Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Growing Pains

2 days down...my mind is having as hard a time digesting the past 48 hours as my body is, the food.  Breakfast at 8, then process group, snack at 10, more process, lunch at 12, then process again.  It's all that I have left in me at 2 to walk my body, bursting at the seams, down the hallway and out the door.  So.  damn.  full.

If I had to sum up the experience so far, I would say, in a word, uncomfortable.  And not the underwear-giving-you-a-slight-wedgy kind of discomfort... the kind of discomfort as if there were colonies of ants scurrying just underneath the surface of your skin, from head to toe, desperately looking for a way out of your body and getting pissed and more frantic because they can't find one.  I literally want to scratch the skin off my body, crawl out of this shell, and run screaming for the farthest hills.  Having someone telling me what I have to eat, when I have to eat, how much time I have to eat, literally watching every bite as it enters my mouth and checking my tray to make sure every last bite is gone before I can get up and leave the dining table feels totally belittling and really, really uncomfortable.  But not quite as uncomfortable as, then, having to pee and having someone else stand just outside the open bathroom door, check in the toilet before I can flush, then watch as I wash my hands and leave to make sure I'm not puking or sneaking in a laxative.  Again...really damn uncomfortable.

I had done a little work to prepare for the mental and emotional discomfort I was anticipating upon starting the program, however I totally underestimated the physical discomfort I would feel.  My body, literally relearning how to digest again, my systems kicking into full gear after lounging back in starvation mode for so long.  The initial moments, post-meal, a dizzying reminder of just how little I've been taking in for so long... hot sweats, cramping, churning stomach, swollen, cloudy eyes, my entire abdomen bloated and inflated, prohibiting even a deep breath from getting in.  I've been sitting in those moments post-meal, closing my eyes, tears welling, body shaking, placing my hands on my belly, sending love and compassion, trying to remember that it was this same belly, the one I despise so much today, that carried my son in safety and comfort for 9 months.  I loved that belly.  I can still love it.  I can feed it, feel it grow, watch it expand and contract on the rhythm of each breath.  Breathing in, I take in what supports me...breathing out, I let go of the rest.  That's the mantra I keep repeating, over and over in my head, waiting in desperation for that moment, which everyone around me says will come, when the discomfort will subside and my recovery can begin.

Friday, December 16, 2011

Loving Ana

This week was bitter-sweet:  I had to say goodbye to the motley crew of recovering addicts, bi-polars and depressives at the out-patient therapy group I've been attending for the past 6 weeks in order to free up my schedule for the out-patient eating disorder group I'm starting next week.  I'm a very busy gal, what can I say.

At our final group, Anger Management (one of my faves), we were asked to write a Letter of Closure to someone toward whom we had unresolved anger.  While my mom is my usual go-to gal for this exercise, I was feeling generous and decided to give her a pass since we had just worked through some mega-goo at (another) family therapy session a few days prior.  Instead, I thought it fitting, given the program I was about to enter, to write to my eating disorder, personified - see what voice surfaced, what feelings emerged, what I could let go of in that space in preparation to enter the next one.  I named her Ana, and it became clear as the words started to form, that she was my lover with whom I have been having an affair, on and off, for 15 years.  And I, with pain and grief and deep longing still in my heart, was writing to her, to finally say goodbye.

Dear Ana, 
It's time for you to go.  You've been my dear friend, my confidante, my only support at times for years, but it's time for us to say goodbye.  See, it's taken me a very long time to also see how manipulative you are.  You want me all to yourself.  Your love has conditions - it says, don't tell anyone about our affair, hold me in secrecy, when people ask, lie to them, pretend like nothing's going on, put on that happy, smiling face you're so good at creating, be the actress you are, I am the part that you were born to play.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming you entirely.  I participated willingly in this dance.  I welcomed you, seduced you, kept us a secret for so long.  I pretended like I had everything under control, like you were helping me to control everything when, really, everything inside and around me was falling apart. 
I want to hate you for fucking up my life so much.  But I don't.  I hold myself responsible and accountable for the part I played.  It takes two to tango, after all.  But you need to go.  I'm done sneaking around, lying, manipulating the truth, skating the line in every relationship I have to keep us, you and me, together.   
I'd be lying if I said I'm not scared to let you go.  I'm terrified, in fact.  I don't know what me without you looks like.  But I do know that me with you is crumbling my whole foundation - my friends, my family - it's literally eating me away from the inside out - and that reality right now is scarier than losing you. 
I'm so happy you kept finding your way back to me all these years.  My old love, familiar and embracing, I can close my eyes and fall back into you, trusting that you'll catch me, enter me slowly and comfortably, take the lead.  Thank you for your companionship, the way you've held me together for 15 years, when so many things have been slowly eroding.  I love you. 
But it's time for you to go.  I don't need you anymore.  I choose hope.  I choose to keep repeating:  I am complete, I am whole, I am loved, I am healed. 
Over and over again.  Until it sticks.  Until it's finally digested. 

