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.
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