part0027

It wasn’t even like it was a book that I loved, or even liked very much. The main character was mildly annoying and a ballet dancer; I was neither. If anything, as the kind of kid who complained to the teacher when losing a point for neatness brought me down to 99 from a possible 100, I was probably really annoying.

I didn’t enjoy the reading experience. And yet . . . I read that book over and over again.

The book-girl wanted to be perfect—she was under pressure; I thought I was, too. I was tasked with “doing my best” at school, and it was understood that “my best” would result in top grades. I was good at schoolwork, but the message was that there was always room to be better. I embraced that. I was competitive, and I wanted to win at things, especially things that I was already on my way to winning.

The book-girl would push the food around on her plate, and she’d divide sticks of gum into tiny doll-sized parcels; the result seemed so neat and orderly. So perfect-like. I wanted to be orderly and together. I wanted the inner me to be worthy of permanent display, like a diorama. The self I wanted to shake off was a little messy and prone to finishing projects at the last minute, rushing onto the school bus with the glue dripping from a tower of toothpicks, slightly askew. There was a discipline that called to me from the book-girl’s life. Some part of me imagined that learning to have that sort of control would transform me into the type of girl who did not find old permission slips and bread crusts crumpled up in the bottom of her backpack. Who was not obsessively anxious about loss, even in the middle of abundance.

I wasn’t even aware of being chubby until I made a triumphant fifth-grade return to a school that I’d left in third grade, a year when my true self had apparently been suffocated by the weight of my own flesh. On my first day back, the principal and my second-grade teacher crowed over how I’d “lost the baby fat.” They had me pose and twirl for them repeatedly, in the middle of the principal’s office.

I remembered this moment recently; it wasn’t a happy memory.

But at the time I returned to that school, I was overjoyed. For one thing, I got to check out the principal’s office, a place that I had not previously frequented (that was the goal), and for another . . . the principal and teachers were noticing me. Not my excellent grades, not my good manners, but my self , my body.

In eighth grade, my father was at home less, and my mother cried frequently. There seemed to be so much wrong, and nothing I could do to make things better. Age thirteen brought with it a sense of being unfamiliar with my own body, of a lack of control over myself, of no longer being sure who that “self” really was. I wanted to be simultaneously bound for the honor society and prom queen, but the paths seemed divergent and rough terrain for an awkward amateur like me. During a time when I desperately wanted to unveil a “new” identity, I remained brace-faced, bespectacled, someone who didn’t visit the principal’s office, and—to my mind—boring.

My friends and I spent afternoons at the mall, sharing packs of hot salty fries and chatting about “diets,” and about how terrible we looked while also assuring each other that we were “perfect.” Maybe they understood it as light chatter. Maybe they believed the slogans and PSAs that told us that everyone was beautiful in their own way. Or maybe, I thought, they just didn’t want it enough. I did. I knew I could do better, be better, be the best , and win.

My attempts at plate organization and extreme portion control went unnoticed by my family, and my weight stayed the same. Around that time, I graduated to sticking my index finger down my throat. I’d gorge on bags of Doritos, boxes of doughnuts (the cinnamon-sugar ones were the best), and cherry Coke, eating quickly and secretly—grabbing two hot dogs and wolfing them down in the bathroom before I ate one in public at a relatively normal pace. Sometimes it took only a casual conversation about diets and supermodels to help me find my way to others who fought food like I did. One day, a friend told me that a quick-and-dirty weekend of weight loss was a breeze with Ex-Lax, and lots of it. “It’s just like eating Hershey’s,” she said, her blond curls bouncing. She was skinny. I smiled and nodded, but it was much more satisfying, and purposeful, it seemed to me, to throw up right away, before the food “took.” I imagined that whatever I ate would immediately turn into nasty white globules of pus-looking fat, visible remnants of failure. Getting rid of it right away meant that the bingeing, the hunger, my sloppy greed had never happened. Puking it up instantly was like hard work and magic. It was the best of both worlds.

My peers were all “WOW—YOU LOOK AMAZING!” anytime I happened to drop a couple of pounds, and silent when those pounds (inevitably) came back. When we took class pictures, I wasn’t sure how to feel when the photographer’s assistant said, “Whoa, I thought you’d be much fatter, from your head shot!”

I took my eating pathology to college, along with my giant stuffed animals and dreams of carefree living like the pictures in college brochures. It didn’t take long for me to realize that it was very difficult to be “in control” on a campus of twenty thousand superstars. I was not the smartest kid in the room anymore, and minor roles in high school plays did not make me the most talented. With two ill family members at home, and a father who had moved out, not only had I not shaken off my messy self but it began to feel like I would never be able to. That it was time to give up on perfection, and just . . . disappear. Rather than get help in class when I didn’t understand, I stopped showing up. When I was assaulted, I absorbed the pain until it became shame. I convinced myself that people who had everything in order and under control didn’t let their lives get like this. I was losing. I had already lost. I tried not to let it show. I listened to my friends’ freshman struggles, and I worked hard to develop a reputation as a sage dispenser of advice and kindness to disguise my own ineptitude. I painted over the anxiety, uncertainty, and sheer terror that are a part of growing up with a hard, clear veneer of Cool Girl .