An Unconsumable Heart

"After her body was exposed and examined by passerby, it was returned to the fire, where it was burned to ashes.  These were thrown into the Seine to prevent the cultivation of relics.  It is said, however, that no matter how long it was left in the flame, her heart could not be consumed.  Of the fate of Joan's uncomsumable heart, we have no word."  (Mary Gordon, Joan of Arc)
Recently a friend of mine, in her offering of words of encouragement, got my wheels turning around the concept of courage.  She reminded me that the word courage, at it's etymological roots, is derived from the French, "coeur", meaning heart.  Digging deeper, I discovered that it was actually birthed from Latin ("cor" for heart), then adopted into Old French ("corage" for 'heart and spirit').   It then moved into Modern English where it was applied to a wide range of feelings, including wrath, pride, confidence, and lust.  It wasn't until the 1600's when it finally settled into the more narrow definition of "bravery."

When I think of courage today, I can't help meditating on Joan of Arc, Saint Joan, who has been eerily traveling in and out of my awareness, through my dreams and my journals, over the course of this whole year.  A few months ago, I finally got the hint and started to feed my curiosity about this historical figure, whom I only knew as the boyish teen in armor, martyred at a fiery stake, all in the name of God.

My Joan, as I've gotten to know her through books, was, above all, a young girl.  Audacious, moody, contradictory, itching to escape the narrow confines of her peasant class, the domestic life which, as a girl, she was being groomed to enter.  She was chatty and precocious, illiterate, though intellectually curious, constantly surrounding herself with people she considered older and wiser.  A tomboy, androgynous, questioning and defiant of gender roles.  At twelve, she began hearing sacred voices, first telling her of the need to preserve her virginity for her soul's salvation, then delivering the message to save the French from the English.  She was seventeen when she left her small village to head an army and eighteen when she was captured by the English, imprisoned, and sentenced to death.  And on May 30, 1431, at the age of nineteen, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.

I am totally fascinated by this girl, this virgin warrior, who at such a young age, when most of her female peers were succumbing to their gendered birthrights, becoming dutiful, subservient wives and mothers, chose to listen to her intuition and pave her own path.  Filled with so much anger at the injustice around her and hunger and lust for things beyond the flesh, she was guided by a spiritual calling that she didn't quite fully understand, but trusted enough to follow, filled with the same raging fire that ultimately consumed her.  She, self-admittedly, was afraid to die, yet she chose to walk through that fear and to listen to her heart.  That inspiring, complex cocktail of passion and emotion, that, to me, says courage.

As I prepare to embark on the next leg of my own journey, I have been bombarded with words of support from loved ones, talking to me of my own courage.  But I don't feel courageous.  I don't feel inspiring.  I feel tired.  And terrified.  And confused.  And turning to the only path that seems to be left for me, having futilely exhausted all the others on my own.  I don't feel brave.  I feel defeated.

But, like Joan, I do feel my heart.  Pretty strong and fairly loud.  Surviving my attempts over the past year to starve it, shut it down, deteriorate its muscles, lock up its chambers.  Though I've done a pretty good job at numbing my body's appetite, I can still hear my heart calling out for what it's hungry for.  And sometimes, if I really concentrate, I can even taste it.  I'm no Joan of Arc, don't get me wrong, but I am walking into the fire, bleary-eyed, physically weak, a dulling ache in the pit of my stomach, running on fumes and fragments of my former self.  But as fragile as I feel, I can still connect to that constant, reliable rhythm - my heart - like a steady drumbeat, it anchors my feet to the ground and keeps time for my steps - march on, march on, march on.

And I guess, for now, if that's courage, I'll listen.  And I'll follow. 

      
    A.L. Swynnerton, Joan of Arc

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Smells like Teen Spirit

All the skinny girls, seated on the over-sized couch, legs and feet tucked under, wrapping their arms in a self-embrace.  I'm separate, observing them through the doorway from inside the in-take room, waiting to be evaluated, picking up bits and pieces of their conversation... sweet, high-pitched voices, talking as effortlessly about their celebrity boy-crushes as their desire to throw up what they had for lunch.  Dribbles of adolescent normalcy infiltrating the dis-order of their disease.

