, I've got a life to lead.
~ Katie
(1) Annie Dillard on C.S. Lewis in "For the Time Being"
(2) Langston Hughes, "Dream Deferred"
My sadness stemmed not from this decision we've made, but from the journeys we'll have to take back to this place to explain. Our relationship isn't something we can leave behind; it's our daughter's story. From now forward, we are equal yet distant shepherds of her childhood and acknowledging where and how we once stood together won't always be easy for us or for her.
But there is more here, and that's why grief has me by the throat. The other layer, a heavy cloak that drapes me inescapably, is the fact that this isn't my second divorce...it's my third. And sorting through the shame and exhaustion of a life lived in so many iterations in so short a time is my work now.
I have to look back to move forward:
As I have shared, three weeks before graduating from college, nearly a year into my first marriage, I took a trip home. Walking 16 miles a day to and from campus, running for hours at night, eating Saltines and drinking water for dinner -- I'd intentionally lost touch with myself. I'd stopped cooking, bought a stairmaster, and faded out of the friendships I'd made in college. I lived in an apartment with my husband, spent time with my in-laws, and tried to relate to my life. I didn't know who I was. During that trip home I decided to leave it all behind after graduation. This marriage, never really a marriage but a brief and damaging experiment, was over.
Two weeks later, I returned home with my degree, a life torn apart, and my first dose of asphyxiating shame. I wasn't able to slide back into the family slot I'd left 4 years earlier for it had grown closed when I got married and would not reopen. Too many words spoken, too many promises broken, no more trust. Turns out this wasn't home either but a temporary and tolerant shelter.
During those first weeks back, I drove all of my belongings further northward -- wedding gifts still shiny and new, untouched wedding albums, favorite books, photos of my first years on campus -- and sealed them away in a closet at my dad's house where they stayed for ten years. Just last summer, after I'd barely righted my house again, my dad brought my boxes back and stacked them in my kitchen where they haunted me until I tore them open. I sifted through the sands of a life I thought had already washed away, and disposed of nearly everything.
After I left San Diego, the boy and I did the paperwork necessary to end what we'd barely even started. I went to the post office and the county offices a couple of times and then I was done. We were done.
One autumn night, three months after moving back, I was admitted to the hospital. There, my heart rate and blood pressure were checked for the first time since my illness began and I was forced to eat a cookie and drink Ensure. While the other patients slept, I scribbled in the margins of my book.
My grandfather was slowing succumbing to Alzheimer's disease during this same period and lived in a treatment facility a few hours north. On the inside front cover of my book I wrote, "Papa is out there in a place like this. His room, particularly by his bed, probably smells like urine, too...He is lost in the jungles of his own head just like I am; but our maladies have different names." I went on, "The walls here are the same color as the walls of my dormitory during my freshman year of college: mint green. The two places seem eerily similar in my mind tonight. Vacant, unfeeling rooms for misplaced persons to sleep. My dorm room, though, was encased within a University. Here, I am surrounded by Hospital. Saying this causes my mind to stir and skitter." Later, "One thing is for sure, when I am older and looking back on this moment I will feel pain, albeit distant and answered."
When I was released, I packed a few clothes and went to live with my dad. Every day for weeks, while he was at work, I went to a bookstore and read chapters of Vinegar Hill. Then, he'd come home, I'd shrug off dinner, and sleep in the room I once shared with my sister on the weekends. I was 21 years old and had, in one short year, built a life I couldn't lead.
This next chapter is the most painful.
At 26, I got married again, to a boy who'd been a dear friend since high school. His thorough familiarity with, and acceptance of, my illness and first marriage made me feel understood and loved. I would be okay here, I thought. Maybe even safe.
Whereas the first time I had the mental acuity to register regret, my mind was now too numb to think. I don't even remember the first couple of weeks after the courthouse ceremony. In fact, I don't remember anything up to the drive we took that February night, just two months into our marriage, on the eve of my next hospitalization.
Eventually, I became too sick to work and crawled through the house we'd bought together. I ran wildly between bouts of total collapse, trying to escape the silence of my starving mind and quiet the intuitive stirring of my heart.
Rich was gradually launching his own intervention during this time and, not long after, my memories turn to noise: the doctors, Rich, this second boy who was losing hope and then throwing it away, my family, the patients in the hospital. The madness, the madness, the madness. The crying and the food. The despair and the demands. The nurse who argued that my shame, now compounded a second time, wasn't worth my life.
After my last hospitalization, when alliances changed, I pleaded to have my job back, found a tiny studio apartment in my favorite town, gathered a few things out of the first house I'd ever owned, and started again.
It seemed frivolous to mourn the little things when so much was at stake, but I missed the antiques I'd collected and the furniture I'd so carefully selected for the house. This second attempt at settling down had been a fully realized home. But, an irreversible change had taken place within those walls and I couldn't go back. In the house, I went from sick to dying and I couldn't stay.
