She and I had always been control freaks. Yet we both drank to the point of losing control. It sounds contradictory, but it makes total sense. The demands of perfectionism are exhausting, and it’s hard to live with a tyrant. Especially the one in your own mind.
So she quit drinking, and we found ourselves, once again, two lonely members of an outsider tribe. We began taking long walks around the lake, sharing all the stories we had not told in the years of superficial catch-up. We stayed up talking at her house, and some nights it was like we were 13 years old again, laughing so hard we almost peed, except instead of her mom telling us to keep it down we were interrupted by her daughter, dragging a fuzzy blanket. “I can’t sleep,” she would say, finger in mouth, and she would hop up into her mother’s lap, one last stint in the world’s safest place.
Talking was the glue of our world, never drinking. We were good talkers. Our conversations were so natural, so obvious. She would talk, and then I would talk, and then somehow, through this simple back-and-forth, we could start to hear the sound of our own voices.
NINE
BINGE
One afternoon, I got an urge to pull into the drive-through at Jack in the Box. Do I like Jack in the Box? Not particularly. But the urge snagged me, and before I could unsnag myself, I was on the conveyor belt that led to the drive-through’s metal box, where I ordered my carb explosion. What I noticed—as I idled there with a queasy feeling like I was getting away with something—was that absolutely no one was going to stop me. The bored teenager wearing a headset did not ask “Are you sure about this, ma’am?” The woman who swiped my credit card did not raise an eyebrow, because she had seen so much worse. There were precious few barricades between my stupid, fleeting impulse and the moment I sat on the floor of my living room with ketchup covering my fingers and chin.
“I just ate an Ultimate Cheeseburger,” I told my friend Mary. She lived around the corner from me, and she had been a champion binge eater most of her life.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “Did you get the curly fries, too?”
“I can’t believe you even asked that.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie. Of course you did.”
When addiction lives in you, it sprouts many vines. For the first year after I quit drinking, I refused to worry about food. I would do whatever it took to give up alcohol, which included a typical dependency swap: Trade booze for smokes. Or trade smokes for Double Stuf Oreos. Or Nutella. Or Double Stuf Oreos with Nutella.
A year and a half of drinking nothing should’ve made me proud. But a year and a half of eating everything in my path had left me defeated and ashamed.
“I think I need to go on a diet,” I told Mary, lobbing the words into the air before I could snatch them back. Diet: the toxic buzzword of body dysmorphia. Diet: those things destined to fail.
In the old days, a heroine in search of happiness lost weight and found a prince. But current wisdom dictates a heroine in search of happiness should ditch the prince, skip the diet—and gain acceptance. Stop changing yourself to please the world and start finding happiness within. That’s a good message, given all the ways women are knocked around by the beauty-industrial complex.
But my problem wasn’t a deficit of acceptance. It was too much. I drank however I wanted, and I accepted the nights that slipped away from me. I ate however I wanted, and I accepted my body was a home I’d never want to claim as my own. Sitting on that linoleum floor, surrounded by empty foil wrappers and my own disgust, I wondered if I could use a little less acceptance around here. Or, to be more precise: Acceptance was only half the equation. The other half was determining what was unacceptable—and changing that.
I DON’T KNOW when I stopped taking care of myself. In college, Anna used to foist vegetables on me, which was exactly what my mother used to do when I was a child. They were both healthy eaters, who saw beauty in nature’s bounty, and I was a hedonist who liked slapping away her broccoli. I had the tastes of a frat boy, or a grumpy toddler. No to vegetables. Yes to ranch dressing. I actually described the food I liked as “nothing healthy.”