Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (18 page)

I distinctly did not want to be seen as bulimic. I wanted to be an anoretic. I was on a mission to be another sort of person, a person whose passions were ascetic rather than hedonistic, who would Make It, whose drive and ambition were focused and pure, whose body came second, always, to her mind and her “art.” I had no patience for my body. I

wanted it to go away so that I could be a pure mind, a walking brain, admired and acclaimed for my incredible self-control. Bulimia simply did not fit into my image of what I would become. Still, I
was
bulimic and had been for seven years. It is no easy addiction to overcome. But my focus had changed.

Up to that point, the bulimia had had a life of its own. It was purely an emotional response to the world—under pressure, binge and purge; sad and lonely, binge and purge; feeling hungry, binge and purge—and actually had little to do, believe it or not, with a desire to lose weight. I'd always wanted to be thinner, sure, but I wanted to eat as well. The year I got to boarding school, I actually began to hate my body with such incredible force that my love of food was forced underground, my masochistic side surfaced, and anorexia became my goal.

Part of this had to do with the self-perpetuating nature of eating disorders: The worries about your weight do not decrease no matter how much weight you lose. Rather, they grow. And the more you worry about your weight, the more you are willing to act on that worry. You really do have to have an excessive level of body loathing to rationally convince yourself that starvation is a reasonable means to achieve thinness. Normally, there is a self-protective mechanism in the psyche that will dissuade the brain from truly dangerous activity, regardless of how desirable the effects of that activity may be. For example, a woman may wish to lose weight but have an essential respect for her physical self and therefore refrain from unhealthy eating. I had no such self-protective mechanism, no such essential self-respect. When you have no sense of physical integrity—a sense that your own health is important, that your body, regardless of shape, is something that requires care and feeding and a basic respect for the biological organism that it is—a very simple, all-too-common, truly frightening thing happens: You cross over from a vague wish to be thinner into a no-holds-barred attack on your flesh.

You stop seeing your body as your own, as something valuable, something that totes you around and does your thinking and feeling for you and requires an input of energy for this favor. You begin seeing it instead as an undesirable appendage, a wart you need to remove. “I
have
a body, you are likely to say if you talk about embodiment at all; you don't say, I

am
a body. A body is a separate entity possessable by the ‘I’; the ‘I’

and the body aren't, as the copula would make them, grammatically indistinguishable.…Bodies get treated like wayward women who have to be shown who's boss, even if it means slapping them around a little.”2

When you believe that
you
are not worthwhile in and of yourself, in the back of your mind you also begin to believe that
life
is not worthwhile in and of itself. It is only worthwhile insofar as it relates to your crusade. It is a kamikaze mission. Life and self are far less important than your single-minded goal. “Thinness” was as good a name as any for my goal. Twenty pounds, I said. No matter what.

By winter, I was starving. Malnutrition is not a joke. Whether you're skinny or not, your body is starving. As the temperature dropped, I began to grow far, what is technically called lanugo. Your body grows it when you're not taking in enough calories to create internal heat (it's interesting how we think of calories as the Antichrist, rather than as an energy source). I liked my fur. I felt like a small bear. I grew fur on my belly, my ribs, the small of my back, my cheeks, fine downy fur, pale white. My skin grew whiter, more so than usual, when the sun became translucent, as it does in winter far north. I began to look a bit haunted. I stood in the shower, feeling the bones in my lower back, two small points at the top of my rear.

I took hold of my pelvic bones, twin toy hatchets. I took Fiberall and Dexatrim. I drank gallons of water. I was perpetually cold.

Mornings, I'd haul myself out of bed at 5 A.M., put on running clothes, walk through the purple light latticed with the black arms of trees, open the doors to the long hall of the main building, and run. This was the strangest thing. I have always hated solitary exercise. When I was younger, I played soccer, racquetball, and swam on the swim team, but I had always, always hated solo running. I was very proud of myself for forcing my body to run. And run.