With Rich, the intervention turned into its own attachment, and we built something different. A very complicated relationship grew out of the heightened chaos of my illness and, ultimately, a treasure we share made it nearly impossible for us to walk away when it was clear our journey together was over: our daughter. This child whose beginning was an indelible triumph, and whose tiny spirit was so determined to get here that she rebuilt her mother's body in the process.
In so many ways, I feel I've made a mockery of my life thus far. I've embarrassed myself and my family with so many false starts. With all the nets I've cast into the sky, I'm ashamed that I haven't pulled down a single star. But, and I think Rich would agree, together we found something that forever altered our separate skies for the better.
If forgiveness toward myself washes over me occasionally, it is often born of bitter frustration. I am angry with myself, yet I am tired of carrying this. I've slipped in and out of families, bought trust on credit and returned it, taken names and given them back. I don't allow many people to get close because I can't reconcile myself with, or explain, the speed and tumult of these changes. I can't admit how often I've tried and failed, and how I feel at times that I don't deserve another chance.
Here we are now, ten long and tangled years later. Years that were liquid in their pain but now live solidly in my mind. A big weighty mass that chases me in my dreams and wakes me to this latest grief.
But, the moments in my life that are beautiful now are of such heartbreaking volume they dim the insolent roar. Watching my daughter learn and laugh and play, and feeling myself grow toward the sun again...this is the music I hear.
Still, as I navigate new waters, I wonder: what do I have to give but a decade of mangled time? I am ashamed that one day I'll have to tell my daughter how many times I've fallen and how many people I've hurt along the way. And how the path I chose to move through those years nearly killed me.
But, what is the alternative?
Langston Hughes wrote:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-- And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
I guess I don't want to find out what happens to a dream, or to a life, deferred.
I am 33 years old and I've been married 3 times. Why I searched for myself inside those relationships is another story entirely, but it is fair to say that as soon as I stopped looking, I began to find what I need.
During my final hospitalization, when the nurse knelt down next to me in the hallway, I told her I wouldn't be admitting the same mistake twice. My second marriage would not end in divorce; I could not bear the shame. She asked if my life was worth making the changes necessary for my survival, and I said no. Luckily, I was in a hospital surrounded by eating disorder specialists and I didn't have a choice.
When Rich and I neared the end of our road I asked myself the same question. This time, my answer was yes. I had the clarity and maturity to understand that I still need to make the changes the nurse had been referring to all those years ago. It is time to move through this and get better. It is time to do the hard work.
I'm finding that the true miracle of life is the soul's tireless ability to get up and keep moving forward, even when every sign points in reverse. I don't know what's ahead, and part of me is ashamed to wonder and to hope and to dream. But, perhaps this body that I've tortured and this mind that I've rejected time and time again, are much stronger than the will that has beaten them down.
One of these days, I will find a way to be proud of myself so that when my daughter falls and makes mistakes of her own, she'll stand up and be proud of herself, too. Yes, I'm embarrassed, and yes I'm ashamed. And, yes I'm a bit tired, and yes my faith is shaken. But, sitting here at my computer, with the sun finally coming up, my hope feels familiar and welcome.
Looking back, I do feel the distant pain my young self prophesied in the margins of my book. But, I don't have all the answers yet.
Early in my hospital journaling, I asked,"Will I meet people in the future and refer back to this time in my life?" I guess time has answered that question, but why I refer back I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps I need a few more years to figure that out.
In the meantime, I've got a life to lead.
~ Katie
(1) Annie Dillard on C.S. Lewis in "For the Time Being"
(2) Langston Hughes, "Dream Deferred"
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
On January 27th, 2008, I moved to Chico. It has now been two years since I could travel in any direction and know exactly where I was; two years since the ocean fog lived inside my bones and traffic ate up my time; two years since I woke up each day to a husband and child…two years since “normal.”
Now, not only is everything new, it's becoming newer every moment, and I don’t recognize one day from the next. I say to my life: Hello, have we met before? We have? Oh, pardon me, I didn't recognize you! Sometimes, I’m still surprised that the sun streams into my bedroom from the right.
New job, new community, new friends, new industry…and now someone new in my life…
These days, I find myself wishing I could hit the pause button and familiarize myself with my surroundings before proceeding. But, life doesn't work that way. It plows ahead whether I'm running alongside it or doubled over ten paces back, winded and drained.
Last year, as the shape of my life shifted and my sense of security ebbed and flowed like the tide, I was equal parts strength and fragility. My power surged while my knees buckled. The constant expansion and contraction of my world was necessary but exhausting, leaving me eye-to-eye with my kitchen floor more than once. I don’t know what I would have done without my pink bathrobe, my pillar people, and the command center in my head demanding I put one foot in front of the other.
