“Because I have a monster. I have a monster that lives in me. This monster, sometimes he’s noisy and sometimes he’s not so loud, but he’s always here, and he’s always, always telling me what to do. He’s responsible for my food problems—making it impossible to eat or try new things. He also makes me anxious and depressed and sad because he tells me what I should think, what I should say, what I should do. And then I do it. No matter what it is. And sometimes I do horrible things.”
You don’t tell them what you did after Ben left Saturday night. You can’t. The monster won’t let you. You’ll get in trouble. You feel your nose get tickly and you are pretty sure you’re going to cry but then your monster tells you not to be a baby, not to cry, so you don’t. Because you always listen to the monster.
“The other night, I made my boyfriend leave because of the monster, and he wasn’t doing anything wrong. And I didn’t want him to leave and now I think we broke up. This monster makes me do bad things. Do you guys have any idea what I’m talking about?”
“You mean like Ed?” one of the girls asks.
Shayna interrupts. “Ed is a term we use for eating disorder, like we’ve given it an identity.”
You look at Shayna and then address the girls again. “It’s worse than Ed. It’s like having Ed plus having a real monster. One who controls every part of your existence. Like for-real real. Like I wake up every single day hoping the monster is dead but he’s not. He’s not dead. He’s not leaving. I can’t get him to leave.”
One of the girls—Nina, she’s textbook anorexic—comes over and hugs you. She’s standing and you’re still sitting and it’s a totally awkward hug, because she’s much too thin and has sharp elbow edges, plus you don’t even know her. You don’t hug her back, but that doesn’t stop her from hugging you harder. This is extremely annoying to you, and then Hailey gets up and group-hugs you.
Jesus Christ, you think.
“I’m so sorry you’re going through this,” Nina says.
“I hate the fucking monster,” you say. “I need it to die.”
Nina pats you on the head and says, “I know, I know.” Her breath stinks. You imagine it’s what death smells like.
You try to pull away. “Please stop hugging me.”
32
It started the night Ben left your house. And every day it gets worse.
The strange thing, the craziest thing about it, is you watch in amazement and can’t believe you can’t feel it.
You can’t feel any of it.
That’s not exactly true. You do feel something.
You feel calm.
The first time you were in the kitchen. Right after you made Ben leave that night, you sat at the kitchen counter, humming to yourself. Although you couldn’t tell if it was you humming, or if the monster was humming. You felt a buzzing, vibrating sound coming from inside. It was echoing and it felt like a force from within. There had been a safety pin on the counter.
A random safety pin.
You picked it up and unlatched it and at first you touched the sharp edge to your thumbnail. You pushed back your cuticle and picked at the skin with the pin. You felt like you might cry because you had made Ben leave, but you forced yourself not to shed tears. It wasn’t you who wanted Ben to go. The monster wanted him to leave. And so he left.
He was gone.
And you were alone.
Alone with the monster.
You pushed your cuticle back on your thumb and then you went through all your nails. All ten of them: you pushed your cuticles back and thought about what you had done. You were mean to Ben and you told him to leave. He left. You should have gone after him and told him you were sorry, explained to him that you hadn’t meant to be rude, that you were out of sorts, not yourself, and you didn’t really want him to leave.
You should have done the simple thing, the right thing, and apologized.
But the monster told you no. Told you to stay there.
So you did.
You had taken the safety pin and pressed your cuticles back with the sharp point, testing the soft area of your skin, and then you scraped them down some more, slowly and deliberately, until they turned pink. Then you scraped until blood came. But you didn’t feel anything like hurt. Nothing. Six of your nail beds bled.
You thought you should have felt something but you didn’t. You heard the humming still, but it didn’t bother you, it just encouraged you. You kept scraping and scraping until more blood pooled from your nail beds, and then you got tired of it so you took the pin and put it down on the counter.
You looked at your left thumbprint, the tiny circles looping round and round, and you noticed lines intersecting the circles; you had never looked that close before. You picked up the safety pin again, traced across those horizontal lines on your thumb, and jabbed at your thumbprint, tried to scrape it from your thumb. You scratched furiously at it, wanting to erase it. It didn’t go anywhere.
The humming, you almost could recognize the tune; not quite, but it was still there, in your ears, like a soft rain, lulling you into a trance. It was comforting.
When you got bored, you went upstairs, knowing that Ben wasn’t going to come back, he wasn’t going to call or text. It would be up to you to apologize. You were the one who hurt him.
*
After that night, you keep the safety pin with you. It doesn’t hurt when you do it, and it’s just a little scraping on skin. You’ve decided it’s a coping skill. Shayna has taught you about coping skills. Like meditation and yoga. Taking walks and listening to relaxing music—soft drums and chants, maybe a river flowing—something to calm you, almost like the humming you do, which sounds like a soft rain. The humming that accompanies the safety-pin activity is soothing.
So the safety pin is a coping skill. It’s easy to keep with you, and after all, it’s “safe.” A “safety” pin. When you feel stressed or unnerved or like the monster is getting too loud, you take the pin and scrape and scratch. At first you focus on your fingernails, and in between your fingers, sometimes on the sides of your wrists, but really, really gently, until the skin turns white and flaky.
You convince yourself this is okay. This is nothing bad. It’s not like you’re going to kill yourself. This is not a razor or a knife. It’s a small safety pin. You only do it for a short while, the scraping, just a few minutes at most. And the blood, when the blood finally comes, doesn’t spurt out, and sometimes there’s no blood at all. But when it comes, it’s subtle, like a soft ooze, so subtle that no one knows. No one but you and the monster. It’s not hard to hide it from your parents either. You camp out in your room, avoid dinners, the usual. They leave you alone and when your mom does check on you, you tell her you’re doing homework.
The times when you get out the safety pin and scrape—when you see that crimson red skim the surface of your skin—you feel relief from some of the internal pain you’re feeling. It’s almost like letting out a little bit of air from a balloon that’s been blown up too much. You just need to let some of that air out so you can breathe.
That’s all.
That’s all this is, you’re sure. You’re letting the monster breathe a bit. And when some of the blood comes, it’s like you’re giving him air.
He’s quiet. And you’re calm.