In Recovery

No. No. Susannah, don’t look at your dinner. Ignore it. No. Choke down your Diet Coke and give a watery smile and act like everything is okay. The more you smile the less fake you seem and everyone will believe you and everything is fine, just fine.

When you excuse yourself and get up, just try to keep your balance. Forget about the pounding in your head and that ever-numbing emptiness. If you pretend the black spots in your vision don’t exist then they won’t exist, because that’s how things work.

Calm down. Breathe. Go back to your room. Try not to crumble because you ate, you actually ate food yesterday. And when you start hitting yourself, your legs and your stomach and your head, be relentless because you deserve the pain.

Keep hitting and hitting and hitting because maybe the other pain you feel will go away. The pain that stabbed you when you failed that test, or when that boyfriend broke up with you. The pain you felt on that awful day three months ago, when you looked in the mirror and decided to stop eating, because you looked fat.

Fat. The word is forever stamped onto my brain and it burns my tongue. It’s a threat as much as it is a punishment. I was eight when the word first hit me, a harsh slap in my face. I was standing on my grandma’s back porch, a chorus of a thousand cicadas whispering in my ear.

My brother and I were arguing, going back and forth, trying to one-up each other with our most scathing insults.

“Yeah, well you’re stupid!”

“Yeah, well you’re dumb!”

A pause.

“Yeah, well you’re fat!”

We both went silent. My brother blanched. His words settled between us, an ocean of hurt.

This was different from our usual fights. We could use as many petty insults as we wanted; it was an unspoken rule. But “stupid” and “dumb” are harmless. “Fat” is a kind of venom you can’t suck out of the veins. It stays. It circulates.

I’ve always been the fat kid. The fat friend. The fat girl. The desire to lose weight had gnawed at me every day for years, a fire fed by self-doubt. Hiding behind my towel while my friends showed off their new bikinis at the pool. Covering my arms with heavy sweaters in 100 degree heat. Shopping for larges while my friends happily purchased smalls. I was ashamed.

Halfway through my sophomore year, I started my diet. I wanted to be healthier, have more confidence. I was eating 1200 calories a day, the bare minimum amount of calories still considered healthy. I did pilates, I started jogging. I was doing everything right, but everything was going so slowly. Then I had an idea.

A fire was lit in my head, brilliant and burning bright with the possibility of starvation.

The process was gradual. Each day I reduced and restricted everything I ate, and within a month I’d perfected my method. Skipping meals, throwing out my lunch when I got to school. Heading straight to my bed when I got home to ignore the hunger pains that reverberated in my stomach like a broken stereo. Ignoring every urge I had to shove something, anything, in my mouth and swallow it down.

Within two months, I was down to 200 calories a day.

Skinnier, prettier, thinner. As much as fat was a threat, thin was a promise. I would spend hours each day looking at pictures of food I could never eat. Peanut butter and jelly, molten chocolate cake, Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. The pictures and words satisfied me the way I wouldn’t let eating actual food.

Food meant eating and eating meant calories and calories meant fat. Strawberries were 53 calories. Almond milk was 30. Spinach was 7. Meals and snacks were just clusters of them. Everything I ate added up in continually disappointing equations where the sums kept getting lower.

The less I ate, the harder cravings hit. They struck at school, in bed, in the middle of a run. The mere thought of sweets made me shake, but giving into a craving meant binging. And nothing was worse than binging.

Every time I binged I would force myself to my knees in front of the toilet so I could throw it back up. But no matter how far I shoved my fingers down my throat I could never make myself purge the calories I’d poisoned myself with. When I would get up off the frigid bathroom tile, my knees were bruised. My face was covered in snot and tears, and my stomach rumbled uncomfortably, unused to holding more than a cup of food at a time. I looked at my disheveled reflection in the bathroom mirror and all I saw was a failure.

I knew I was digging myself into a hole, but I didn’t know how to get out of it. I didn’t want to.

The effects weren’t immediately visible. The weeks slipped away as I was slicing off more and more calories. My bone-white complexion paled further; my nails were Rothko-esque shades of yellow and blue. Seventy degrees felt like 50 and standing up felt like free-falling. My body was disintegrating and nothing but a sick glow shone from its ruins. I knew I was slowly killing myself, but at least I’d die thin.

What I had wasn’t just a disease. It was an addiction, a competition. I was competing with myself and there couldn’t be a winner, no matter how much I restricted.

***

One day in April I finally lost. In a trance I tip-toed past my dad’s room to the kitchen and started opening the cupboards, knees shaking. As soon as I found the jar, I began shoving sweet, sticky Jif peanut butter into my face. It was the first time I’d eaten protein in over a month, and it was the best thing I’d ever eaten.

When I was done binging I stumbled back to my room, bloated and miserable. I curled into the darkness and began sobbing. I felt like a whale and I wanted to die. I’d lost control, and deep down, I knew I could never get it back.

That’s the thing about rules. You set them, you follow them, but inevitably they’ll be broken. And when I broke my own rules I shattered myself.

It was then that I began to realize that the emptiness in my stomach also left me empty as a person. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cracked a joke or read a book. As much of a cliché as it is, I was what I ate. And I was nothing.

After that initial, awful binge, I spent the next year and a half trying to put myself back together. I realized that I couldn’t go on without eating. Mentally or physically. My body would eventually give out, even though my mind already had. And I couldn’t let that happen. Slowly, I started eating and trying to love myself again.

Recovery isn’t easy. It’s really f***ing hard. It feels like trying to tear down a brick wall with your bare hands. You slump down, bloody and scathed and defeated. You wished you’d never tried. But I had to, for myself.

I hated every second of it. I still do.

And even now, I can’t really remember those months. Years. They writhe and twist in my mind, inscrutable and punctuated only by binges and bitter successes.

But each day I had, still have, a decision to make. I could choose to be happy. I could choose to feel again. I could choose to recover, or I could choose to die.

In the end, I choose life.