I am not the same mother I was before we packed up and left the Bay Area. There, I did what I thought should be done; here, I do what needs to be done. When I want something, I don't reach out, I reach in. My house is a glittery, pink nest of blissfully chaotic order, and life is just plain different.
My daughter doesn’t sleep in her bed anymore, but in a “blanket bed” on her floor. And morning doesn’t come without her snuggling in next to me. We didn’t decorate our Christmas tree with ornaments but with projects from preschool, and a four foot witch wearing sparkly red antlers stood in our living room until just last week. Candles and art supplies clutter every room, and a grinning paper Eskimo lives above the recycle bin in the kitchen. A mechanical pumpkin and holiday wreath decorate our porch year-round, and we have collections of acorns, large and small, in plastic baggies all over the house.
This is our life.
We are finding our own rhythm, the two of us, establishing new traditions and routines. We cuddle, we bicker, we share lip gloss, we tie our scarves the same way. We need to watch “Martha Speaks” in the morning to feel we’ve started the day out right, and we need to read together at bedtime to feel the day is finally done.
Her universe is expanding to take in these changes. She asks questions I can’t believe are in her mind, and I answer them from my heart. She inquired, a year into our new life, why mommy and daddy don’t live together anymore. By then, I could give her an answer.
Today, I am more in love with my life than I've ever been, but the tough times are a little bit tougher. Some days I’m desperate to share the load, even things out, smooth the wrinkles, soothe the tears, share the laughter. But in the absence of someone else, I’ve stored these moments inside of myself. Written them down. Laughed with friends. Lived my life out loud.
In order to do all of this, to make these disparate ends meet and keep our sails turned toward the wind, I’ve had to find a new kind of peace within myself. Sharing these chapters of my life in writing has allowed me to move more easily within my memories, and see more clearly the distinction between then and now.
And yet, I’ve hit the wall I knew was there all along. On one side live the pieces of myself I can hold up to the light; on the other live the shadows I don’t acknowledge. I’ve wondered: can I share with my new friends all the things I wish my old friends didn't know?
I can’t just yet.
But, I’ve realized in documenting this part of the story, and in releasing some of my nastiest demons, that shame thrives only in dark and hidden places. If what makes me ugly when I look in the mirror continues to fester unseen, the shame will remain.
Still, everything in its own time.
I am looking at a photo of myself and a good friend, both of us 19 years old, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at the Oakland Airport. He's holding a shoe, I'm holding a magazine, and we’re leaning in toward each other. I hadn't yet made the myriad of mistakes that would drive us apart, and he still adored me. Two years later he pulled me aside at my wedding to tell me I looked beautiful. Five years after that I called him from a pay phone in the hospital only to hear him refuse to visit. His heart was broken and mine was breaking again. That is one of the last times we spoke.
One of these days I’ll have to forgive myself. With enough distance and time I'll find empathy for the young woman who didn’t think twice about smiling straight into the camera before ruthlessly barreling into her life too fast, too soon. Perhaps I’ll see that same fire in my daughter’s eyes one day and will accept and love it then.
I've always thought I'd build right over those years, simply tear them down and start again. But, now I'm not so sure. Rather than erase the evidence, I'll think I’ll pour this next foundation just a little to the left so that I can still observe my first attempts at constructing a life. And, when my new home has withstood the test of time and weathered life's storms, I'll glance out at the work of my younger hands and cherish it for what it was.
Two years into this new journey, I’m finally ready to put down roots. I’m learning to let go of what might have been, and celebrate what is.
It’s good to be home.
~ Katie
(with inspiration from Emily Dickinson: "We turn not older with years, but newer every day.")
Now, not only is everything new, it's becoming newer every moment, and I don’t recognize one day from the next. I say to my life: Hello, have we met before? We have? Oh, pardon me, I didn't recognize you! Sometimes, I’m still surprised that the sun streams into my bedroom from the right.
New job, new community, new friends, new industry…and now someone new in my life…
These days, I find myself wishing I could hit the pause button and familiarize myself with my surroundings before proceeding. But, life doesn't work that way. It plows ahead whether I'm running alongside it or doubled over ten paces back, winded and drained.
Last year, as the shape of my life shifted and my sense of security ebbed and flowed like the tide, I was equal parts strength and fragility. My power surged while my knees buckled. The constant expansion and contraction of my world was necessary but exhausting, leaving me eye-to-eye with my kitchen floor more than once. I don’t know what I would have done without my pink bathrobe, my pillar people, and the command center in my head demanding I put one foot in front of the other.
I am not the same mother I was before we packed up and left the Bay Area. There, I did what I thought should be done; here, I do what needs to be done. When I want something, I don't reach out, I reach in. My house is a glittery, pink nest of blissfully chaotic order, and life is just plain different.
