“People are slaves to whatever has mastered them.”
2 PETER 2:19
“Can you come with me, please?” The voice—deep, male, full of authority—spoke when Mom and I had barely stepped out of the mall entrance of Kohl’s. I thought the loud pounding of my heart was going to give me away. But it didn’t. The security guard didn’t need my telltale heart; he already knew I was trying to walk out with merchandise I hadn’t paid for.
Mom had driven from Springfield to visit Josh and me for the weekend and had offered to take me shopping—an attempt at a mom-and-daughter activity. While in Kohl’s, I went to the dressing room, telling Mom I was going to try on two or three bras and some underwear—$52 worth of clothing. Then I put my clothes on over them and walked out. It certainly wasn’t the only time I shoplifted; it was just the only time I got caught. But what had possessed me to do it while I was out with my mom? Mom had the money and could have paid for it. Did I think they’d be less likely to suspect me? Did I do it that day out of habit? Or out of a need to feel that adrenaline rush of power, especially since I’d be outwitting not only the store but Mom as well? Or out of anger in a lame attempt to punish Mom for leaving us? Her abrupt departure had torn a jagged black hole in me, one that I could not stitch together and find a way to heal. Instead, I had started to fall into that hole.
At the security guard’s first words, Mom looked at him, baffled. Then she looked at me, and she could easily tell by the look on my face that the guard knew something she didn’t. She followed us back to the security office and sat quietly with me as the police were called. I was told to step into a separate room and remove the stolen items. I complied. Then we looked at the “evidence” on the security guard’s desk. How ironic that I chose underwear. It represented what Mom had never even talked to me about—becoming a woman, what body changes to expect during puberty. Sexuality. She had left me on my own on all fronts.
I felt mostly numb as I was arrested and handcuffed. After finger-printing me and filing charges, they released me on my own recognizance, with the not-so-pleasant farewell words, “We’ll see you in court.”
I’m not sure what I expected Mom’s reaction to be. Anger? Embarrassment? To my surprise, she expressed neither. Maybe she somehow sensed my anger at her for abandoning Josh and me. Did she feel guilty, even responsible, for my acting out? I didn’t know, and frankly, I didn’t much care.
Mom and Dad both came to court with me and sat in silent support as I confessed, taking full responsibility. I left court with a misdemeanor on my record. (Thankfully, a few years later, my record was cleared because I hadn’t done it again.)
As I look back, it seems so weird that I stole at all—not just that day, but all the other shoplifting days too. It’s not like I needed to. After all, I’d had jobs since I was thirteen. I wanted to carry my own weight. Make my own way. Earn my own money for my own expenses.
I did it not because I needed to; I did it to fill a hole.
THE QUEST FOR CONTROL
Looking in from the outside, my senior year seemed to be filled with laughing, enjoying friends, and getting ready for the send-off into adulthood. I may have acted as though I had it together, but on the inside, I was dying. Even though my mother had not been a nurturing presence in my adolescent years, she was still my mother, and she had many wonderful qualities. I couldn’t control her horrific personal crisis or her unusual ways of dealing with life, kids, and household responsibilities. But I loved her and needed her, and her abrupt departure had torn a jagged black hole in me, one that I could not stitch together, one that would not heal.
It seemed that though Mom came to a few of my games that year, she was there in body but gone in spirit. The picture of my life with her in it was fading, dissolving, like the picture Marty McFly was holding in Back to the Future when it appeared that his parents would never meet.
The substitutes I found for my broken identity and fragile self-image, an intact family, and my mother’s love were unhealthy and unhelpful. Fast food. Drugs. Alcohol. Shoplifting. Sexual activity.
It also explains something else: my anorexia.
Anorexia is an eating disorder characterized by an obsession with weight loss, looking thin, and either refusing to eat or obsessively controlling what one eats. According to ANAD (the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders), at least thirty million people of all ages and genders suffer from this eating disorder in the United States.* But I didn’t set out to be anorexic. I had been a Taco-Bell-eating, volleyball-playing, sports-loving jock. As an athlete and teenager, I naturally burned plenty of calories daily and still managed be in the normal weight range. Anorexia crept into my life insidiously.
It probably got a jump start when I moved to St. Charles, Illinois, with my dad and found a job at a health club, where I worked nights and weekends scrubbing toilets and showers and working the front desk. There I was exposed for the first time to the vanity so prevalent in the fitness and gym culture. Not the normal vanity we all have to some degree, but that of many who seemed compelled to do vigorous daily workouts. It fascinated me that everywhere I looked at the club, I saw powerful, beautiful people. Smiling. Glowing. Perfect.