All the skinny girls, draped in button-down flannels, open cuffs pulled over their hands.  Multi-colored fingernails and blue streaks in their hair, announcing their set-apartness.  Shoulders, sunken and slouched, shielding their vulnerable hearts.  Misfits and over-achievers outside these walls but, in here, what a relief to be just another starving white girl.  I close my eyes and listen harder, tears of compassion starting to pool.  My heart screams, I want to give you back your innocence.  I want to hold each of you, the depth of your bodies and minds, the way your mother never could.  Come with me, my peaceful warriors, let's build an army together.  Let me walk along with you.  Take my arm, I've been down this road before.  We'll find our way together.

Through the doorway, the treatment coordinator arrives.  My eyes open and her gaze and half-smile immediately reassure me.  Trust me, I get why you're here.  And she does.  We walk into the hall towards her office, past the skinny girls, of which I am now one.  My girls, my kindred, my little sisters, whom I love already.  Her office door closes, she motions me to a chair.  I sit down across from her, tuck my legs and feet under, take a deep breath, and begin.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

The Letting Go


In an act that's quite uncharacteristic for me, I'd like to borrow somebody else's words to initiate - christen, if you will - this blog.  Generally, I have no shortage of words on or about, well, just about anything.  But trying to write and dialogue in an empowered way about my eating disorder - anorexia, let's call it like it is - is really challenging for me right now, partly because I don't have the benefit of all that meaty, a-ha producing, self-reflective hindsight yet but also because I still feel a lot of guilt, shame and general confusion about it.  It's muddy.  It's murky.  It's that mysterious, shadowed silhouette leaning against the corner store, the one you catch a glimpse of and wonder whether or not you should cross the street before you pass.  I'm just not so sure of her yet. 

But I wanted to open this blog with some explanation, some overview, some glimpse inside the brain and body of an eating disordered person to shed some light, even just a flicker, on a disease which has reached epidemic proportions among girls and young women.  Statistically, eating disorders are the number one cause of death (from heart problems and suicide) of any mental illness.  Period.  And personally, it's seduced me and stroked me and locked me in a choke-hold that I can't break out of without now calling in serious reinforcements.  And that's a new place for me, for sure.

I'll just say, too, that I'm specifically invested in how eating disorders (EDs, from now on in) affect girls and women, not to dismiss the fact that boys and men make up about 10% of those suffering from EDs.  But, as females, we have a special relationship to hunger - we are taught from a very young age to curb our appetites, to reroute our desire for satiating comfort food, to get and remain, in a word, smaller.  More on hunger in all its glorious metaphors later....

Getting back to using another person's words...the following text is taken from the book Wasted:  A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher.  Marya is an amazingly gifted writer who developed bulimia at the age of 9 and cycled through EDs, mental illness and various addictions throughout her life (she is now 37).  In her preface, she eloquently captures my experience of anorexia in a way that I hope to eventually be able to so beautifully articulate for myself and others.  She writes:

An eating disorder is not usually a phase, and it is not necessarily indicative of madness.  It is quite maddening, granted, not only for the loved ones of the eating disordered person but also for the person herself.  It is, at its most basic level, a bundle of deadly contradictions:  a desire for power that strips you of all power.  A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength.  A wish to prove that you need nothing, that you have no human hungers, which turns on itself and becomes a searing need for the hunger itself.  It is an attempt to find an identity, but ultimately strips you of any sense of yourself, save the sorry identity of 'sick.'  It is a grotesque mockery of cultural standards of beauty that winds up mocking no one more than you.  It is a protest against cultural stereotypes of women that in the end makes you seem the weakest, the most needy and neurotic of all women.  It is the thing you believe is keeping you safe, alive, contained - and in the end, of course, you find it's doing quite the opposite.  These contradictions split a person in two.  Body and mind fall apart from each other, and it is in this fissure that an ED may flourish, in the silence that surrounds this confusion that an ED may fester and thrive.     (M.Hornbacher, Wasted)
                                                                  
It is my profound wish that, along my recovery journey, I will begin to make sense of these contradictions in myself and to heal the places where I've been split in two.  It is also my wish that my experience may resonate with others - eating disordered or not - in a meaningful and thought-provoking way.  Speaking and writing and sharing my truth, in each moment, as I live and breath and walk it, is the only way right now that I know how to do both of those things.  There is pain, there is suffering, there are sparks, there are set-backs, there is love and support, anger and grief, there are tears - lots and lots of tears - and fear and obsession and heartbreak, there is kicking and screaming and, eventually, faith, when the voice is finally hoarse and the legs have been exhausted.  And there is, ultimately, hopefully, God-in-all-her-friggin-glory willing, there is, in the end, the letting go.