Small Bites
Trigger warning: This article is about eating disorders.
Unhappy anniversaries are strange. When you hear the word “anniversary” you usually picture a celebration — frothing champagne bottles, an exchange of carefully wrapped gifts; indulgences. But what do you indulge in when the occasion is one of sadness, rather than joy?
Today is the one-year anniversary of my mental breakdown (today being the Friday after Thanksgiving). It’s a bit strange, as most anniversaries are marked by a date, not an event. But everything about this week has felt strange to me. Nothing about the past week has made much sense at all. It started with another day that will become an unhappy anniversary.
Seven days ago — a day I mark as a week before the anniversary of my mental breakdown — I went to the doctor and found out I’m sick. No one else noticed my sickness because you can’t really see it, or you couldn’t until recently. I’ve known I’ve been sick for quite a long time, but I’ve never asked a doctor to look into it because I never really wanted to get better. It was too much a part of me to let go.
I have anorexia.
It took forcible effort to write those three words and leave them written. Even now, as I sit on my bed at 4:06 p.m. having not eaten a single thing today, and knowing that I won’t stop writing and eat something now. Even if I say I will, even though writing it down makes it obvious how bad this is. Even now, I want to delete those words and take them back. I want to stop writing this and keep pretending I’m Fine, as I’ve been doing fairly successfully for eight years.
I have had an eating disorder for eight years. I have to keep repeating this, keep writing it down, because otherwise I will keep pretending. No one who knows me knows how good I am at pretending, or maybe they’re just pretending, too. Either way, the charade has been going on for eight years and it seems like if it wasn’t really that serious — “not a real eating disorder,” as I have insisted to myself and my therapists, my family, my friends — it would have stopped by now. The voice in my head would fade away sometimes for a few months, but it was never gone.
And here I am, at 4:13 p.m., and I know I’m still not going to stop writing because, I tell myself, it will disrupt my flow. Because it will distract me. Because I can do it later. Because, right now, my sickness is stronger than me. Because part of me is still committed to pretending I don’t have a problem.
I’ve always gone through cyclical phases of eating less and more; depending on how much I’m working and exercising, I just would feel more interested in food some weeks than others. Though I’ve been told by multiple therapists I’m “unusually self-aware,” I never considered the roots of this cycle or how harmful it was. I didn’t want to. Whenever I was in a phase of eating less, I would be acutely aware of how little I was eating and eventually feel guilty and bad enough to cycle back to eating more normally. During those phases, I would worry about myself a little, but never too much. I recognized what I was doing was unhealthy, but it was too easy to convince myself it was normal. I went to a small liberal arts school that favors a very specific kind of body type and not everyone at this school had that body type, naturally. Mental health issues like anxiety, depression and eating disorders disproportionately affect the demographic of a so-called elite university. Eating disorders are often intrinsically related to anxiety and depression and a perceived loss or lack of control over one’s life. When you feel like you’re losing control or are lost, unsure where your life is going or what’s happening, eating is one thing you can control. Your body is one thing you can control. But sooner or later, it becomes a sickness and if you let it fester, it will control you.
No one was ever very worried, even when I told them I had a problem, and my therapists never diagnosed me with an eating disorder because I never lost enough weight. The only people who expressed worry were friends who had eating disorders of their own, but I wrote them off. Without an actual diagnosis, I was never really sick in anyone’s eyes — including my own.
~~~
My visit at the doctor’s office last week went perfectly normally until just before I left, when the nurse realized she hadn’t checked my weight. I had been waiting for the moment when I’d be asked to step on the scale, as I always wait for it — with a twisted mixture of dread and excitement. I felt I’d lost a little weight due to a particularly stressful couple of weeks at work, and I was waiting for the scale to confirm or deny the few pounds I guiltily hoped had slipped away.
When the numbers appeared on the screen, my mind went blank. That can’t be right, I thought, and looked at the nurse, waiting for her to shake her head and tell me she needed to reset the scale so it would work properly. But she just nodded and wrote it down. I had mentioned to the doctor I’d struggled with eating disorders in the past — this was the first time I’ve ever said as much to a physician — but if she was concerned by my response, she didn’t show it. A few scribbles on a pad later, I was sent on my way without another word about it. I walked out and realized I really did have a problem. I weigh less right now than I have since I was 15.