My daughter doesn’t sleep in her bed anymore, but in a “blanket bed” on her floor. And morning doesn’t come without her snuggling in next to me. We didn’t decorate our Christmas tree with ornaments but with projects from preschool, and a four foot witch wearing sparkly red antlers stood in our living room until just last week. Candles and art supplies clutter every room, and a grinning paper Eskimo lives above the recycle bin in the kitchen. A mechanical pumpkin and holiday wreath decorate our porch year-round, and we have collections of acorns, large and small, in plastic baggies all over the house.
This is our life.
We are finding our own rhythm, the two of us, establishing new traditions and routines. We cuddle, we bicker, we share lip gloss, we tie our scarves the same way. We need to watch “Martha Speaks” in the morning to feel we’ve started the day out right, and we need to read together at bedtime to feel the day is finally done.
Her universe is expanding to take in these changes. She asks questions I can’t believe are in her mind, and I answer them from my heart. She inquired, a year into our new life, why mommy and daddy don’t live together anymore. By then, I could give her an answer.
Today, I am more in love with my life than I've ever been, but the tough times are a little bit tougher. Some days I’m desperate to share the load, even things out, smooth the wrinkles, soothe the tears, share the laughter. But in the absence of someone else, I’ve stored these moments inside of myself. Written them down. Laughed with friends. Lived my life out loud.
In order to do all of this, to make these disparate ends meet and keep our sails turned toward the wind, I’ve had to find a new kind of peace within myself. Sharing these chapters of my life in writing has allowed me to move more easily within my memories, and see more clearly the distinction between then and now.
And yet, I’ve hit the wall I knew was there all along. On one side live the pieces of myself I can hold up to the light; on the other live the shadows I don’t acknowledge. I’ve wondered: can I share with my new friends all the things I wish my old friends didn't know?
I can’t just yet.
But, I’ve realized in documenting this part of the story, and in releasing some of my nastiest demons, that shame thrives only in dark and hidden places. If what makes me ugly when I look in the mirror continues to fester unseen, the shame will remain.
Still, everything in its own time.
I am looking at a photo of myself and a good friend, both of us 19 years old, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at the Oakland Airport. He's holding a shoe, I'm holding a magazine, and we’re leaning in toward each other. I hadn't yet made the myriad of mistakes that would drive us apart, and he still adored me. Two years later he pulled me aside at my wedding to tell me I looked beautiful. Five years after that I called him from a pay phone in the hospital only to hear him refuse to visit. His heart was broken and mine was breaking again. That is one of the last times we spoke.
One of these days I’ll have to forgive myself. With enough distance and time I'll find empathy for the young woman who didn’t think twice about smiling straight into the camera before ruthlessly barreling into her life too fast, too soon. Perhaps I’ll see that same fire in my daughter’s eyes one day and will accept and love it then.
I've always thought I'd build right over those years, simply tear them down and start again. But, now I'm not so sure. Rather than erase the evidence, I'll think I’ll pour this next foundation just a little to the left so that I can still observe my first attempts at constructing a life. And, when my new home has withstood the test of time and weathered life's storms, I'll glance out at the work of my younger hands and cherish it for what it was.
Two years into this new journey, I’m finally ready to put down roots. I’m learning to let go of what might have been, and celebrate what is.
It’s good to be home.
~ Katie
(with inspiration from Emily Dickinson: "We turn not older with years, but newer every day.")
Sunday, December 13, 2009
"And the less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine." ~ Emily Saliers
If I miss anything about my illness, it's the protective cocoon it provided. I could undergo any transformation, big or small, positive or negative, and be entirely insulated from the rest of the world.
Those days are gone, though I wish desperately at times I could replicate that total lack of concern. I was safe inside my cocoon; now I am vulnerable.
But, I can't go back. And for so many reasons...I won't.
I met the first boy I would marry on a winter mountaineering backpacking trip when I was 20 years old. There were 13 young men on the trip and myself, and we ventured into the San Gorgonio wilderness one frozen February weekend.
I was beetle-like on the hike in: tipped onto my back, heavy pack wedged in the soft snow, arms and legs flailing about. I had to be pulled up time and time again, amidst teasing and laughter. After a while, they discovered that I didn't fall so much if I simply took my place at the tail-end of the line where the footprints before me were deep and established.
We made camp at the bank of a partially frozen stream in a small clearing surrounded by trees. We dug out our snow cave and established the "boys’ side" of the forest and the "girl side."
Among other things, we learned to self-arrest with ice axes. The instructor clipped me to the middle of the line since he didn't want me falling off the side, yet he sent me over the Tyrolean traverse first because I was the lightest. Over the river I slid, hand over hand, until I was clipped off on the other side. He decided that the rope was safe for the others and they spent the next several hours sending each other from bank to bank.
