Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (11 page)

The same held true at school. Rumors about me—that I was pregnant, I was easy, I was doing drugs—flew during seventh grade, which infuriated me, because none of these were true, yet. School was hell. My grades fell from As to Cs and Ds, the occasional F. I was in trouble all of the time. I was talking back, sitting in the back of the room with my head on the desk, reading a novel in my lap, whispering, passing notes, getting into screaming fights with boys who pissed me off. I developed a severe intolerance for any sort of irritant, especially the “in-crowd” boys, who were the main sources of those whispered rumors. These were boys who had money, played hockey, pinched girls' asses, told dirty jokes to make people blush, and never failed to solicit a loud string of obscenities from me. I spent a fair amount of time in detention, in-school suspension, or just plain kicked out.

Sitting in detention one day after school, I was reading and eating a bag of chips. The teacher didn't know it was the first thing I'd eaten that day, and would also be the last. She didn't know I was bulimic.

She was a nice person who encouraged my writing, often calling me into her classroom to say, in a very concerned voice, that I wasn't living up to my Potential. There was nothing wrong with her, so I don't blame her for this. She said, wagging her finger at me as I munched away on my bag of chips, “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips.”

I stopped midchew. Looked at her hips. She had big hips. She smiled at me. I smiled back. On my way out the door, I dropped my bag of chips in the garbage can, headed straight for the bathroom, threw up in the stall farthest from the door. Got dizzy as hell as I walked down the hall, footsteps echoing weirdly. I stumbled as I went down the stairs, hit

ting my head on the wall. I rubbed the bump and watched the patterns in the tile floor as they seemed to slide closer to my face, then veer away.

It was about then that I began to have regular, severe migraine headaches that knocked me into bed and left me shivering in the artificial night of drawn blinds and cold cloths. I began to have massive menstrual cramps, to complain of dizzy spells during gym class. I'd retreat to the locker room where I could barf and lie down in peace. I began to leave classes, dizzy and with black spots swimming before my eyes, and go to the school nurse, who had me lie down. It was very quiet in her office. She shuffled papers. I began to have stunning backaches. My mother gave me back rubs, knuckling knots the size of her fist. My parents took me to doctors. I spent the next several years discussing things with neurologists, biofeed-back specialists, orthopedists, orthodontists, gynecologists, pediatri-cians, back specialists. I sat in waiting rooms paging through women's magazines, reading diet articles and ads for liposuction. People gave me pills and tried to worry out a possible cause, but none was available. Rare and mysterious illness. Psychosomatic complaints.

[Bulimic] patients tend to somatize to other body systems. These patients are often referred to various medical subspecialists, because they complain of headaches, back pain, breathing difficulties, abdominal cramping and nausea, muscle and joint pain, and the like.…No doubt the pain is real but misplaced.

Raging internal emotions erupt in the body…[the patient]

would much rather have a concrete and treatable condition than a diffuse, potentially untreatable and shameful psychological one.14

I appeared at dinner one night, sat down, looked at my mother, and watched her open her mouth and scream. What the hell? I said, and apologized. Jesus, my father said, staring at me as if I'd grown horns. WHAT? I said. Honey, what's wrong with your eyes? He reached toward me. I jerked away and toward the mirror that hung above the buffet. I looked: The lower half of the white of my eyes was deep red. My eyes

14Ibid., 267-68.

looked as if they were welling with tears of blood. In fact, I had popped all the blood vessels while vomiting that afternoon, and the liquid red lay below the shimmery skin. I screamed and ran to my room.

Looking back, I can say: There. My life split in half, finally and definitively, right there, seventh grade. The outside world began to fade into the middle distance, and then to the background. Right there, I began to run toward the vanishing point with cold sweat running down my face. It did not seem that way at the time. It felt more like a bad day, an embarrassing event, a too-close call—I almost got caught. I sometimes think about how different my life might have been if I'd done what I should have that day: I should have confessed. I should have been scared off. I should have taken my cue from the universe that this was only going to get worse. I did not. I threw up again that night, half-afraid that my eyeballs would explode. But it was, by far, more important that I get rid of dinner.