But when my first-semester grades came in, it was clear that there were cracks. It was time for me to take control. I got off the meal plan, for which my school was famous, and through which it was customary to binge on ice-cream sundaes and breaded chicken after a pizza appetizer, and I began to shop and cook for myself. In much the same way that I would manipulate and push around the food on my plate in my amateur days of Ordering My Way Through a Food Disorder, I came upon a simple but brilliant strategy for cooking delicious and elaborate meals for my friends and “myself.” I kept busy, looked accomplished, made people happy, and reveled in praise. Friends asked for tips on how to make pasta sauce without using Ragú or other ready-made items. I really enjoyed cooking: it was a stress reliever, and . . . I. Was. Really. Stressed. Out. So I cooked, but what I didn’t do was eat. My cooking routine was lauded, and there was little that I liked better than praise. Refusing to eat, I felt simultaneously dainty and strong. Skinny me got lots of compliments.

Once you get to a certain place of not eating, it feels almost like a spiritual experience. It is a spiritual experience for many who fast for religious reasons. Your stomach shrinks, so you stop feeling as hungry. You feel proud of yourself for not succumbing, for not being weak, for the willpower, the control. Though so many things in my life were falling apart, I had it together. I was proud of myself. My grades went up. I had a boyfriend. I walked everywhere; I was good at seeming healthy. I could make an impressive lasagna—at least, that’s what I was told. It did look good when I pushed it around on my paper plate.

The truth was, it finally felt like I was doing something right. Almost everyone around me was like that principal and that second-grade teacher. I was repeatedly rewarded with compliments for making myself less. For disappearing a little more every day .

There were times I ate food that other people cooked, though. My car made it easy for me to take solitary late-night trips to an all-you-can-eat buffet, where I binged on potato wedges and cheap slabs of “steak.” And there was the most glorious of grocery stores, with the most superb selection of prepared foods, where I’d buy tubs of hot macaroni and cheese that I finished before I even got back to the car.

On a trip home, my best friend said, “You look amazing!” I was long and lean, “like a rope,” he pointed out. I pretended that those words didn’t feel like a noose.

I made a trip to a local diner with a group of friends, the way normal people did. After a tasty plate of clam strips—the kind of food that was small enough to not feel like food—I ordered a five-scoop ice-cream sundae, something I usually ate in minutes at 2:00 a.m., standing up in the dark. This time, I enjoyed it out in the open while we laughed and talked. I don’t know if I finally felt like the girl I wanted to be or if a part of me wanted to “slip up.” To drop the facade and be seen as I truly was. Maybe there was a tiny part of me, that messy, real me, that was not going to give up, not going to let my self completely disappear. When it was time to go, I stood up and my skirt . . . dropped down.

I grabbed it before it got to my ankles, but it fell fast and far enough that I was glad I had on good underwear. We screamed with laughter the way you do so that everyone can stare and wonder if they’ll ever have as much fun. And we left. I could feel my friend H. glance at me from time to time as we rode home in my car. I made sure not to catch her eye.

I had lost so much weight that my skirt had literally dropped off me. Overloaded with classes, boyfriend woes, family worries, and more, I hadn’t realized that I’d lost that much weight. While I was no longer puking up a storm, I didn’t think about the fact that I cooked as part of an elaborate ruse to trick myself out of eating or that I ate whole cows and vats of congealed pasta and fake cheese in minutes, only to spend hours “paying for it” with endless hikes across the huge and hilly campus until I could feel empty again. I hadn’t thought about what this meant about my body, about who I thought I was.

After that night at the diner, I knew that I couldn’t fool anyone anymore, including myself. At school, I was a trained peer educator, and preparing for a work-study job coordinating programs and advising students. I had perfected my technique as a certified late-night “listener,” nodding and murmuring gentle advice, offering homemade snacks and cups of tea. I knew how to handle this for others, and now it was time to work it out for myself.

I went and got help.

Getting help meant I did everything I never did before—I let myself be. I acknowledged the space that I took up, even though it seemed like so much more than it should be. I told the truth about how I was feeling, about my fears, my anxieties, my anger, my confusion. About the stress and the guilt, the strain in my ever-ready smile. About the things that I thought I should do and be, and how I would keep moving them just out of reach, so that doing my best would never be enough. I spoke the truth into visibility: No matter how good I thought I made it all look, one day my skirt was going to drop off, and what would be left would be me. Just me. There, for everyone to see. And what would I do then?

Now it was my job to figure out how to make me enough. How to do my best and be okay with not winning. How to satisfy my appetite for control, for perfection, without slowly destroying my body.

Years later, I’m still figuring it out. I’m still reminding myself that I need help, and that is okay. That I need to have people around me who will love and support me. Who let me know what I need to know because they see me and still love me. Who will help me look for myself when I get lost. That I’m not in control of everything, I never was, and I never will be. That somebody knows the me nobody knows, and they love me anyway.

More than anything, I really need that somebody to be me.

I’m not in charge—not even close—of all the things I thought I could control, and I’m okay. Most of the time, I can eat without counting, without silently berating myself for being weak, without believing with all my heart that I don’t want to be worth my weight in anything because that would be too much.

I can eat almost everything in moderation and sometimes out of moderation. I can know that I have so much to be sad about, and joyful about, and afraid of, and angry because of, and I don’t have to fix it all, or fix myself with food. I can let my life be what it is, and my self be who I am. I can muddle through.