Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (44 page)

It was the worst night of my life. It is the only lucid memory of this entire time. I dreamed I was eating and eating in a dark, hellish restaurant, and everyone was staring but I couldn't stop eating and then I'd jerk awake and think it was real and panic and then remember it wasn't real. I hadn't really eaten, everything was okay, and then, horribly dehydrated, I'd take huge swallows from the bottle of diet orange soda I had by my bed, crash back into sleep, return to the restaurant, and keep eating, and wake, and panic, and drink, and sleep and dream, hours and hours of dream eating and the echo of people laughing as I ate and ate. When morning came I was essentially broken. I could hardly talk.

My father drove me to the hospital for my checkup. For some reason

it didn't register with me that I was seen in the emergency room.

For some reason, when I walked in, the woman at the triage desk took one look at me as I came through the door, picked up the phone, and said something I couldn't hear. Then there was a sound like a pummel of hoofbeats and someone's voice on the loudspeaker. There was a flurry of people. I was taken to a room. I lay down on the little bed and someone put a blanket on me. Someone came in and poked at me, then helped me sit up, handed me a little can of juice. It said BLUE BIRD APPLE JUICE. Apparently I was supposed to drink it. When the somebody left, I poured it down the sink, thinking, Why am I pouring this down the sink? What does this prove?

That thought was my downfall.

A doctor came in. She was brisk. She told me she was going to admit me. I said I had to go, I was meeting friends for breakfast, which was true. I'd been worried all morning about how I was going to get out of eating at breakfast, wondering if the restaurant had yogurt, and whether it was fat-free or low-fat, and I asked if I couldn't come back later? wondering if in the meantime I could gain enough weight to keep myself out of the hospital, something in the range of fifty pounds, and I was very tired and I lay my head on the pillow and closed my eyes for a minute. She waited. I pushed myself up from the bed and smiled and asked, Okay? I can go?

She said: You aren't going to make it down the block.

I thought about that for a minute.

I thought it was possible that she was right.

I asked if I could go have a cigarette while I thought about this.

She humored me. I walked outside, holding the wall as I went. It was too cold to smoke, so I ground the cigarette out with my heel, turned, got dizzy, bent over, and waited. While I waited I counted my bones. They were all still there. Then I thought, my God.

I straightened up, held the cold brick wall while the dizziness came in waves and washed away. I walked very slowly inside, placing my feet carefully on the floor. I went to the desk and signed myself in.

Afterword

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

I came to see the damage that was done

I stroke the beam of my lamp

slowly along the flank

of something more permanent

—Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck,” 1973

I have not enjoyed writing this book. Making public what I have kept private from those closest to me, and often enough from myself, all my life, is not exactly my idea of a good time. This project was not, as so many people have suggested, “therapeutic” for me—I pay my therapist a lot of money for that. On the contrary, it was very difficult. I wrote in stops and starts, trying to translate a material object, a body, into some arrangement of words. Trying to explain rather than excuse, to balance rather than blame. The words came bitten-off, in quick gusts and then long ellipses. After a lifetime of silence, it is difficult then to speak.

And even when you have spoken, you find your lexicon vastly insufficient: the words lack shape and taste, temperature and weight.

Hunger
and
cold, flesh
and
bone
are commonplace words. I cannot articulate how those four words mean something different to me than perhaps they do to you, how each of these has, in my mouth, strange flavor: the acid of bile, the metallic tang of blood.

You expect an ending. This is a book; it ought to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I cannot give you an end. I would very much like to. I would like to wrap up all loose ends in a bow and say, See?

All better now. But the loose ends stare back at me in the mirror.

The loose

ends are my body, which neither forgives nor forgets: the random halfhearted kicking of my heart, wrinkled and shrunken as an apple rotting on the ground. The scars on my arms, the gray hair, the wrinkles, the friendly bartender who guesses my age, smiling, saying,

“Thirty-six?” The ovaries and uterus, soundly asleep. The immune system, trashed. The weekly trips to the doctor for yet another infection, another virus, another cold, another sprain, another battery of tests, another prescription, another weight, another warning. The little yellow morning pills that keep one foot on the squirming anxiety that lives just under my sternum, clutching at my ribs.

The loose ends are the Bad Days: my husband finding a bowl of mush on the kitchen counter, cereal I poured and “forgot” to eat, my husband arguing with me about dinner (No, honey, let's
not
have rice cakes with jelly). The loose ends are the nightmares of hunger and drowning and deserts of ice, the shivering jolt awake, the scattering of cold sweat. They are the constant trips to the mirror, the anxious fingers reading the body like Braille, as if an arrangement of bones might give words and sense to my life. The desperate reaching up from the quicksand of obsession, the clawing my way a little farther out, then falling back. The maddening ambiguity of

“progress,” the intangible goal of “health.”

It does not hit you until later. The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive. Frostbite does not hurt until it starts to thaw. First it is numb. Then a shock of pain rips through the body. And then, every winter after, it aches.

And every season since is winter, and I do still ache.

February 18, 1993. I am given a week to live.

Four years (approximately 169 weeks, 1,183 days, 28,392 hours) pass.

March 11,1997. I am alive.

There will be no stunning revelations now. There will be no near-death tunnel-of-light scenes, no tearful revelatory therapy sessions, no happy family reunions, no cameo appearances by Christ, M.D., no knight on a white horse galloping into my life. I am alive for very menial reasons:

1. Being sick gets singularly boring after a while.

2. I was really annoyed when told I was going to die and rather petulantly went, Well fuck you then I won't.

3. In a rare appearance by my rational self, I realized it was completely stupid and chicken-shittish of me to just check out of life because it ruffled my feathers.