Of course, by then, throwing up was the only way I knew to deal with fear. That paradox would begin to run my life: to know that what you are doing is hurting you, maybe killing you, and to be afraid of that fact—but to cling to the idea that this will save you, it will, in the end, make things okay.

At a certain point, an eating disorder ceases to be “about” any one thing. It stops being about your family, or your culture. Very simply, it becomes an addiction not only emotionally but also chemically.

And it becomes a crusade. If you are honest with yourself, you stop believing that anyone could “make” you do such a thing—who, your parents? They want you to starve to death? Not likely. Your environment? It couldn't care less. You are also doing it for yourself.

It is a shortcut to something many women without an eating disorder have gotten: respect and power. It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny. It is a blow to your parents, at whom you are pissed.

And it is so very seductive. It is so reassuring, so all-consuming, so entertaining.

At first.

“Well!” thought Alice to herself. “After such a fall as this, I shall
think nothing of tumbling downstairs! How brave they'll all think
me

at home! Why, I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the
top of the house
!”…

Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end
?

Junior high is an unpleasant experience for many people. It was certainly not pleasant for me. The family was a raging mess. My parents were, as usual, not getting on very well, and I was not getting on very well with anyone. My father and mother were extremely volatile. My mother, when I ask her about it now, says she felt she was unwelcome in the family. That makes, by my count, three of us.

We flitted in and out of the house. We perched on couches, plodded through the farcical ritual of the family dinner, silver pinging on the plates. My mother, like me, is a workaholic of astounding proportions, and she disappeared into the abyss of meetings and conferences. My father worked strange hours and was home more often than she. But my father and I were engaged in an undeclared war over everything. Nothing was too inane for us to get into a red-faced screaming match over. I discovered that breaking things, including but not limited to door frames, which suffered unduly from my endless door slamming, was very cathartic, as was my projectile launch from the door to the bed, face buried in the pillows, kicking and pounding the walls.

Years later, as we screamed at each other in family therapy, it would be none-too-gently pointed out to us that we fought so hard and so often for a very simple reason: It was the only mode of connection that we could agree upon. We baited and bit, taunted and tore at each other—but there was a point of contact, there was an assurance that the other one was
there
, that they knew
we
were there, that we were all being given our due moment of attention, that
we
are all here together
, even if we are all here for the sole purpose of picking on each other. In the absence of tenderness, battle was preferred to the slow backward walk away from one another that silence would bring. Hatred is much closer to love than indifference. As I got older, the fighting grew more and more intense, as if we were all afraid of the inevitable moment when our cozy little war zone would fall silent, the small city of our family reduced to the razed fields and burnt-out buildings of separate lives.

One might wonder what, precisely, was the problem. This is an interesting and perhaps unanswerable question. There was no articulated problem. Nothing, the party line went, was wrong. People at church saw us as the perfect family. Friends thought my parents were darling. My parents' friends thought I was a dear, if a little hyperactive, a little mouthy. Later, a therapist would say, “Your family was very carefully constructed to say: We are a good, solid family. Nothing wrong here.” And I think we were desperate to believe that. We did not discuss my mothers emotional absence, biting sarcasm, caustic comments about what I was wearing (“you look like a tart” was my personal favorite), sneering remarks about my adolescent angst, melodramatic mimicries of my tears (“Don't MOCK me, Mom,” I'd scream, and in a high-pitched whine, imitating my Minnesota accent, she'd reply, “Don?'t MAAHK me,
Mahhm
”), irritated sighs at the slightest request—or utter silence. We did not discuss my father's unbelievable panic about my catapult into womanhood, nor did we mention his inarticulate and misdirected emotional needs, nor his causeless rages. We did, from the time I was thirteen until I left home at fifteen, discuss, at incredible length, my: melodrama, demands, moodiness, temper, bad behavior, irre-sponsibility, childishness, excessive precocity, attitude, mouthiness, craziness,
etc.
I
was the problem. But we never wondered why I was the problem.