It’s 5:16 p.m. now and I haven’t stopped writing to eat something yet. I told myself I couldn’t stop now because I’m using the passage of time as a writing device, but I’m not convincing myself anymore because I can’t. I’m sick. And I need to get better.
~~~
It’s 6:02 and I really did eat.
This is how my eating disorder works now: I’m not obsessed with calories, I don’t eat particularly healthy food, I don’t fear unhealthy food. (Some people do — everyone experiences this disorder and all mental health issues in their own way.) I am not obsessed with how much I weigh, but I secretly want my waist to measure a specific number that I have been fixated on for eight years. I want to take up less space. I want parts of my body to go away. I imagine hacking my hips and thighs off with a butcher knife sometimes. I think about the sheer, clean cut it would make and picture a cut-away of my anatomy, how my insides would look exposed to the world. This is disgusting and I don’t like these intrusive thoughts, but I have them. Mostly, I think I want to have control over my life and feel like I’m doing something right and my sickness has convinced me starving myself is doing something right. It became a competition with myself: How close could I get to an eating disorder without anyone calling it an eating disorder?
This is how my eating disorder worked back then: I was an incredibly underweight child. I’ve been a vegetarian since infancy because I couldn’t tolerate first the taste, then the thought, of meat. I ate a lot of carbs, but I was always in the lowest percentile for my weight — I had a fast metabolism and just didn’t like food very much. I remember people making comments to my mother or directly to me starting around six or seven years old, asking if I was anorexic or something was wrong with me. By eight or nine, I began to wish there was something wrong with me so those people would have their answer and leave me alone. I hated how much people commented on my diet — it was a constant invasion of my privacy from as long as I can remember. I learned how to push food around my plate, fake chewing and swallowing, hide food in my napkin, all the tricks in the eating disorder book.
I gained about 20 pounds between the ages of 14 and 15. I hit puberty and seemingly grew all new tastebuds and started eating a much wider range of foods around the same time I grew hips. As a coxswain on the crew team at my high school, I was told by my (male) coach to stay below 105 pounds or find a new sport to play. (I was 5’4”.) Over the span of two years, three of my close friends suffered from eating disorders. One was severe enough to be sent to an in-patient treatment center. Even though I’ve never been overweight by society’s standards, I stopped feeling comfortable or at home in my body. The beginnings of an anxiety disorder emerged; I saw myself “bad at dealing with things.” Sometime in my sophomore year of high school, I stopped eating before I felt full and I started making myself throw up. I couldn’t say how often I did it or what exactly I felt the first time I stuck a toothbrush down the back of my throat, but it continued on and off throughout college. Each time, I knew what I was doing was wrong, but my sickness was stronger than me.
It still might be stronger than me, but I’m fighting back now. I’ve fought back before — I stopped throwing up a few years ago because it gave me such bad acid reflux I started throwing up involuntarily; from eating the wrong thing, from stress, from anxiety. But I never fully confronted my eating disorder and called it by its name for anyone to hear.
Today is the one-year anniversary of my mental breakdown, and in the last year I’ve made more progress than I would have ever thought possible. I’ve made huge bounds in dealing with my anxiety, PTSD and ADHD. I’ve done well and been very lucky with my friendships and my career. When I look at where I was a year ago, I’m incredibly proud of where I am now. But when I think about the numbers on that scale and the week before, when I fell apart on set because I hadn’t eaten a meal in over three days, I see that there is still a lot of progress to be made.
Addressing my eating disorder this publicly and seriously terrifies me, but I have to stop pretending. Not just for myself, but for the sake of every other girl or woman who’s hiding her suffering in guilt or shame or fear, telling herself and everyone around her she’s fine.
It’s 7:05 p.m. and I’m going to eat something else because I know I need more than one half-meal a day, even if it’s already night and my sickness is telling me it’s fine.
It isn’t fine. And I’m not fine, but I will be okay.
