She didn’t make a joke or laugh it off. She just looked very sad for me. I don’t know what it was about that moment, but for some reason it woke me up. Maybe I realized that I was hurting people I loved with my behavior, or worse, disappointing them, which was a threat to my perfectionism. Maybe I was ready to change, maybe Jenny is my guardian angel and shone a divine light on me. Or maybe I was just tired.
What’s interesting to me is that Jenny isn’t a doctor or a therapist or a documentary. When you live in an alternative delusional reality, facts sound like fiction, so if people tell you the truth, it doesn’t really help much; it just kind of makes you want to get away from the person telling it to you. I must have subconsciously known on some level that I was killing myself; the point is, I didn’t acknowledge that reality. Today denial is without a doubt my greatest fear in life because I know how powerful and insidious it is. It’s made me do terrible things to my body and has even been the fuel on the fire of wars, genocides, racism, and trends like drawn-on eyebrows and shiny clear bra straps that almost draw more attention than normal opaque ones. Denial is dangerous. Make sure you don’t have it.
Jenny’s face that day was the first step in shattering my denial. Something shifted in me that day. This moment also collided with the point in my stand-up career when I was starting to go on tour, opening for comics like Steve Byrne and Bobby Lee, and my lack of energy was starting to sabotage my dreams. I had to be on a plane at six A.M. and had to perform at eight and ten at night. My immune system was so weak that I was always run-down and constantly sick. I was finally getting what I wanted in life, but I was too dizzy and lethargic to enjoy it. Since I was tired of being tired, I finally experimented with trying a carb here or there, and it was incredible how much energy they gave me. Eating a piece of bread would literally feel like I had just snorted a line of cocaine. When I was about twenty-three, I finally ate a whole bagel, and I was like Bradley Cooper in that movie Limitless, bouncing off the walls, super focused, able to get through the day without a headache or a low-blood-sugar nap. One day I ate a bowl of cereal with 2 percent milk and I wrote an entire TV pilot script in eight hours. Once I saw how productive I could be on calories, I was sold. Food was my new secret weapon. And even crazier, after a couple of weeks during which I ate real food in sane quantities, my hairbrush no longer looked like Chewbacca.
Maybe it was unhealthy for Jenny’s reaction and work goals to be what helped me slay this thing; maybe I was trading one unhealthy obsession with another, but whatever it was, it was better than being a walking zombie full of sodium benzoate. It doesn’t really matter what the catalyst was; the important thing was that Jenny’s reaction to the “food” in my cabinets made me want to get help.
When I first decided to talk to Vera about my eating disorder, I was stunned when she told me my issue had very little to do with actual food. I thought that statement was odd, given food was pretty much all I thought about. Moreover, the disorder was, as I’ve already said, more about feeling like I had a modicum of control in a hectic environment than being thin. As long as I was eating something fat-and sugar-free, everything was okay. Well, everything except my liver.
Turns out my eating disorder was also about having incredibly low self-esteem, which may not be a surprise to you guys, but for me it was straight-up breaking news. When I first heard that I had low self-esteem, I was flabbergasted. Shocked, I tell you. Downright stunned. Everyone always told me I was so “strong” and “confident.” I found out that many people, including myself, conflate being loud and talking a lot with having self-esteem. However, I’ve learned that the loudness of your voice is not an indicator of your feelings of self-worth. In my case, the two are actually antithetical: The louder I’m talking, the less faith I have that someone is actually listening. I became loud because as a kid I didn’t feel heard, so I developed the habit of overcompensating and talking as if I’m always hailing a taxi. Once Vera explained this to me, it all made a lot of sense, given the paradigm I was living by was that my external appearance was more valuable than my health. Of course this assumes anyone even finds an emaciated girl with thinning hair attractive, which I certainly don’t. My disease distorted my reality to the point that I lost the plot on why I was even starving myself in the first place. It went from a logical way to get attention as a kid to a mindless habit to an insidious disease that cost me a lot in dental bills and God knows how much in bone density.
Vera had me do some “inner child work.” I heard people talk about their inner child, but to me it sounded creepy and perverted. I came to therapy to learn how to act like an adult, so why are we talking about being children? This sounds—I don’t know—kinda childish? I learned the key to being an adult may just be honoring the young part of yourself—your basic emotional needs, insecurities, and the mental conditioning that was done at a young age. Through connecting to your inner child, which you can call whatever you want if inner child weirds you out: your source, your gut, your inner fetus . . . I really don’t care. Through this connection you honor the defense mechanisms you developed as a kid in order to survive your family system and start to deactivate them. Essentially, you start to parent yourself the way you wished you had been parented: with patience, sensitivity, forgiveness, and butter.
Vera gave me an exercise to do where you write to your inner child and ask him/her a question. If you’re struggling for an answer to something or if you aren’t sure about what to do in a situation, you write out a question in your dominant hand (you) and write the response with your nondominant hand (your inner child). Initially I thought the whole idea was ridiculous and probably for narcissistic pedophiles. I hardly respond to e-mails, so how was I going to make time to sit down and write a letter to some needy imaginary kid?
I resisted doing this exercise for a very long time, but one day I was overwhelmed with anxiety and frustration and was all out of ideas on how to soothe myself. Eating wasn’t working, not eating wasn’t working, texting guys wasn’t working, working wasn’t working. Weed wasn’t even working, so you know it was bad.
I figured if I did the stupid exercise, I could at least end up writing some jokes about how ridiculous the whole thing was. I wrote a couple questions out with my right hand. The first one was pretty passive-aggressive: “What do you want to eat?” I switched to my left hand as Vera instructed me to do. Look, I’m not big on ruminating about the metaphysical because I’m still trying to figure out the physical, but something I can only describe as magical happened akin to what people are apparently experiencing when they use a Ouija board: A force flowed through my left hand and it started moving the pen across the page. My left hand scribbled “peanut butter smiles.”