4. It struck me that it was entirely unoriginal to be starving to death. Everyone was doing it. It was, as a friend would later put it, totally passé. Totally 1980s. I decided to do something slightly less
Vogue
.

5. I got curious: If I could get that sick, then (I figured) I could bloody well get unsick.

So I did. Am. However you want to put it. Obstreperousness, which as a character trait is extremely exploitable in the energetic annihilation of one's own body and individual self, is also very useful in other pursuits. For example, life.

My eating disorder was not “cured” the minute I rolled—was rolled, rather, in a wheelchair with an IV in my arm, head nodding and heart lurching in my chest—onto the eating-disorders unit one bitterly cold day, February 18, 1993. It was not cured during the three months I stayed there, or during the years that have passed between then and today. I sit here now, eating dry cereal from a bowl because going to the store for milk seems somehow complex.

It was not cured. It will not be cured. But it has changed. So have I.

I am precisely twice the size I was then. Which means I am still underweight. Which also means that in the mess of the last four years, I did a few things right. I am three inches taller than I was then, which means, maybe, that the body surges upward toward light, like a plant seeking sun. I am classified as (Axis I) 1. Atypical Bipolar II, cyclothymic, hypomanic 2. Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (ED-NOS), (Axis II) 1. Borderline?, which means, essentially, nothing. I have scars all over my arms that were not there in 1993, which means some sadness came alive as my body did, and I, mute, etched it into my skin. It also means that we do not keep razors in my house. I am married, which

means many things, including but not limited to the fact that I've learned a thing or two about love, and patience, and faith. It means I have a responsibility to stay here, on earth, in the kitchen, in the bed, and not seep slowly back into the mirror.

And I am all right. We will not deal here with words such as
well
, or
recovered
, or
fine
. It took a long time to get all right, and I like all right quite a bit. It's an interesting balancing act, the state of all right.

It's a glass-half-empty-or-half-full sort of place, I could tip either way. It's a place where one can either hope or despair: Hope that this will keep getting easier, as it has over the past few years, or despair at the infuriating concentration balance requires, despair at the fact that I will die young, despair that I cannot be “normal,”

wallow in the bummerish aspects of my life.

Blah blah blah. I'm sick of despair. It's so magazine-model-looking-apathetic-and-underfed-and-stoned-and-exactly-the-same-as-all-the-other-wan-sickly-models. Forgive me for being chipper, but despair is desperately dull.

So I guess what happened is that I got tired of being so dull.

This is what happened: I went to the hospital and stayed there for a very long time. I got out of the hospital and threw myself into life with precious few tools and made a big mess and broke a bunch of things. Learned to be more careful. I worked, made friends, had a messy love affair, moved into a crack house apartment downtown and got a cat. Learned that in order to live, plants need water. That girl cannot live by cereal alone, though I go back and forth on that one still. That friends are a good source of food and soul when one has not yet gotten the hang of cooking or living (as opposed to dying) alone. That nothing—not booze, not love, not sex, not work, not moving from state to state—will make the past disappear. Only time and patience heal things. I learned that cutting up your arms in an attempt to make the pain move from inside to outside, from soul to skin, is futile. That death is a cop-out. I tried all of these things. I shaved my head, attempted suicide in November 1994, got forty-two stitches in my left arm, which hurt like a sonofabitch, and decided that was enough of that. I wrote and published and read and researched and taught and went to school from time to time and drank a lot of coffee and had a lot of really macabre dreams and played Trivial Pursuit and went to therapy and found myself extremely wrapped up in the business of life. I learned, gradually, to just fucking
deal
.

There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.

In my limbo period after leaving the hospital the last time, I was grasping at straws. If you do that long enough, you eventually get a hold of some, enough, anyway, to keep going. I no longer had anything that I understood or could believe in. The situation I was in then is not at all uncommon. The experts say, What did you do
before
your eating disorder? What were you like before? And you simply stare at them because you can remember no before, and the word
you
means nothing at all. Are you referring to Marya, the constellation of suicidal symptoms? Marya, the invalid? Marya, the patient, the subject, the case study, the taker of pills, the nibbler of muffins, the asexual, the encyclopedia, the pencil sketch of the human skeleton, the bearer of nightmares of hunger, the hunger itself?

It is impossible to sufficiently articulate an inarticulate process, a very wordless time. I did not learn to live by words, so I have found myself with few words to describe what happened. I've felt rather like I was dubbing in voices and adding Technicolor to a black-and-white silent film. This history is revisionist in that same way: I have added words, color, and chronology to a time of my life that appears to me a pile of random frames scattered over the floor of my brain.

I am sometimes startled, now, when I stand up and turn to the door to catch myself in the mirror. I'm often surprised that I exist, that my body is a corporeal body, that my face is my face, and that my name has a correlation to a person I can identify as myself. But I suppose it's not so strange to create a collage of memory—clippings that substitute for a linear, logical narrative. I did a very similar thing with myself.

There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are.

You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you

hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect.

And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.

I make it sound so simple: I say it got boring, so I stopped. I say I had other things to do, so I stopped. I say I had no other choice but to stop. I know all too well that it is not that simple. But in some ways, the most significant choices one makes in life are done for reasons that are not all that dramatic, not earthshaking at all—often enough, the choices we make are, for better or worse, made by default. It's quite true that there was no revelatory moment. Mostly what happened was that my life took over—that is to say, that the
impulse
for life became stronger in me than the impulse for death.