When I sat across from the specialist, she looked way too concerned about me for my liking. Her concern made me feel things, and feeling things was something I made a point to avoid. She started talking about how many calories we need in a day just for our organs to function. She talked about how protein keeps our hair follicles strong, and how fat keeps our skin bright and healthy. She was clearly trying to appeal to my vanity, but what she didn’t yet know was that my disorder wasn’t about trying to be pretty. It was about being in control and shrinking my body as much as I could to get the attention I couldn’t seem to get when I looked too healthy.
She got up and pulled a giant sheet of paper from a huge roll hanging from the ceiling. She pushed aside a coffee table full of random objects and Rubik’s cubes, which I always figured were a therapist’s way of setting psychological traps for their patients, making judgments based on what you picked up. Distrustful, I never touched anything, which of course told her everything she needed to know. The specialist then had me lie down on a big piece of paper. She kneeled next to me, and with big black Sharpie, she outlined my body. When she was finished she told me to get up and look at the drawing.
“Did you know that that’s the size of your body?”
As I looked at the outline of my frame, all I could think about were those chalk outlines of dead bodies at a crime scene. And Kate Moss. The two worst things you’d ever want an outline of your body to remind you of. But at that point, the sick perfectionism had taken my frontal lobe hostage, and instead of horror, I felt a sense of accomplishment. My isolating, lying, jogging, and starving had paid off. Anorexia is a disease of the mind that makes being thin your primary source of self-esteem and purpose, so the concern on this woman’s face felt like even more of a win. When I was alarmingly thin, people cared, they fussed over me, they wanted to see me again.
In fact, she asked if I could come in the next day. See? Being thin worked! She was obsessed with me!
However, I didn’t go back the next day because we couldn’t afford it. If nothing else deters you from succumbing to an eating disorder, please listen to this: It costs a fortune. Between the low productivity due to the constant mental distractions, pricey fat-free foods, and the medical specialists, it drains your bank account as much as it drains your energy from low blood sugar. I’m not sure how my mom figured out how to afford it, but I agreed to see the doctor once a week solely because I could tell she was having a complete meltdown underneath the crystallized shell of denial about how thin I was.
Going to this “nutritionist,” who I now realize was an eating disorder specialist, was a big obstacle in my ambitions for skeletal glory. She made me keep a food journal in which I had to write down everything I ate each day. This was perhaps my first piece of published fiction since everything I wrote down was a lie. At this point, I had lost sight of what normal people even ate, so I just wrote down whatever I saw on dinner tables in commercials.
When I went back to see the therapist, she read through my journal. She might as well have been reading Harry Potter. After she skimmed a couple of pages, it was clear that she saw right through my scam. She then asked me to stand on a scale to see if my eating had helped me put on weight, what with all the imaginary roast beef I had been consuming. The first time she weighed me, I remember trying to make myself heavier by bending my knees a bit and leaning back and forth. That’s how cunning eating disorders can be; I actually thought that would work. I thought I could literally defy the laws of gravity. Whenever I get frustrated with the people in my life who struggle with addiction or dysmorphia, I remember how delusional I once was, thinking I could magically put on weight with mental force.
The next session, I was more prepared for the whole scale rigmarole. I had a whole system down: I’d arrive twenty minutes early with four fifty-ounce bottles of water, the ones you see someone carrying at the gym and you roll your eyes at. Like, dude, if you’re that dehydrated, you should probably take the day off. Anyway, I would chug all of them before going into my appointment. As you can imagine, this was as uncomfortable as it was insane, but it actually worked. This time, when I stepped on the scale, I was four pounds heavier due to the water I was holding in my stomach and I guess the pee I was holding in my kidneys. She looked at me half confused, half impressed.
I really hope being pregnant doesn’t hurt as much as drinking four giant bottles of water in a row because I was certain my ribs were going to shatter and that my body would tear open, causing the entire building to flood.
In my experience, eating disorders are all about control, so treating them is incredibly difficult because the more people try to help you, the further you recoil into your disease. Trying to help someone get better can actually make them worse. If you’ve ever had to deal with someone in active addiction or with a personality disorder, you know that it’s very hard to make someone who is sick understand that they’re sick given how many layers of denial shroud their perception. I was no different and since this woman was a little too aggressive with things like “logic” and “concern,” I stopped going to her.
I pretended to go a couple of times, but of course the narc called my mom and told her I didn’t show up. Since for me anorexia was a progressive disease, things kept getting more and more extreme. I became increasingly isolated and dysmorphic. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that I was terrified of some foods. Some people fear heights, others fear sharks; I feared olive oil. When an event was approaching, like a homecoming dance, prom, or a holiday gathering, for weeks prior I would have a knot in the pit of my stomach—not that I would ever eat a knot because it would have been way too many calories. I panicked thinking about what I was going to order at restaurants, how I could pretend to eat at dinner, or what I was going to say to get out of eating altogether. I’ve said every iteration of every prevarication to avoid eating in public: I’m vegan, I have acid reflux, I have celiac disease, wheat gives me migraines . . . The aforementioned is actually sort of true, but I didn’t know that until pretty recently, so for all intents and purposes it was a lie at the time of the telling.