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Anorexia Swallowed Me Whole While I Couldn’t Eat a Bite
It would try to destroy me for nearly a decade
It was a profoundly sobering moment, and one I will never forget. It’s as clear in my heart and mind as if it happened this very afternoon.
It was the terrible moment I heard that Karen Carpenter, brilliantly gifted singer and drummer, was dead at 32 years old. After years of battling anorexia, her badly damaged heart had finally given out.
This was the moment when the world first became aware of this deadly disease, and it happened when I was in the throes of my own dangerous dance with that particular devil.
At the time, I was in my early 20s, a divorced mum of two little girls and living in my parents’ basement. I had been thin my whole life, never giving any thought to my weight. But over the previous few years, something more than nature had been keeping me thin. Too thin, in fact.
A sequence of disturbing events had pushed me into a suffocating relationship with food. I was at war with it; food was The Enemy. It felt like a battle of wills: what food demanded of me versus what I wanted for myself. How I wished I never had to eat again. I hated food, hated that I was expected to force it down my throat, whether I wanted it or not — and I really did not.
