Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (33 page)

Play
what?
She'd smile at me, I'm sure you can think of something, she'd say. And there I'd sit, wishing passionately for a book.

Eventually they assigned Duane to play with me. Things improved. Soon we were making collages, building elaborate Lego castles, constructing houses of cards, though the latter activity had a tendency to conflict with our Issues of frustration and occasionally sent Duane into his furies, spinning down the hall, or put me into a catatonic, blank-eyed stupor for a few hours. I was assigned to twice-daily one-on-one time with my counselors. I was assigned, to my delight, a journal.

But one-on-one time, which had at first allowed me the verbal contact I craved, a chance to have my version of human connection—cerebral, removed, a soliloquy of complaints or a means of picking fights with Staff—soon began to open doors I would've preferred to leave shut. Staff was not stupid. They stopped taking the bait and started calling my bluffs sooner than I'd expected. They simply wouldn't fight. I'd make some searing, brilliant observation on the infinite flaws of the program, the Staff, the food, the touchy-feely bullshit approach they were taking, and they'd just sit there, waiting for me to deal with the fact that I was mortified to have gotten myself into this situation. They held up a mirror and made me look.

I didn't want to look. The very simple fact that I'd been avoiding all along became, in the quiet hours, in the patient presence of people who bewilderingly cared about me, unavoidable: I hated myself and did not believe that I deserved to live.

In my journal, too, which at first had seemed so comfortable and familiar a thing, it soon became impossible to avoid myself. There were only so many ways I could describe, in my frantic scribbles, all the ways in which everyone was wronging me, all the ways in which I was certain I was right and they were wrong, before it became painfully obvious even to me that I was lying. All of my grandiosity, my arrogance, my holier-than-thou attitude, my loud voice, my hard-edged don't-touch-me-fuck-you sneer, was a lie.

Everything about me, in fact, was a lie. I'd finally been caught and exposed for the farce that I was.

I didn't know what lay beneath the skin I wore. I didn't want to know. I suspected it was something horrible, something soft and weak and worthless and stupid and childish and tearful and needy and fat.

I started cutting my hair. Of course, what else would you do when your repertoire of emotional skills is limited to the random, the pointless, and the bizarre. Every week, when my parents came to visit, I had

less hair. I requested permission for the scissors, requested accompanied access to the bathroom, sat in the sink, pulled a fistful of hair away from my face, cut. And cut. I caught sight of my face one day, in the mirror: a vicious sneer, a mouth twisted and white. I kept cutting until Staff gently pried my fingers loose, took the scissors, returned me to my room, sat at the edge of my bed while I lay facedown, fingers playing in the rough edges of my hair. Up to the ears, then close to the scalp. Then one side shaved, then the other, then the whole head. I sat at dinner, watching David play with his bald peas, laughing maniacally to himself. The night I shaved it off altogether, a Staff named Mark, whose take-no-prisoners approach I respected and feared, pulled me aside, looked me hard in the face, and said, Marya, your hair. I said, Yeah, so? crossing my arms in front of me. He said, It's
harsh
. I said, Yeah, well. He leaned down and whispered to me: No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath. And he let go of my arm and walked back down the hall.

I didn't want it to be me underneath. I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can't quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you.

This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of
kill
is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death. Without being entirely aware of it, I had settled on starvation as my torture of choice. When people think about killing themselves, they usually think about killing themselves with the least amount of pain, the briefest period of suffering. This is different.

There was a girl on Unit B, an incredibly sad girl, who cut herself with anything she could get her hands on. Bits of glass she found on the street, she saved these for her private moments under the sheets. An accidental, overlooked sharp edge on a windowsill. In group, the rest of the

patients tried to understand, tried to say to her: But why? She shrugged and looked at her hands. I told my father about her. I remember his face, worried, mortified; he said: My God. Self-mutilation. And he shook his head. I just don't understand that, he said.

I understood.

I understood so well, in fact, that I would begin to do that very thing a few years down the road. After my eating disorder was

“over,” I would go in blind search for something else with which to tear myself apart. I found a razor blade worked quite well. In Lowe House, what this girl was doing to herself made perfect sense to me.

It seemed to me that only our means were different; our ends were very much the same. Carving away at the body to—symbolically and literally—carve up an imperfect soul.

I didn't talk about the mortifying revelations I came to in my moments alone. I talked about my relationships with my parents, to some extent. I felt then, as now, that my parents were only one part of a larger complex of issues. I talked more and more, as time went on, about the role of my own personality—the need to feel powerful, the desire to be successful at all costs, the usual culprits like perfectionism, innate sadness, anger. Even in Lowe House, I was aware that there was something larger that had sparked this in me. Even then, the easy excuses of low self-esteem, bad parenting, media images, didn't seem sufficient. They were related, certainly. But the part that kept lurking, unarticulated, in the back of my head wasn't discussed. Because there isn't a good way to discuss it.

That part was me. The interplay of my upbringing, familial and cultural, with my own character, was not something I either understood nor did I really want to. I didn't want to deal with the fact that there was something about me that had made this possible. I didn't want to deal with the fact that I may have, if not just “come this way,” then come with some traits, some tendencies, that led me to do this. There was simply the issue of my brain. There was simply the issue that, despite the love my parents did give me, the support I'd gotten all along from friends and other people in my life, I had an insatiable curiosity about the limits of my own self. Combined with my self-hatred, that curiosity was dangerous. I could never quite explain to people that, in addition to

all the other more obvious factors, I also just wanted to see what would happen.

That curiosity had yet to be sated.