On the drive back to campus, one of the boys and I exchanged phone numbers and, just over a year later, we were married.
I have very few memories of that relationship but some moments are branded into my mind. Like the day I came home to a dozen candles burning in our tiny apartment and a small velvet box sitting on the coffee table. The ensuing discussion lasted so long the candles burned themselves out, dripping all of their wax down the furniture and onto the carpet. About a week prior, I'd told him I was unhappy and was leaving San Diego. If he wanted me to stay he had to make our relationship official.
My family desperately tried to talk me out of it. My mom called me in tears, begging and pleading. She had other family members call me to do the same, but I was entirely impervious. This wasn't marriage, it was an escape. I didn't love the boy and I never would, but the freight train kept coming and I didn't know how to derail it.
Today, of course, I wish they'd flown down to San Diego and asked me what was wrong. They would have seen that I didn't know what I was doing, that I had no idea what I was stepping into. They would have understood that I needed to be taken home. But they didn't know, and I didn't know to tell them. I was on my own, and I simply had to do something to kill the wounded ache in my heart -- to somehow dim the depression that had clawed at me my entire life. At 21, marrying a boy seemed like the perfect solution to my aimless and gutted existence.
The wedding was cold and hollow. At one point during the ceremony, I turned to my mother and reached out my hand. She took it and held on until I could breathe again, and then I turned back around. I wish she knew in that moment what I meant. I wish I had known. But I didn't hear every cell in my body screaming "Get me out of here!" and she didn't either.
The boy and I exchanged gold-plated rings we'd bought at Target for $25, and we mingled with our 100+ guests. We'd decided not to take a honeymoon because finals were two weeks away and we didn't have any money. After the wedding, we drove back to our apartment.
Less than 24 hours later, my anorexia began.
The morning after our wedding I awoke with a start, my face just inches from the wall. I remember swimming in a subtle but growing panic during those moments before waking, but with my eyes open there was no mistaking the enormity of what I'd just done. I had not, until that moment, understood what it meant to get married. I'd been applying a bandaid to my life, not taking a vow. But suddenly here I was, alone with a stranger I'd just pledged to spend the rest of my life with, and I was terrified. I'd angered my family and gone against their wishes; I'd lied to everyone including myself. This wasn't about love and it wasn't about marriage...it wasn't even about the boy who I would never fully know.
The marriage was not a solution to my depression and confusion, it was an even bigger problem that I didn't have the tools to solve. Instead of feeling better as half of someone else, I felt more incomplete than I ever had in my entire life. In that brief moment of realization, I went from a silly, innocent child who could toy with her life, to a young woman burdened by a horrible and, in some ways, irreparable mistake.
I began that very first day of the rest of my life in search of a way out.
A year to the day after we married, I announced I was moving back to the Bay Area after graduation. Alone. Two weeks later, at 4:30am the morning after our joint graduation party, I drove my little Honda packed with all of my belongings northward, and haven't been back since.
Three months later I was hospitalized for the first time. My weight was dropping, my depression was worsening, and my new life was taking hold. My family and I couldn't talk about the real problem; I was too ashamed and they were too angry.
After that first hospitalization, I went to live with my dad. We didn't know each other well but those months bonded us in a way my weekends with him never had. He took me hiking, he took me biking, he took care of me. He told me over and over not to feel so guilty. Nobody's perfect, he said, we all make mistakes.
Unfortunately, there was no rationalizing my way out of the anorexia by this point. It had crawled under my skin and was slowly eating away at my insides.
The next set of transitions are a blur. After leaving my dad's house I moved in with a friend's parents, then in with my friend, then into an in-law unit by myself. I'd left most of my belongings at my dad's house and lived out of a plastic garbage bag. This was my rootless, ungrounded life for a long, long time as my health slowly eroded.
After a while, I got a temp job and fell in love with meeting planning. I spent one year as a marketing assistant with another company and was hired back by the first as a meetings assistant. There I would stay, and progress professionally, until I moved to the Chico area in 2008.
In 2002, while on a run, I tore a muscle. Due to my constant and unending motion, the muscle tear led my hip to crack. I went to the doctor when I couldn't walk anymore.
I was x-rayed and scanned and made to answer a bevy of questions about my overall health. No, I couldn't remember the date of my last period because I hadn't had one in years. No, I wasn't sure why my blood panel was irregular, I'd never had it checked before. No, I hadn't experienced a sudden weight loss but my body had shrunk by a third over time.
The anorexia diagnosis followed the hip fracture diagnosis, and from there my routine came to include sitting and listening to doctors try their hardest to reach my unreachable mind. I was actively and progressively anorexic during the first years of my treatment, unaccepting of the ugly word they used to describe my private life.