I began by adding more workouts to my sports activities. I started counting every calorie. I put myself on a strict fat-free diet, eating rice cakes, grapes, fat-free crackers, popcorn, and frozen yogurt. I wanted to be a perfect version of me—skinnier, smarter, prettier. I started out my senior year weighing 122 pounds. I found pleasure and strength in the process of losing weight. But even more, I found the very thing I was desperate to have: control.
Could I control the choices my mother made? No. Could I control the things she did that embarrassed me? No. Could I control the labels others had put on me and my family? No. Or the labels I’d put on myself? I didn’t think so. But I could control what I put into my mouth. How much. How many calories. How many fat grams. That steadied me. It gave me a sense of order in my extremely disordered world—which led me to focus on food more and more.
The painful darkness that had been growing from my earliest childhood through my teen years was gnawing away at my spirit. I tried desperately to find something to make it go away. It’s funny that though my mother’s behavior brought me great shame and embarrassment, my own choices and my own behavior in going along with my friends brought me no shame at all. Everybody slept with their boyfriend. Everybody smoked or drank or experimented with acid. Everybody shoplifted. These were just cool things to do. There was no sense of making a moral choice, no sense of guilt, of doing something wrong. So I kept on doing all the things everyone else did, waiting for the moment when my inner pain vanished—just as my mother had vanished.
Not that all my high school behavior was unhealthy. I always held a job, played sports year-round, and got good grades. I never got in “trouble” in high school. I appeared to have it together, and my reputation with teachers and other grown-ups was good. I wasn’t loud, partying, obnoxious, or trouble seeking. In fact, I had lots of friends, and though I was still shy and reserved, I totally enjoyed the laughter, camaraderie, and just plain goofiness of teenagers having a good time. Being a people pleaser was vitally important to me, and so I enjoyed being friendly, funny, silly, and welcomed (quietly) into a room by teachers as well as classmates. But all of that was a mask to the internal devastation I privately worked so hard to control.
I lost a pound. And then another. By graduation, I had lost twenty-two pounds. For an athletically built girl who was five foot five and 122 pounds to begin with, twenty-two pounds was a significant amount of weight. I wouldn’t have admitted it then, even to myself, but this was my acceptable, nearly invisible, slow suicide.
It took its toll. I didn’t have the energy or the drive to think about the future. Coping with my confusing life zapped all my energy. Froze my thought processes. While other kids were eagerly making plans, signing up for college, and marching forward into their futures, I was stuck in the private black hole that had become my life, clawing at the dirt, choking on the dust. The Bible reads, “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18 KJV). I had no vision. I was seriously depressed. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I couldn’t see any further into my future than losing the next pound. My only goal was to lose more weight.
Unlike my more forward-thinking, motivated classmates, I had no idea what to do after graduation, especially knowing I’d have to pay my own way through college and not wanting to go into debt. At the last minute, figuring I had to do something, I signed up at Elgin Community College to take some basic courses.
SLOW SUICIDE
A few weeks after graduation, our group of friends and classmates took a trip to Puerto Vallarta. Everyone was a bit crazy with the excitement of our first taste of our newfound freedom. We would be able to drink legally in Mexico (and boy, did we!). But while everyone else was gorging on Mexican food, I was eating the food I’d packed and brought with me—crackers and microwave SpaghettiOs. I sampled only a little bit of local foods. Despite that, I returned home very sick, most likely from a parasite I picked up there. This trip was something I had looked forward to for a long time. But it, too, disappointed.
Even so, I told myself that at least something good had come of my trip to Mexico: I lost another three pounds that month, bringing me down to ninety-seven pounds.
As the pounds fell away, friends and family noticed and urged me to eat. But I resented their interference. As I saw it, it was my body, my decision, my way. By this time, I had lost control over my anorexia. Because of the parasite, I totally lost my appetite and was in far too deep.
Mom came back for a brief visit. At dinner, I could tell she was watching me portion out my food. She said, “You’re too thin, and you’re not eating enough.”
“I’m fine, Mom.”
Deeply concerned, she called a doctor anyway. The moment the doctor entered the exam room, Mom said, “There’s something wrong here. I think my daughter is anorexic.” For once I felt seen by her, even though I was disappearing. She’d noticed something.