While I was in Lowe House some things did change. I began to piece my life together, stitch together memories into a patchwork quilt that made a chaotic sort of sense. When I arrived, I could not tell them anything about myself. Long periods of my life had been erased, events were lost and out of order. When you cannot say who you are or where you've been, when you've reduced yourself to no more than a skeleton with a bunch of puzzling awards, you cannot even begin to have a sense of yourself as a whole person. I asked my parents to bring in all their old photo albums, quizzed them at length about their lives, their marriage, my childhood, what they'd been thinking at this point, at this point, what happened here and here and here.

They, slowly and awkwardly, began to remind me, asking often: You don't remember that? My mother saying, bitterly, as she looked out the window: How quickly they forget.

But I began to remember. For better and for worse.

The better part was that, while I was living within the safe confines of an oversize padded cell, remembering gave me some insight into the hows and whys of what had happened, and I was in a place where I could feel relatively secure in looking at my problem, if only with tentative glances. It gave me a sense of who this person was that they referred to when they said my name, and while this was painful—I came face-to-face with a profound and nauseating hatred for the child I had been, the subhuman creature I suspected myself of being, and understood that I would have to come to some sort of reconciliation with her in order to be whole—it also gave me something I needed: the beginnings of order. The brain craves order, and I leapt upon the missing pieces with a hunger that can be credited only to a resuscitated survival instinct. I wanted to understand, and I kind of wanted to get better.

This had a down side. The self-knowledge I gained scared me to death. The unknown order I was approaching seemed more dangerous than the disorder I knew. And when I left Lowe House, and got sicker than I ever believed possible, it was all the more sad because I did it with

a constant, horrible knowledge that I had come so very close to health and chickened out.

he snow melted,

the leaves sprang out overnight, as they

always do. I was taken off building restriction and began to go along with the group on outings, to the hospital pool a few blocks away—I swam, like most of the girls, in a long T-shirt, embarrassed about my body—to the movies, or on a drive. My parents remember that I began to have more affect, laughed a little, began to take notice of things—a child on the swings in the park, a woman in a funny hat in the café where we were allowed, now, to have unmonitored time together. I was allowed to go on passes, home first for a few hours, then overnight, then for the weekend. I remember it only very vaguely. I mostly remember that I was beginning to feel strong, and I was beginning to feel almost happy.

My roommate, Joan—suicide attempts, abusive mother, abandoned by father, repeated foster homes—and I, both rife with Intimacy issues, had managed to push past a few of them and had become friends. It is noted on my charts—under “Positive Gains”—that we were both getting in lots of trouble for talking after lights out, laughing too loud, acting, essentially, like teenagers. She laughed at me when I stood on the bed, shrieking, “My butt!” She said, Yes, Mar, you have a butt! It's there so you can sit down!
Sheesh
, she said.

Some people. When we were falling asleep at night, both buried under piles of stuffed animals we'd had since birth, she'd say, Night, Mar. I'd lift my baby blanket off my nose and say, Night, Joan. And then it was very peaceful in our room. The soft shadow of the night Staff stretching over our tiled floor. The occasional scream and hush of a nightmare down the hall.

I wasn't gaining much weight. I hovered just under my goal weight of 101 most of the time. The closer I got to it, or the days when I stood on the scale in Shawn's office and actually
was
101, I cried. But for all the emotional “work” I was doing, one step forward and two more back, and for all the good effects it was having on my relationships, my sense of personal worth, and all that, I was not wholly convinced that I would be able to go on without an eating disorder, so I didn't throw myself

headlong into recovery. I think I had the idea that if I could just get a little
happier
, my eating disorder simply wouldn't
matter
anymore.

Maybe I could just have a
moderate
eating disorder when I got out, but not be so
miserable
. Just “diet normally” like “everyone else.”

Good luck. Basically this is the equivalent of a binge drunk deciding to be a social drinker, or—as I recently, ludicrously, attempted—a three-pack-a-day smoker deciding to smoke only at parties. Of course it was utterly terrifying to me to relinquish, even for a short period of time, some token eating-disordered behaviors. What if I forget
how
? What if, God forbid, I completely lose all control and decide not to
want
to have an eating disorder? I pictured myself, as we say in our catty little culture, “letting myself go,” messy-haired, laying around being
relaxed
all the time. I would not, until many years later, notice that “letting myself go” might have other connotations: freeing myself, for example, from a fatal disorder and a compulsion to wear eyeliner at all times.

It took them a while to realize that, for several months, I'd been waking up at 5 A.M., moving as quietly as I could to the sink in my room, turning the tap ever-so-slightly, just enough for a trickle of water to slowly slide down the side of one of those big plastic cups, a Minnesota Twins cup. I drank one glass, then another and another, glancing over to Joan's sleeping figure as I silently gulped, drinking probably a gallon or more of water every morning, then lying in bed, waiting until it was time to get up. I held it until after my morning weigh-in, then asked during school to go to the bathroom, my bladder about to explode.

One day in school, Staff beckoned to me during class, pulled me out into the hall, and handed me a pee cup. I argued. It was a lost cause. My pee was so diluted it almost didn't qualify as pee. That was the end of that. My weight that afternoon magically dropped back down to my admission weight, and I was back on building restriction.

When I got my privileges back, I went on a pass and came back six pounds lighter than when I'd left. In truth, I have no idea what happened. I expect I just wasn't eating enough and probably walked too much. When you're in shaky medical condition, you often lose weight at the drop of a hat, as my present-day doctor will tell you.

At any rate, they suspected laxatives, which I shrieked and hollered, honestly, that I hadn't