As I’ve mentioned, eating disorders aren’t just about food obsession and restriction. In order to successfully starve yourself, you have to engage in a massive amount of lying to others and to yourself. My friends Jenny and Dori and I laugh about how much I used to lie to them in my early twenties. Now that I’m out of the woods, we make fun of how I used to order at restaurants to avoid eating calories: I would pretend to consider the most fattening meals on the menu, and then fake getting flustered at the buzzer and go for a salad with dressing on the side. When you have an eating disorder, your brain tricks you into thinking other people are absolute morons who are convinced by terrible acting. Knowing full well that I would have a panic attack if a carb came within a foot of my face, I would pretend to be indecisive even though I knew exactly what I was going to order: “So should I get the cheeseburger or the spaghetti with a milk shake? Hmm . . . ugh, I can’t decide. I guess I’ll just get the side salad and a Diet Coke.”
I continued to be the puppet of my eating disorder through college. Being in college was kind of the glory days of my eating disorder because I was alone and could finally engage in all my weird food rituals without having to hide them from my mom. I didn’t have to pray that she would buy the food I could eat, I could just go buy it myself. Once I lived on my own, what I ate started morphing from weird to just straight-up horrific. I know many people with eating disorders have “safe” foods, but mine were so few that I ended up eating only one or two foods for months at a time. That was the kind of rigid control my brain needed to feel calm. I went on a couple of very disturbing culinary tears that give me chills when I look back: I went about a month eating only dried mangoes, for example. I delved into the carcinogenic vortex as well, thoroughly enjoying the wave of new foods that were coming out before the FDA or the organic moms movement took super-toxic products off the shelves. Sugar-free Twizzlers, anything with aspartame, Olestra potato chips. If you don’t remember these chips, they literally had a warning on them saying they deplete your body of vitamin D and give you “runny stools.” But that was not a deterrent for me; I could not give less of a shit about having the shits. Today when people compliment me on having nice skin, I seriously think it may be because I embalmed myself with so many chemicals in my twenties.
Granted, this wasn’t my first foray into artificial foods. I ate so much candy as a kid that the first time I actually ate a grape at around eight years old, I gagged. “There is something very wrong with this grape!” I said, spitting out what I thought was rotten fruit. It tasted nothing like the grape Bubblicious or the Runts I ate on a daily basis. I eventually learned that real grapes didn’t taste anything like my beloved synthetic candy. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that my favorite philosopher is Jean Baudrillard, who wrote about the idea of simulacra, about how in modern civilization people tend to prefer the simulation of something to the original. After eating fruit-flavored candy for so long, actual fruit was a real letdown.
By the time I was twenty-two, my safe “food” choices were incredibly unhealthy, if not downright inedible. I got pretty obsessed with fat-free Swiss Miss hot chocolate, for example. There was a fifty-calorie pack, but certain grocery stores had twenty-calorie packs, and when I found them, I would buy every box they had. I had to rotate grocery stores a lot because the only thing stronger than my desire to stay thin was my desire to be thought of as normal by the cashiers. I would always pretend the groceries I was buying were for someone else or that I thought there was a deal. I would bring ten boxes to the counter at once and do a mediocre performance of a person who’s too lazy to save money. “There’s not a sale on these? Oh, well, I’m already here so I might as well just get them anyway.” This was before Amazon, which lets you buy weird things in the privacy of your own home. This was back when you had to face another human being when you bought embarrassing things, back when we had to do bad improv with the cashier and cover up condoms with other products, hoping they’d scan it upside down before seeing “ribbed for her pleasure” on the box.
After a fifteen-year struggle with anorexia, I’m still not sure I even know how to describe it. Well, maybe I’ll start by saying it wasn’t a real struggle until I got into my twenties. My eating disorder was my best friend until I decided that I wanted to stop and simply couldn’t. By the time I moved to Los Angeles, as I tried to control my need to control, the pendulum swung to the opposite extreme. My brain convinced my hands and mouth to start bingeing instead of restricting, but I never purged or threw up my food. I’m truly not sure why, since I had the neurological makeup and perfect childhood to make me a red-hot candidate for bulimia. Maybe I wasn’t ambitious enough, or maybe I was too much of a masochist, because the aftermath of bingeing meant extreme stomach pain and countless hours at the gym. This was a perfect justification for my need to isolate. If I threw up my food, that would mean I’d actually have time to see people and function in society, which was my nightmare.
If the idea of binge-eating didn’t make you jealous enough of my life, the weirder part is that I started doing it in my sleep. My body and brain were so bifurcated, so at war, that when I fell asleep, my body would take over and seek the nutrients it needed. Clearly my subconscious didn’t trust me to provide myself with food anymore, so like a puppet master, it started getting the job done without me. I know sleep eating sounds funny in theory, but it’s actually pretty terrifying to wake up every morning with the taste of barbecue sauce in your mouth and have it smeared all over your face. Many mornings I’d look in the mirror and think I was covered in dried blood, wondering for a second if I had been stabbed in the night before realizing I had gone nuts on strawberry jelly in my sleep.
Every morning I felt like the dude from Memento, trying to piece together what happened. From what I could make of the forensics, apparently I would get up three A.M. and ravage anything in the kitchen with calories. The next morning I’d wake up surrounded by wrappers in my bed; sometimes I was even sticky from whatever weird sauce I blindly poured down my throat. Sometimes I had painful cuts on my gums and the inside of my cheeks from whatever I had been jamming into my face at four A.M. After I got out of bed, I’d slowly walk into the kitchen, dreading the carnage I’d find. It all felt very cinematic, like I was in a horror movie and had just walked in on a grisly crime scene. But what I found was often way weirder than a dead body. I’d walk into a scene that looked like a bomb had gone off in a grocery store and created an apocalyptic graveyard of chicken carcasses and broken jelly jars. I was used to walking on eggshells, but walking on broken glass was a new one.
To further complicate my disorder, I faced another interesting development around this time. My parents stopped giving me money. I was given money only if I was in total crisis, e.g. my perpetually worn-down brakes and dried-fruit-induced cavities. Other than that, I was on my own.