The doctor put his stethoscope to my chest and said, “Well, she is thin.” He peered into my ears with his little light, up my nostrils, and down my throat. After examining me, the doctor gave Mom a prescription that was supposed to help me. Mom had done what she could, but I didn’t respond well to the drugs. One of them caused hallucinations. I stopped taking them a few weeks later but never told Mom.
It became more and more difficult for me to go to work at the fitness club. I could barely get out of bed, much less perform the tasks required of me. Then one day, I got to work, and the doors of the fitness club had been chained shut. They had not been paying the rent, so the landlord locked them out. With a good deal of relief, I went home and crawled back into bed.
Later that summer, still living with my dad in St. Charles, I went to the grocery store and ran into my high school best friend. Instead of saying hello, she just looked at me, with her mouth open in astonishment. I can’t blame her. I was a walking skeleton. My legs were like pencil sticks. My skinny arms were covered with a sweatshirt despite the summer heat. I was cold—always cold. I barely had the energy to shower and brush my teeth, so I certainly didn’t have the energy to carry on even a casual conversation. I had nothing left to give anyone. I said hello and made awkward small talk. Today I regret that I was too self-conscious to tell her how much her friendship meant to me. I haven’t seen her since.
Soon I was down to a mere seventy-eight pounds. I knew I was sick, but I was clueless about the damage I was doing to myself in my pursuit of losing just one more pound. I didn’t know I was knocking on death’s door. Electrolyte imbalance could have stopped my heart. I should have been hospitalized, but I had turned eighteen in July and our insurance wouldn’t cover in-patient hospitalization, even though I was still under my parents’ policy. An eating disorder was considered a psychiatric disorder, and the cost of a month of in-patient treatment was more than $100,000. There was no way my parents could ever come up with that much money.
So I went to two weeks of outpatient treatment instead. There they tried to stuff me with piles of meat and potatoes, cookies and cake. I was horrified, literally afraid of what I now considered disgusting Midwestern fare. I was angry, and the entire experience just made me feel even sicker.
And then Dad came home one day with an announcement that surprised and delighted me.
HOPE
“I’ve received a job transfer to San Diego,” Dad said. He invited Josh and me to move with him. I was exhilarated and began anticipating a new beginning. A fresh start. A blank slate.
On Halloween, Dad took me to the airport and put me on a plane. He and Josh would follow with the dog and the car, driving from Illinois to California. I didn’t want to drive all that way with them—besides, our dog, Jake, already made me sneeze. Being shut in a car for days with it seemed an intolerable idea.
The three of us stayed in an apartment for three months until Dad found the right house. I was grateful when my older brother, Jason, moved from Arizona to live with us as well. Finally, with the three of us and Dad together, maybe we would feel like a family again. But sadly, by now I’d developed a snarky attitude. With an air of entitlement, I pointed out that my furniture was bigger than everyone else’s, and as I was the only girl, I needed the biggest bedroom with a private bathroom—the master bedroom. My dad didn’t even hesitate to give it to me. I felt he owed me. After all, I reasoned, he had left us with a dysfunctional mother. Dad carried a load of guilt, believing that he did owe me. Usually I didn’t take advantage of that guilt, because I prided myself on being self-sufficient. But this time I didn’t care.
Once we were settled into our new home in sunny California, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time: hope. A new beginning! I took walks on the beach, alone and with my dad. I enjoyed my brothers. I wanted to get started on my new life, and I got a job at Islands, a burger restaurant. But I had to quit after only a couple weeks because I lacked the stamina to do my job of bussing tables. I went home and back to bed.
Here, languishing in bed rather than enjoying my new life in sunny California, the familiar voices were back in my head: Despite the hope I felt on arriving in a perpetually sunny, beautiful place, I had brought along issues that didn’t magically dissolve. The shadows had grown too dark for me to simply walk out of them. The hole too dank. The pain too overwhelming. The lies too powerful.
For the next six months, I was almost too weak to get out of bed, barely able to shower. Getting out of bed took so much energy that I just stayed there, stuck in my dark hole. On those days, I wondered if there was light somewhere. I knew there must be. But where? And how could I find it if I never clawed my way out?
Oddly enough (and very true of eating disorders), I was obsessed with food. Instead of eating, I lay in bed endlessly watching the Food Network on my nineteen-inch TV. On the very few times I did venture out of the house, I went to the grocery store. Food was the only thing I could control, and yet I was starving.