Malnutrition precipitates mania. So does speed. Both were at play here, in large doses. But so was masochism—the subjection of the self and/or body to pain and fear, ultimately resulting in a transitory sense of mastery over pain and fear. Every morning, I ran five miles, up and down this hall, touching the

2Nancy Mairs, “Carnal Acts,” in Minding the Body, ed. Patricia Foster, 270.

door at each end, the mark of an obsession. I had to touch the door or else it didn't count. You make up these rules, and if you break the rules, God help you, you have to run an extra mile to make up for it. When I was done, I'd go downstairs to the workout room and weigh myself.

The workout room was packed with girls. On the scale, on the bikes, on the weights, the rowing machine. Nothing wrong with a little exercise. But in such a small community, you can't help but notice the changes. The same girls, shrinking, day after day. I saw them, later, on campus, shivering in classrooms, at readings, at concerts, wrapped in wool. I'd weigh myself and leave. There was no mutual recognition. You can talk food all day with friends, but you keep your secrets. On the surface, you're doing this companionably, you're a friggin' unstoppable dieting army antl you'll all go down together. On the underside, you're all competing with one another to be the thinnest, most controlled, least weak, and you have your own private crusade on which no one can join you, lest they be as fucked up as you.

By midwinter, I would run in the morning, eat grapefruit after grapefruit for breakfast (someone told me it had only eight calories.

When I found out that was wrong, I ran ten miles to make up for all that grapefruit), go to class. At lunch I would speed-walk up and down the hallway while reading a book, then go to class. At the end of the day, run again, five more miles, go to the cafeteria, eat carrot sticks with mustard. Soon I made a new rule: now I had to run
after
dinner as well. By January I was running twenty-five miles a day, on a knee that was beginning to split.

In the hospital, anoretics are always amazed that they could possibly have had the energy to run, to sit on the exercise bike for hours, pedaling madly toward the vanishing point in their heads. They talk about this in group, depending on their state of mind, with either a sad sort of pride, or shock. The latter is rare. You only hear the latter from women who have come to some understanding that they have been living in an altered state, a state that cannot be maintained. The former tend to maintain their grandiose illusion that they are superhuman.

I was beginning to harbor that delusion myself, that I was superhuman. When you coast without eating for a significant amount of time, and you are still alive, you begin to scoff at those fools who believe they must eat

to live. It seems blatantly obvious to you that this is not true. You get up in the morning, you do your work, you run, you do not eat, you live.

You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all of the time, and you can't remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of
full
for granted. They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of hands that do not shake, heads that do not ache, throats not raw with bile and small rips from fingernails forced in haste to the gag spot.

Stomachs that do not begin to dissolve with a battery-acid mixture of caffeine and pills. They do not wake up in the night, calves and thighs knotting with muscles that are beginning to eat away at themselves. They may or may not be awakened in the night by their own inexplicable sobs.

You begin to rely on the feeling of hunger, your body's raucous rebellion at the small tortures of your own hands. When you eventually begin to get well, health will feel wrong, it will make you dizzy, it will confuse you, you will get sick again because sick is what you know.

I cannot explain why I remember this year with such joy. Perhaps it is because it was just the beginning. It is the last year I remember feeling whole, although I was not whole. My private self-abuse is overshadowed by my memory of Interlochen, no doubt glorified magnificently in my head, but glorious in its way nonetheless. I remember the hum of passion palpable in the studios, the concert halls, the constant music coming through the vents of the dorms from the basement practice rooms below, the dramatic voices and flailing arms in the cafeteria at dinnertime, the laughter, the undeniable Mad Hatter wildness, the extremes.

Perhaps it is because, for the first and probably last time in my life, my extremes were hardly novel. My extremes were minor, by comparison.