Well over a year after the fracture, they put me in the hospital. I didn't get better slowly, I slowly got worse. If ever they got through to me I'd make sure the wall was fully in place by my next appointment, and they'd have to start all over again.
During the pre-diagnosis years and the early part of my treatment, I had one other relationship. I remember very, very little of it, though it was on the floor of our house that I rocked the breath back into my body. Herein lies the bulk of my shame.
I lived a lifetime in my twenties, my anorexia coating everything with its grotesque, opaque sheen. Those years break my heart still; the illness, certainly, but my path of destruction even more so. The way I tore through life and tore through people and didn't even turn around to see the turmoil I'd left behind...that's where my pain lives to this day. I didn't want to get better, I didn't want to face what I'd done. In so many ways, I still don't want to see it.
I am coming to realize, though, that I must eventually forgive myself for those years if I want to move on. I must come to terms with my unfortunate mistakes and the reasons I made them. I must accept the lost and lonely girl I was back then before I can ever fully know myself.
We are what we live, and we live what we are. This much I know is true. I am inside of those years as much as they are inside of me. I did the best I could with what I had and I tried so, so hard to make everything better. In some ways, I think that every decision I made during that time was an attempt to save myself. If I've learned one thing looking back, it's that a bandaid doesn't heal. Only time can do that.
Today, I look ahead and wonder where I'll go from here. I have a heart that opens briefly before firmly closing again, but that it opens at all gives me great hope. I have a mind that has become, over time, one of my greatest allies. I have a child who may never know the miracle that she is, but who loves me all the same. And I have friends and family who've seen the wall but have decided I'm worth the climb.
My life isn't perfect, and it doesn't fill me with peace, but it's mine all the same. And I'd be a fool to let the rest of it go to waste.
~ Katie
Those days are gone, though I wish desperately at times I could replicate that total lack of concern. I was safe inside my cocoon; now I am vulnerable.
But, I can't go back. And for so many reasons...I won't.
I met the first boy I would marry on a winter mountaineering backpacking trip when I was 20 years old. There were 13 young men on the trip and myself, and we ventured into the San Gorgonio wilderness one frozen February weekend.
I was beetle-like on the hike in: tipped onto my back, heavy pack wedged in the soft snow, arms and legs flailing about. I had to be pulled up time and time again, amidst teasing and laughter. After a while, they discovered that I didn't fall so much if I simply took my place at the tail-end of the line where the footprints before me were deep and established.
We made camp at the bank of a partially frozen stream in a small clearing surrounded by trees. We dug out our snow cave and established the "boys’ side" of the forest and the "girl side."
Among other things, we learned to self-arrest with ice axes. The instructor clipped me to the middle of the line since he didn't want me falling off the side, yet he sent me over the Tyrolean traverse first because I was the lightest. Over the river I slid, hand over hand, until I was clipped off on the other side. He decided that the rope was safe for the others and they spent the next several hours sending each other from bank to bank.
On the drive back to campus, one of the boys and I exchanged phone numbers and, just over a year later, we were married.
I have very few memories of that relationship but some moments are branded into my mind. Like the day I came home to a dozen candles burning in our tiny apartment and a small velvet box sitting on the coffee table. The ensuing discussion lasted so long the candles burned themselves out, dripping all of their wax down the furniture and onto the carpet. About a week prior, I'd told him I was unhappy and was leaving San Diego. If he wanted me to stay he had to make our relationship official.
My family desperately tried to talk me out of it. My mom called me in tears, begging and pleading. She had other family members call me to do the same, but I was entirely impervious. This wasn't marriage, it was an escape. I didn't love the boy and I never would, but the freight train kept coming and I didn't know how to derail it.
Today, of course, I wish they'd flown down to San Diego and asked me what was wrong. They would have seen that I didn't know what I was doing, that I had no idea what I was stepping into. They would have understood that I needed to be taken home. But they didn't know, and I didn't know to tell them. I was on my own, and I simply had to do something to kill the wounded ache in my heart -- to somehow dim the depression that had clawed at me my entire life. At 21, marrying a boy seemed like the perfect solution to my aimless and gutted existence.
The wedding was cold and hollow. At one point during the ceremony, I turned to my mother and reached out my hand. She took it and held on until I could breathe again, and then I turned back around. I wish she knew in that moment what I meant. I wish I had known. But I didn't hear every cell in my body screaming "Get me out of here!" and she didn't either.
The boy and I exchanged gold-plated rings we'd bought at Target for $25, and we mingled with our 100+ guests. We'd decided not to take a honeymoon because finals were two weeks away and we didn't have any money. After the wedding, we drove back to our apartment.
Less than 24 hours later, my anorexia began.