People who have never suffered from or studied anorexia wonder how someone could do such harm to his or her body. Why can’t they just look in the mirror and see how skinny they are, and then eat something? But that’s not how it works—if it were that easy, no one would be anorexic. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see a skeleton in the mirror; I still saw a fat person. Doctors have a name for that—body dysmorphic disorder—and it can spring from unresolved feelings and trauma. I refused to gain weight.
Dad couldn’t understand that anorexia is a disease of the mind. It made him angry and frustrated. He’d come home from work and urge me to join him and my brothers for dinner. I’d refuse to get out of bed. “Eat some food!” he would finally bellow. “What are you doing to yourself? Andrea, you’ve got to eat!”
Then he tried to get me to drink some nutrition shakes. The shakes were awful, and after drinking a few, I started to gain weight—so I guess they were doing their job. But they were filled with sugar and fat, and when I consumed them, all I could see was all that processed junk going into my body.
One night I refused to drink any more of them.
“I’m eighteen. I’m an adult,” I screamed. “Nobody can force me into eating.” I was right, and Dad knew it, which undoubtedly made him feel powerless to help me. And that powerlessness enraged him.
My dad is pretty mellow and laid-back. And I had only seen him lose his temper a couple times in my life. But that night, the father who had never been violent with me became furious, because he was so afraid of me dying. I could see the fear in his eyes when he lost it. He took hold of my legs and swiped them off the bed, while I stubbornly screamed my refusal.
My older brother stepped in, and they began to fight. Jason and Dad got into it, while I sat on the floor crying, watching my brother step up to protect me for the first time in his life. My big brother. The one who, while we were growing up, used to say, “You’re ugly, Brace Face. Those glasses make you look stupid.” But that night, he stepped up. And when my dad had cooled and backed off, Jason looked at me, pleading. “Please, please, Andrea. You’ve got to drink this stuff. Or eat. Something.” Tears rolled down his face. I will never forget that day that my big brother truly cared for me and tried to help. From that moment on, our relationship changed. He was, is today, and will always be my sweet big brother.
And so I took a can and drank it. And I never touched another one again.
I was so stubborn. I would not relinquish the control I believed anorexia had given me. But I was blind to the fact that I was not in control. How could I not see that it was anorexia that had control over me?
ON OUR OWN AGAIN
Around that time, Dad met a woman, Pat, through work, He quickly began to spend much of his time with her and very little with us, until he was primarily living with her more than in our home. The old, familiar sense of emotional abandonment pounded away at my heart. I tried to slam my emotional door shut on the feelings that were far too familiar. Was this a pattern in my family? Would everyone who was supposed to love me abandon me for someone better?
Meanwhile, Jason found a bank job and started going to school. He too found a girlfriend. So once again, Josh and I were on our own, with no parental guidance, no time together as a family—at all. Food had been my primary substitute for feeling a sense of belonging and love since my elementary school days. Now I watched as my little brother dealt with his pain and absence of parental attention by smoking pot and getting into trouble. Dad put him in a transitional high school, hoping that would help him. But what Josh needed was his family—not a different school. He was hanging on by a thread.
At three o’clock one morning, I got a phone call. “Andrea,” Josh said, mumbling, “you’ve gotta come get me.”
“What? Where are you?”
“Jail.”
My heart sunk. “What happened?” I said softly, not wanting to wake my other brother.
“I was just goofing off with some friends.”
“Doing what?” I didn’t know if I should be angry or heartsick that he was so lost.
“Spray-painting. It’s no big deal. I do it all the time.”
I sighed as I hung up the phone, but I knew I’d do anything for him. I made my way to the police station as quickly as I could to bring him home, all the while with memories in my mind of playing the role of mom for Josh in my elementary, junior high, and high school days. I’d been there for him as well as I’d been able. He was my buddy. He still needed me, and I didn’t want to abandon him.
But I didn’t want to abandon myself either. Everyone else had chosen other priorities over family. I was tempted, especially because I was so weak, to play the victim and simply let myself waste away to nothing. But that very idea triggered the old fighter in me to rise up. I wasn’t going to let all of their choices define me! I had come to San Diego for a new start—and it was time to start.