And we did not mention, or perhaps we did not notice, that not only
was
I the problem, but that I
had
a problem. I knew, by then, that I had a problem. I knew it the way alcoholics know in the back of their brain that they have a problem. They know, but they don't believe it's out of control. The convenience in having an eating disorder is that you believe, by definition, that your eating disorder cannot
get
out of control, because it is control. It is, you believe, your only means of control, so how could it possibly control you?

You know, for example, that making yourself an entire box of macaroni for dinner one night, drowning it in butter, and shoveling it into your mouth is being out of control. But it's really okay, you say to yourself, because you're going to puke, you're going to be overcome by an uncontrollable-oops-urge to throw up, thereby taking back control. You'll breathe easier, your stomach will no longer be distended or your

face bloated. Your soul will be at ease. You'll get the bright idea to have a drink. You'll go into the kitchen, drink bad red wine until you're bombed and happy as a pig in clover, and walk up and down the hall juggling oranges, and then remember that wine has calories.

You'll return to the bathroom, throw it up, and go to sleep. A problem? Yes, eating is definitely a problem. Got to stop eating.

I have to answer the obvious question: How could my parents
not
notice? They noticed that something was wrong with me—my anger was completely out of control, I was getting more and more batty by the day—but bulimia, especially in someone so young, is not the first thing that comes to a parent's mind when their thirteen-year-old kid is running wild. I did it when they weren't home, when I was out, or when I had the bathroom door locked and the tub running. I was becoming increasingly aware that I was an exceptionally good liar. My eating disorder was for me, as it is for many of us, one of the only things that I could call my own, something that I could keep private. My father was extremely intrusive at the time. It was his way of dealing with his own fears of my physical maturity and what myriad troubles that might bring. To be fair, I was indeed acting a little strange, and my parents were wondering what the hell was going on. He grilled me with inappropriate questions. He went digging through my drawers, my garbage, read my notes, grounded me for truly minor infractions. He was scared that I was in serious trouble and scared of losing his little girl. I can understand this. But it backfired.

The shrinks call it “emotional incest.” Personally I find the term to be a little excessive, a little shrill. My father, like many fathers, freaked out when I hit puberty, and he began suspecting vast li-centiousness on my part. I think if he had just told me he was worried about me, it might have gone over better. As it was, he acted like a jilted lover. He became more overprotective, more anxious, more rageful. As most adolescents do, I rejected his involvement in my life. He took it too personally and did his damnedest to show me who was boss. We fed on each other's escalating mania to such a degree that I'm surprised we're both still alive, let alone friends.

An environment that supports autonomy, quoth the shrinks, will foster a greater sense of self-esteem, of self-determination, of separateness from

other people—in short, if your family assumes that you are capable of doing things yourself, you will internalize that assumption and act accordingly. You will develop a firm sense of self, a belief in your own capability. Whereas if you grow up in a controlling environment, where your ability to make decisions and act independently is constantly being undermined, you are likely to internalize a deep level of self-doubt and “develop a sense of self-worth contingent upon extrinsic rewards and the evaluation of others.”15

Too often the shrinks assume an eating disorder is a way of avoiding womanhood, sexuality, responsibility, by arresting your physical growth at a prepubescent state. But more recently, some insightful people have noticed that some of us may be after something quite different, like breathing room, or, crazy as it sounds,
less
attention, or a different
kind
of attention. Something like power. An eating disorder appears to be a perfect response to a lack of autonomy. By controlling the amount of food that goes into and out of you, you imagine that you are controlling the extent to which other people can access your brain, your heart. You also throw the family into turmoil, neatly distracting them from their endless bickering, focusing their worry on your “craziness” while you yourself saunter off stage left. The shrinks have been paying way too much attention to the end result of eating disorders—that is, they look at you when you've become utterly powerless, delusional, the center of attention, regressed to a passive, infantile state—and they treat you as a passive, infantile creature, thus defeating their own purpose. This end result is
not
your intention at the outset. Your intention was to become superhuman, skin thick as steel, unflinching in the face of adversity, out of the grasping reach of others. “Anorexia develops when a bid for independence on the part of the child has failed.”16 It is not a scramble to get back
into
the nest. It's a flying leap
out
.