The morning after our wedding I awoke with a start, my face just inches from the wall. I remember swimming in a subtle but growing panic during those moments before waking, but with my eyes open there was no mistaking the enormity of what I'd just done. I had not, until that moment, understood what it meant to get married. I'd been applying a bandaid to my life, not taking a vow. But suddenly here I was, alone with a stranger I'd just pledged to spend the rest of my life with, and I was terrified. I'd angered my family and gone against their wishes; I'd lied to everyone including myself. This wasn't about love and it wasn't about marriage...it wasn't even about the boy who I would never fully know.
The marriage was not a solution to my depression and confusion, it was an even bigger problem that I didn't have the tools to solve. Instead of feeling better as half of someone else, I felt more incomplete than I ever had in my entire life. In that brief moment of realization, I went from a silly, innocent child who could toy with her life, to a young woman burdened by a horrible and, in some ways, irreparable mistake.
I began that very first day of the rest of my life in search of a way out.
A year to the day after we married, I announced I was moving back to the Bay Area after graduation. Alone. Two weeks later, at 4:30am the morning after our joint graduation party, I drove my little Honda packed with all of my belongings northward, and haven't been back since.
Three months later I was hospitalized for the first time. My weight was dropping, my depression was worsening, and my new life was taking hold. My family and I couldn't talk about the real problem; I was too ashamed and they were too angry.
After that first hospitalization, I went to live with my dad. We didn't know each other well but those months bonded us in a way my weekends with him never had. He took me hiking, he took me biking, he took care of me. He told me over and over not to feel so guilty. Nobody's perfect, he said, we all make mistakes.
Unfortunately, there was no rationalizing my way out of the anorexia by this point. It had crawled under my skin and was slowly eating away at my insides.
The next set of transitions are a blur. After leaving my dad's house I moved in with a friend's parents, then in with my friend, then into an in-law unit by myself. I'd left most of my belongings at my dad's house and lived out of a plastic garbage bag. This was my rootless, ungrounded life for a long, long time as my health slowly eroded.
After a while, I got a temp job and fell in love with meeting planning. I spent one year as a marketing assistant with another company and was hired back by the first as a meetings assistant. There I would stay, and progress professionally, until I moved to the Chico area in 2008.
In 2002, while on a run, I tore a muscle. Due to my constant and unending motion, the muscle tear led my hip to crack. I went to the doctor when I couldn't walk anymore.
I was x-rayed and scanned and made to answer a bevy of questions about my overall health. No, I couldn't remember the date of my last period because I hadn't had one in years. No, I wasn't sure why my blood panel was irregular, I'd never had it checked before. No, I hadn't experienced a sudden weight loss but my body had shrunk by a third over time.
The anorexia diagnosis followed the hip fracture diagnosis, and from there my routine came to include sitting and listening to doctors try their hardest to reach my unreachable mind. I was actively and progressively anorexic during the first years of my treatment, unaccepting of the ugly word they used to describe my private life.
Well over a year after the fracture, they put me in the hospital. I didn't get better slowly, I slowly got worse. If ever they got through to me I'd make sure the wall was fully in place by my next appointment, and they'd have to start all over again.
During the pre-diagnosis years and the early part of my treatment, I had one other relationship. I remember very, very little of it, though it was on the floor of our house that I rocked the breath back into my body. Herein lies the bulk of my shame.
I lived a lifetime in my twenties, my anorexia coating everything with its grotesque, opaque sheen. Those years break my heart still; the illness, certainly, but my path of destruction even more so. The way I tore through life and tore through people and didn't even turn around to see the turmoil I'd left behind...that's where my pain lives to this day. I didn't want to get better, I didn't want to face what I'd done. In so many ways, I still don't want to see it.
I am coming to realize, though, that I must eventually forgive myself for those years if I want to move on. I must come to terms with my unfortunate mistakes and the reasons I made them. I must accept the lost and lonely girl I was back then before I can ever fully know myself.
We are what we live, and we live what we are. This much I know is true. I am inside of those years as much as they are inside of me. I did the best I could with what I had and I tried so, so hard to make everything better. In some ways, I think that every decision I made during that time was an attempt to save myself. If I've learned one thing looking back, it's that a bandaid doesn't heal. Only time can do that.
Today, I look ahead and wonder where I'll go from here. I have a heart that opens briefly before firmly closing again, but that it opens at all gives me great hope. I have a mind that has become, over time, one of my greatest allies. I have a child who may never know the miracle that she is, but who loves me all the same. And I have friends and family who've seen the wall but have decided I'm worth the climb.
My life isn't perfect, and it doesn't fill me with peace, but it's mine all the same. And I'd be a fool to let the rest of it go to waste.
~ Katie
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
"I've reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland." ~ Paul Simon
Off and on over these weeks, the lyrics from Paul Simon's Graceland have been running through my mind.