I made a conscious decision to increase my food intake. I started eating more fruits, vegetables, protein, and even more fun food, including sugar and fat. I also started dating a sweet guy, a surfer who often liked to go out to eat. I didn’t want to expose my anorexia, so I ate with him. And I no longer wanted to be too weak and lethargic to get out of bed. When I grew strong enough, I got a job at a clothing store in the mall. And with that income, I decided to start classes at the community college that January.
A GOAL AT LAST
Walking into a community college in a new city, I found myself feeling I could begin a brand-new life with a clean slate. I didn’t know a soul there. When in my fourth month of living in California I showed up to register for classes, I had no idea what to take—but I noticed a theatre class that still had openings. I put it on my list. I’d had no interest in theatre or drama in high school. I was always too shy, too self-conscious. Besides, I was an athlete, not an actor, and in my high school those two worlds didn’t mix. In my circle, acting hadn’t been the cool thing to do.
I quickly discovered that theatre class was an invigorating place to make new friends and create a new identity for myself. By nature, I am an introvert, so I had always bottled up my pain, my feelings, and my voice. But once I started theatre and began playing someone else, creating characters, I felt a sense of incredible release. It was cathartic. Plus, I got to escape being me and thinking about all of my problems. I felt free.
Physically, I gradually got better. Not cured, not “over it”—but better than before. I don’t know if it was because of my sense of responsibility for Josh, or because I finally hated feeling sick or weak, or because I wanted to earn money. Probably a combination of all three. But I knew for sure that part of the reason was that I wanted to get to theatre class for every single session. I didn’t want to miss anything. I wanted to have the energy to act. I’d actually found something that sparked my imagination and drive—something other than simply my failed quest for control.
Slowly, I began to trade anorexia for the freedom of this new life. I realized that here in California, I could be whomever I wanted to be. Nobody knew my mother and her embarrassing choices or my family issues. Nobody knew my junk. I found myself in an entirely new place. And it was a great place to be.
In acting class, I first experienced the marvel of stepping into another character—and there I found tremendous freedom, unlike any I’d ever known before. It was an escape from my own pain and baggage and an inviting opportunity to take on and experiment with whole new personas I could become should I choose. I found great freedom in escaping “me” and my issues and problems and diving into someone else. I was meeting a new self in a way I had never imagined, and to my complete shock, I liked who I met there.
“Dad, I’ve decided I’m going to become an actor,” I announced enthusiastically one day.
My father tried to “talk some sense” into me. Some laughed at the mere mention of my becoming an actor. My coworkers told me story after story of acting wannabes working retail, serving at restaurants, working hotel jobs, and doing pretty much anything other than finding paying work in acting. “Good luck with that!” and “Yeah, you and everyone else come to California to be an actor” pretty much summed up everyone’s response to my newfound passion.
My self-doubts surfaced again for a brief time. Could I really become an actor? It seemed crazy. But something inside me came alive when I acted. I was liberated, and I felt like I was discovering who I was as I explored the thoughts and feelings of other characters. Though I had never been in the spotlight in front of people, had never shined brightly at anything, and had felt self-conscious and unworthy all my life, those very thoughts drove the fighter in me even more. Impossible odds? Unlikely success? Acting made me feel something I’d never felt before. Why couldn’t I become an actor?
And then I made a decision. I’d prove them all wrong.
I did some research and signed first with the Nouveau Model & Talent agency in La Jolla. My agent set me up for headshots, and I was auditioning soon thereafter. That sounded encouraging. Through Nouveau, I started picking up some modeling work in San Diego.
Nouveau then referred me to a Hollywood agent, Gary, who, as they explained it, would help me achieve my goals. Within a few days, I was heading north from San Diego in my little red Honda Civic to meet Gary. My palms were sweaty with nervousness when I shook hands with him, but I tapped into my newfound acting skills to act confident and self-assured. “You need some more photos for your comp card,” Gary told me. “I’ll set you up with a guy who photographs a lot of Playmates.” “Huh? Um, okay . . .” I blindly fell into this sham.
Show business is full of predators, and as it turned out, it didn’t take me long to figure out that this recommended photographer was one. I shudder to think of how many wide-eyed and innocent young girls have been mistreated and preyed on by him at their time of greatest vulnerability. But then when he said, “Would you like to go to a party at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion? There’s no better place to network than at Hef’s,” I had an answer.
“Um . . . Sure!”
I couldn’t wait.
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* “Eating Disorder Statistics,” ANAD, www.anad.org/get-information/about-eating-disorders/eating-disorders-statistics (accessed February 22, 2017).