Trigger warning: This post contains sensitive topics such as eating disorders.
One night, when I was 15 and home alone, I watched the Lifetime movie “Sharing the Secret”, starring Alison Lohman. It happened to air right after “White Oleander”. If you haven’t seen it, here’s what happens: A ballerina is secretly battling with bulimia. She’s afraid to disappoint everyone and keeps her bulimia a secret because of it. Finally, one day she tells her mom, who is a therapist, because the school guidance counselor makes her. Her mom is horrified but not for long. The girl ends up in a treatment center, lovingly sketching a statue of a hippo wearing a ballet tutu and pointe shoes. (She is also an artist.) Finally, she walks around a garden hand-in-hand with her mom, recovered. They gaze at the hippo statue together.
Apparently this is all based on a true story.
A couple of years before watching this movie, I watched “A Secret Between Friends”. This was another movie about girls with eating disorders, also on Lifetime. In this one, two friends are bulimic, and one dies but then comes back as a ghost to say hi to her friend at a volleyball game, reassuring her that she is a happy and confident ghost and that finally, in her death, she has recovered. I found both to be highly relatable and profound at the time.
I was also bulimic, and I had a lot to say about it, but didn’t know how to express it. So I went on vomiting in movie theaters, bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, friends’ houses, boyfriends’ houses, backyards, cul-de-sacs, lakes, rivers, creeks and showers. I told a lot of lies and made everyone around me believe that it wasn’t happening so I could go on with the behavior unbothered.
At the same time, I never had any qualms “sharing the secret,” so to speak. While I definitely lied about vomiting in the immediate, everyday sense, I was always very up front about “struggling with body image” and having purged “before.” I would admit to being bulimic in general but I would never admit to having purged five minutes ago.
Every protagonist, every heroine I’d read about or seen was always rewarded with sympathy and radical acceptance when she finally shared her secret, regardless of what that secret was. I never expected a reward for admitting that I binged and purged, but I did imagine that every time I told someone, the problem would somehow go away — at least, that is what happened for all the girls in the eating disorder specials and documentaries and magazine articles I hoarded. With the exception of very few, they told someone, they got better, they moved on with their lives, they flourished. I carried on the same way I always did. I tried once, very earnestly, to tell a boyfriend about it, and it ended horribly, so I never did that again.
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For me, throwing up was a behavior I picked up casually as a teenager, and always imagined I would outgrow when I was mature enough. But then I turned 25 and it was still a thing I did almost every day, despite intermittent periods of recovery. My parents forced me into inpatient treatment when was 17, my college forced me into it when I was 19, and I forced myself into it when I was 22. My failure to recover was not for a lack of trying, and I will not, for the sake of this piece, pretend that I am recovered now. I am very far from anyone’s idea of recovered. I am certainly hopeful, but I am by no means recovered.
After my last stint and falling out with treatment centers, I learned that it doesn’t matter how many people you tell or how honestly you tell it, it is not a secret that goes away upon admission. You do not get a reward for telling people you are bulimic, or even for giving it up, which for me as a self-centered and entitled millennial, was obviously frustrating. No amount of yoga, therapy or well-intentioned self-care makes the underlying issues go away and drinking to excess certainly doesn’t help, although it always feels like it does. You can enlist your friends and family to keep you honest and accountable, but then you will get annoyed when they try to stop you from binging and purging or drinking laxative tea, and that is a fact. Sometimes they will succeed in intervening, and you will be thankful. But most of the time you will be resentful.
I have written my own plays and stories about girls with eating disorders, and am told over and over again that my protagonists are too selfish and unlikable. I relocated to New York from Texas when I was 18 in an attempt to start over. I used my education and post-grad years as motivation to write the problem out of me. I tried to be a social worker but didn’t get into grad school and concluded that this was because I, like my protagonists, was too selfish and immature.
In the past few years, I have joked and laughed off feelings of despair, owing it all to having “a dark sense of humor.” I have sworn up and down to stop purging and drinking. I have assured my friends and family that I take medication every day and go to therapy, but there are so many moments when I feel absolutely no real commitment to this kind of stability. So I continue on, as I believe everyone does, with my secret rebellions — some downright harmless, others not so much.