Particularly:
...losing love
is like a window in your heart
everybody sees you're blown apart
everybody feels the wind blow...
I looked down today and could have sworn I heard the wind howling through a great chasm in my middle.
Yesterday, a newcomer to my story sent me questions after reading my blog. The questions focused on details I generally keep out of reach – even from myself, in some cases. Nevertheless, I mustered concentration and objectivity last night, answered each and every one with honesty...and woke up feeling ripped apart and vulnerable.
In came the gusts of this cold December day.
It took me most of the morning to find my beloved needle and thread and begin to sew myself back together again. Closing up and in; shutting down and out. I was reeling from the realization I'd created an image of myself crawling, fleshless and depleted, through my house on hands and knees. These are the moments only I know about.
I shared, too, the intimacy of eating during my illness, when every bite was sacred to my soul and conducted in perfect solitude. Yet I touched on the brutality of the food itself: how oatmeal choked and rice cakes suffocated. How I couldn't open my mouth to take a bite, but had to force food between my teeth with my fingers. How I tolerated eating by tuning out, and how I couldn't continue if interrupted. How I'd go to restaurants with my neat little stack of tupperware and watch everyone else eat what was set before them without so much as a thought. And how some of these habits continued for years even after my treatment had ended.
My answers also quantified my weight loss and my treatment length. I painted a picture of myself that was neither pretty nor desirable: a skeletal creature who today wears heels and sparkles; a past that was dim, dry, and deadly, compared to a boisterous and confident present.
I awoke this morning to wonder: What does all of this mean to someone who knows only the shiny side of the coin? Will this information tarnish the luster of today?
With each interaction, I continue to question the impact of this process on my life. Will it crush relationships or make them stronger? Will I one day get to the end of the story and wish I'd never told it? Will it somehow reach people fighting this disease and will it help?
The memories that were once mine alone, protected and secure, are now in other people's minds, seeping into their thought processes. My private rituals are now creating pictures and narration, mutating perhaps, in the imaginations of others.
I realized today how much power this story still has over me and how much further I have to travel before I am free. There are still pieces of this puzzle that terrify me with their very existence, and yet the landscape is not complete without them.
In October of 2001, I wrote: "When did this person emerge? She feels unfamiliar, living beneath my skin yet she has made herself more than comfortable. In fact, she feels downright home, nestled in my layers, nudging aside my organs, lazily inhabiting my insides. She is a monster, a beast. Impish, detestable at times." Then frantically underlined twice, "Who is this being?"
And this, nearly two years later: "Fear is what I felt before, when my heart spoke a rapid rhythm, and shook inside my chest. I just don't know what the fuck is going on."
Later that year: "I think I'm still so hungry...I just don't know it anymore."
I can talk about the illness as if I'm watching it play outside on the lawn, with a kind of fondness and distance – a grown-up sense of pride that I've been there before, but have since moved on. Then I open these pages and peer into that world, and my fondness disappears. My familiarity fades until I'm looking at someone I've never met before and want banished from my property immediately.
I did art projects while I was in the hospital. They were intended to be quiet meditations, perhaps reflections, on what we were learning. I see the pictures I colored during those weeks, the patient and diligent strokes of someone who craved distraction.
During group sessions we used art to express ourselves, too. I've held onto a portrait of a woman sitting naked against a gray backdrop, eyes aglow, hair shiny, skin thick with protection.
At one point, I was asked to bring in two pictures of myself – one before the illness, the other during – and draw a path between the two. Inside the path I wrote my thoughts as I progressed from one image to the other. The words leaving my high school senior portrait say, "If my thighs were smaller I would have a perfect body." The words arriving at my sick photo are, "I will not get better. I would rather die."
On another piece of paper I glued over 80 cut-out mouths arranged from closed on the left side to wide open on the right.
At the top of another paper is written, "Who do I want to be?" followed by a list of all the things I didn't think I was: a patient listener, an inspiring writer, a dreamer, a woman who knows herself.
When I see these representations of my illness, and how much work went into each of them, I close the curtains and step away from the window. I don't want to see what's outside anymore.
There are layers here. I can share the surface: skin, hair, eyes. I welcome the pieces just below – my hopes, desires, determination – for their eventual success in bursting forth. The building blocks of my illness, which I've always understood but kept close, are tender yet acknowledged. What lies at the core of it all, however, remains untouched.
In many ways, I am still holding tight to the mountain of my illness. Backlighting its peaks to show their width and height, as I've done here, has been frightening enough. Stepping out in front of the mass and shining a light on its vastness is the work I have yet to do.
I hope, when I arrive at the end of this strange and uncomfortable journey, that the hole I continue to sew shut remains closed forever. And maybe, just maybe, the healing process of someone else begins.
~ Katie
Saturday, December 5, 2009
"The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
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
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
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