Read Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia Online
Authors: Marya Hornbacher
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Medical, #Health & Fitness, #General
In me, the two impulses coexist in an uneasy balance, but they are balanced enough now that I am alive.
Looking back, I see that what I did then was pretty basic. I took a leap of faith. And I believe that has made all the difference. I hung on to the only thing that seemed real to me, and that was a basic ethical principle: if I was alive, then I had a responsibility to stay alive and do something with the life I had been given. And though I was not at all convinced, when I made that leap of faith, that I had any sensible reason for doing so—though I did not fully believe that there was anything that could possibly make as much sense as an eating disorder—I made it because I began to wonder. I simply began to wonder, in the same way I had wondered what would happen if I began to lose weight, what would happen if I stopped. It was worth it.
It
is
worth it. It's a fight. It's exhausting, but it is a fight I believe in. I cannot believe, anymore, in the fight between body and soul.
If I do, it will kill me. But more importantly, if I do, I have taken the easy way out. I know for a fact that sickness is easier.
But health is more interesting.
The leap of faith is this: You have to believe, or at least pretend you believe until you
really
believe it, that you are strong enough to take life face on. Eating disorders, on any level, are a crutch. They are also an
addiction and an illness, but there is no question at all that they are quite simply a way of avoiding the banal, daily, itchy pain of life.
Eating disorders provide a little private drama, they feed into the desire for constant excitement, everything becomes life-or-death, everything is terribly grand and crashing, very Sturm und Drang.
And they are distracting. You don't have to think about any of the nasty minutiae of the real world, you don't get caught up in that awful boring thing called regular life, with its bills and its breakups and its dishes and laundry and groceries and arguments over whose turn it is to change the litter box and bedtimes and bad sex and all that, because you are having a
real
drama, not a sitcom but a GRAND
EPIC, all by yourself, and why would you bother with those foolish mortals when you could spend hours and hours with the mirror, when you are having the
most interesting
sadomasochistic affair with your own image?
What all this grandiosity covers—and not very well, I might add—is a very basic fear that the real world will gobble you up the minute you step into it. Obviously, the fear is incredibly large or you wouldn't go to all the trouble of trying to
leave
it, and certainly not in such a long, drawn-out manner. The fear, too, is a fear of yourself: a completely dualistic and contradictory fear. On the one hand it is a fear that you do not have what it takes to make it, and on the other hand, a possibly greater fear that you
do
have what it takes, and that by definition you therefore also have a responsibility to do something
really big
. It's a little daunting, going out into the world with this state of mind. Most people go out with a general idea that they'll do something or other and that it will be okay. You go out with the certainty that you will be a failure from the outset, or that you will have to do something utterly stellar, which implies the potential for failure anyway. When I was growing up, I always felt there was an expectation that I would do one of two things: be Great at something, or go crazy and become a total failure. There is no middle ground where I come from. And I am only now beginning to get a sense that there is a middle ground at all.
I had to decide that whatever happened, I would be all right. That was the hardest decision I've ever made, the decision to protect myself no matter what happened. My entire life, I've turned on myself the minute
something went wrong, even a tiny little thing. It is not an uncommon habit among women. Among those of us who see in all-or-nothing terms, it seems as if you have only two choices: either lash out at the world and label yourself as interminably hysterical, shrill, unstable, and otherwise flawed, or lash out at yourself. With eating disorders, that lashing out at yourself is unfortunately rewarded—temporarily—by the world and thus is all the more tempting.
But then the whole thing goes sour.
My leap of faith was more a negative reaction against the idea of wasting my life than it was a positive, gleeful run into the arms of the world. I'm wary of the world, even now. But I would not say I am wasting my life.
There is a difficult factor in deciding to end the game, and that is that most women are playing it at some level of intensity or another—and all of those levels have sublevels of dangers, not just the over-the-top-mortality-stat type of disorder. Eating-disordered people, for the most part, don't talk to one another. It is usually not a little sorority where it's all done in a very companionable way. It's usually intensely private. And when you decide you are tired of being alone with your sickness, you go out seeking women friends, people who you believe can show you by example how to eat, how to live—and you find that by and large most women are obsessed with their weight.
It's a little discouraging.
I can think, in retrospect, of all sorts of ways in which I might have avoided an eating disorder, and thus avoided the incredibly weird journey through the darker parts of the human mind that my life, essentially, has been. If I had been born at a different point in time, when starving oneself to death did not seem such an obvious and
rewarding
—Oh, you've lost so much weight! You look fab-ulous!—way of dealing with the world, of avoiding the inevitable pain of life. If I had been a different sort of person, maybe less impressionable, less intense, less fearful, less utterly dependent upon the perceptions of others—maybe then I would not have bought the cultural party line that thinness is the be-all and end-all of goals.
Maybe if my family had not been in utter chaos most of the time; maybe if my parents were a little better at dealing with their own lives. Maybe if I'd gotten help sooner, or if I'd gotten different help, maybe if I did not so fiercely cherish my secret, or if I were not such a good liar, or were not quite so empty inside, maybe maybe maybe.
But all this is moot. Sometimes things just go awry. And when, after fifteen years of bingeing, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss—when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy, and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not yet know what it means to be “well,” or
“normal,” when you doubt that those words even
have
meaning anymore, there are still no answers. You will die young, and you have no way to make sense of that fact.
You have this: You are thin.
Whoop-de-fucking-dee.