That year for several reasons I dated boys who were very young, aphysical, harmless. My hatred of my body, which steadily escalated over the course of the year and was not, of course, mitigated by the fact that I was losing weight, made it literally impossible for me to be even slightly physical with anyone without feeling disgusting, exposed, dirty, fat. Nighttime, in a dorm room with the door ajar (“open room” regulation, applicable only with a visitor of the opposite sex), I'd make the perfunc

tory noises, I'd do what I was supposed to do, short of sex, and then leave to stand in the shower, feeling my hip bones for an hour, eyes closed.

This was, given my prior history, a little strange for me. But maybe not. Maybe I was tired of sex. Sad, but maybe true. And maybe I was afraid of the intimacy, the exposure, the vulnerability. Or it may have been what so many eating-disordered women report: a fear of having their bodies seen as excessive, having their faces show response, having their voice leap out, unbidden, uncontrolled, having their passion diverted from its chosen focus—death—into something more frightening still: life. One of the boys told his roommate, worriedly, that I was “a heavy breather.” I'd been faking it, of course, but I was humiliated nonetheless and kept my responses, forged or real, to myself the next time he rubbed his skinny self against me, panting and coming in his jeans, keeping his eyes averted. I listened to the laughter and shouts of the people passing by in the hall. I gave thanks for gravity and the way it pressed my belly down toward my spine, forming a little concave hollow between my pelvic bones.

A year later, in the hospital, I will hide my face in my hands as a beautiful woman starts to cry in group while blurting out that she is afraid of her own passion, her physical passion, her desire for her lover. The rest of the group, embarrassed into silence, will stare at the floor, each of us pretending we do not know what she means, each of us insisting to ourselves that we don't understand, we've never felt that. We will joke to one another later, Isn't sex just for burning calories? and laugh. I understood what the woman meant.

My face burned, as if my understanding marked me as one of them, one of those women who feels things from the inside out, one of those women whose bodies sometimes rise in wordless joy. I did not want to be one of those women. In my year at boarding school, I did all that I could to starve that part of me away. The taking in of food, like the taking in of a lover, is seen as an admission of weakness and need, an admission of desire for physical pleasure, a succumbing to the “lesser,” the base sides of the self. A loose woman, that's what you are, your passions beyond your control. The etiquette of our culture says that a good woman should take sex and food with a sigh of submission, a stare at the ceiling, a nibble at the crust.

Besides, sex always made me hungry. So did smoking pot. I avoided both.

Lora and I lay in our side-by-side beds in the night. Winter light is bright and blue, and cast the room in eerie shadows. The pipes banged. She was an insomniac, more so than me. We lay there speaking intermittently, of poetry and stories and writers and words, heated, blurred flurries of words about words. As the hours grew small, our voices slowed and faded. We spoke of where we would go. What we would write. Rarely did we speak of the lives we'd left.

As the clock crept toward dawn, we rambled nonsensically. She called me Max.

As winter went on, longer than long, we both freaked out. My mania grew to insane proportions. I sat in the study room at night, wildly typing out Dali-esque short stories. I sat at my desk in our room, drinking tea, flying on speed. She'd bang into the room in a fury. Or, she'd bang into the room, laughing like a maniac. Or, she'd bang into the room and sit under the desk eating Nutter-Butters.

She was a sugar freak. She'd pour packets of sugar down her throat, or long Pixie-Stix. She was in constant motion. At first I wondered if she too had some food issues, subsisting mostly on sugar and peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread, but my concern (as she pointed out) was “total transference, seriously, Max.

Maybe you're just
hungry
.” Some Saturdays, we'd go to town together, buy bags and bags of candies, Tootsie Rolls (we both liked vanilla best; she always smelled delicious and wore straight vanilla extract as perfume, which made me hungry), and gummy worms and face-twisting sour things and butterscotch. We'd lie on our backs on the beds, listening to The Who and Queen, bellowing, “I AM THE

CHAMPION, YES I AM THE CHAMPION” through mouths full of sticky stuff, or we'd swing from the pipes over the bed and fall shrieking to the floor.

People have this idea that eating-disordered people just
don't eat
.