But when you decide to throw down your cards, push back from your chair, and leave the game, it's a very lonely moment. Women use their obsession with weight and food as a point of connection with one another, a commonality even between strangers. Instead of talking about
why
we use food and weight control as a means of handling emotional stress, we talk ad nauseam about the fact that we don't like our bodies. When you decide not to do that, you begin to notice how constant that talk is. I go to the gym, and women are standing around in their underwear bitching about their bellies, I go to a restaurant and listen to women cheerfully conversing about their latest diet, I go to a women's clothing store and the woman helping me, almost universally, will launch into a monologue about how these pants are very slimming, how lucky I am to have the problem of never being able to find clothes that fit, “Because you're
tiny
!” she'll squeal. I have to remind myself that it's not a conversation I want to get into. I refuse to say, “Gee, thanks.” I don't necessarily
want
pants that are slimming, I don't want to look like the photos of skeletal models on the walls. Wanting to be healthy is seen as really
weird
.
So I'm weird. So what?
I want to write a prescription for culture, some sort of tranquilizer that will make it less maniacally compelled to climb the StairMaster right into nowhere, and I can't do that. It's a person-by-person project.
I do it, you do it, and I maintain the perhaps ridiculous notion that if enough people do it we will all get a grip. I want to write about how to Get Well, but I can't do that either. I want to do a sidebar here with little pie charts breaking health down into statistical slices, showing the necessary percentages of therapy, food, books, baths, work, sleep, tears, fits, trials, and errors, and I can't. I find this maddening. If I were to describe the path between point A and point B, I would have to detail a convoluted, crisscrossed, almost blind stumble through a briar patch: the doublings-back, the stumbles into different, smaller rabbit holes, the sudden plunking down and howling with rage. In the end, I will have to point out that my stumble is specific to me. Your stumble will be different. You will avoid potholes I fell headlong into and find yourself tripping into quicksand I missed.
It is not a sudden leap from sick to well. It is a slow, strange me-ander from sick to mostly well. The misconception that eating disorders are a medical disease in the traditional sense is not helpful here. There is no “cure.” A pill will not fix it, though it may help.
Ditto therapy, ditto food, ditto endless support from family and friends. You fix it yourself. It is the hardest thing that I have ever done, and I found myself stronger for doing it. Much stronger.
Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The greater question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?
That is a question I'm still working on. I gave life a trial period, six months, and said that when the six months were up, I could get sick again if I really wanted to. In that six months, so much happened that death seemed, primarily, inconvenient. The trial period was extended. I seem to keep extending it. There are many things to do.
There are books to write and naps to take. There are movies to see and scrambled eggs to eat. Life is essentially trivial. You either decide you will take the trite business of life and give yourself the option of doing something really cool, or you decide you will opt for the Grand Epic of eating disorders and dedicate your life to being
seriously
trivial. I kind of go back and
forth, a little Grand Epic here and a little cool trivial stuff there. As time goes by, I take greater and greater pleasure in the trivial stuff and find the Grand Epic more and more dreary. It's a good sign.
And still, every goddamn day I have to think up a reason to live.
Obviously I've come up with something.
I do not have a happy ending for this book. I suppose I could end it with my wedding—Former Anoretic Catches Man! Ex-Bulimic Saved from Gastric Rupture by Pretty White Dress!—but that would be ridiculous. I could end it with the solid relationship I have with my parents, but that seems less than relevant. I cannot end it with assurances of my own Triumph Over Adversity, because (1) we're a ways off from Triumph yet, and (2) the Adversity was, um, me. I cannot end it with my blooming health or stable weight because neither exist. I cannot sum up and say, But now it's over. Happily Ever After.
It's never over. Not really. Not when you stay down there as long as I did, not when you've lived in the netherworld longer than you've lived in this material one, where things are very bright and large and make such strange noises. You never come back, not all the way.
Always, there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier, thin as the glass of a mirror.
You never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.
It is the distance of marred memory, of a twisted and shape-shifting past. When people talk about their childhood, their adolescence, their college days, I laugh along and try not to think: that was when I was throwing up in my elementary school bathroom, that was when I was sleeping with strangers to show off the sharp tips of my bones, that was when I lost sight of my soul and died.
And it is the distance of the present, as well—the distance that lies between people in general because of the different lives we have lived. I don't know who I would be, now, if I had not lived the life I have, and so I cannot alter my need for distance—nor can I lessen the low and omnipresent pain that that distance creates. The entirety of my life is overshadowed by one singular and near-fatal obsession.
I go to great
lengths now to compensate for a life of sadness and madness and a slow dance with death. When I leave my house, I put on a face and a dress and a smile and wave my hands about and talk brightly and am terribly open and seem to have conquered my monsters with great aplomb.
Perhaps, in some ways, that's true. But I often feel as though they have conquered me. As I write this, I am only twenty-three. I do not feel twenty-three. I feel old.
I have not lost my fascination with death. I have not become a noticeably less intense person. I have not, nor will I ever, completely lose the longing for that
something
, that thing that I believe will fill an emptiness inside me. I do believe that the emptiness was made greater by the things that I did to myself.
But to a certain extent—the extent that keeps me alive, and eating, and going about my days—I have learned to understand the emptiness rather than fear it and fight it and continue the futile attempt to fill it up. It's there when I wake in the morning and there when I go to bed at night. Sometimes it's bigger than at other times, sometimes I forget it's even there. I have days, now, when I don't think much about my weight. I have days, at least, when I see properly, when I look in the mirror and see myself as I am—a woman—instead of as a piece of unwanted flesh, forever verging on excess.