body vigilance

I've started reading Aimee Liu's Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders. I'm surprised I hadn't read it before; I guess it somehow slipped under the radar. I'll start by mentioning that her constant emphasis on people's weight (mentioned in specific numbers) is offputting. An Amazon reviewer articulated it perfectly: though in recovery, the author is clearly still caught up in the world of scales and pounds. While I'm empathetic to her continued struggles, I also think she has to accept responsibility for writing a book that could seriously, unnecessarily trigger the very people it's seeking to help. Weight issue aside, I've found it good so far.

When I reached the chapter about the inborn trait of perfectionism, I stopped dead in my tracks at this:

To test for perfectionism, the researchers asked questions like "Did you spend a long time doing and redoing your hair every morning to make sure it was straight without bumps?"

I cannot begin to tell you how many hours of my life I've poured into fixing and adjusting my hair, judging it and always finding it lacking when compared with other girls'. It was always too flat or too messy or too bland. Never, ever good enough. I have cried in frustration in front of a mirror, hairbrush in hand, more times than I'd care to admit. Though therapy, recovery, and Prozac have helped with my body image disturbances, I am still a chronic mirror-checker -- when in between classes or while out to eat or at a club, I generally have to go to a bathroom at one point and make sure I am not, in my own lovely self-dialogue words, "disgusting". It's an embarrassing habit and it causes me undue stress. It always has. No amount of lovely compliments or positive self-talk has been enough to counter it. While my stomach also contends for the dubious prize of "must scrutinized part of the body", the hair obsession has been far more long-lasting, arising well before the advent of my ED.

I still remember, with clarity so absolute that it surprises me even today, one night when I was in the family room with my siblings and mother, testing how my hair looked in different permutations and anxiously asking for evaluation. I was maybe eight or nine. This testing went on for some time until my older sister snipped, "Why do you spend so much time on your hair if it doesn't look good anyway?" I burst into tears, and that phrase has been burned in my mind ever since.

My family thought I was vain -- always checking and rechecking and then rechecking the mirror again because who knows what could have happened to make my hair tangled or static-y or flat or ugly in the past twelve seconds. Their breezy assessment infuriated me, although of course I never articulated it to them. Body image perfectionism was -- and still continues to be -- an incredibly raw subject for me. Describing it would mean articulating layers and layers of disgust and shame.

Another issue -- and god, this is a weird one to explain -- is angles. Yes, angles. This is a private journal entry I wrote about six days before I went into treatment, after spending a weekend trying to hold my shit together enough to attend my sister's graduation in Massachussetts:

I am so gross. I look hideous, by the way. Horrible. Every single time I looked in the mirror this weekend, I was upset at what I saw. Fat, ugly, round, red, messy. Always. (Strange travel-induced memory this weekend: me at twelve, staying at a hotel in Boston and seeing my face at a new angle in the weird mirrors there, absolutely appalled and ashamed at my profile and my stomach, horrified that this was how I looked to the outside world. Crying over it in the shower.)

That memory of being in Boston and looking in the mirror is also seared into my brain. I don't think I'll ever be able to articulate the intensity of the shame I felt after looking in the mirror. It was just so. . . visceral. I think I had gotten used to looking at myself dead on in the mirror and had accepted that that was how I looked from straight-on (even if I didn't like it.) But knowing that other people were looking at me in ways I couldn't control and didn't have access to (from behind, from my far periphery) decimated me. I just remember that feeling of helplessness. I felt like I had utterly failed in my efforts of vigiliance: it was one thing to look terrible, but it was entirely another to look terrible and not even realize it.

I recognized that this kind of obsession was perhaps more intense than others', but not pathological. Just as I spent years starving, calculating calories, bingeing, and purging while vaguely thinking, you know, everyone probably has a phase like this, I'm no so bad, I didn't think this sort of perfectionism was that uncommon. The results of a screening between high-achieving, psychologically healthy adult women and patients with eating disorders would suggest otherwise:

Except for a handful who had overvalued rules and order as kids, the women who had never had eating disorders registered zero childhood perfectionism, zero inflexibility, and zero doubt and cautiousness. By contrast, 60 of the eating disordered had been perfectionistic, rigid, and rule bound as children.

Another indication that there is something qualitatively and intrinsically different about people who go on to develop eating disorders, hinting again that the role of genetics/biology (this time, in the form of inborn traits) influences ED pathology more than culture.

subconscious

I was watching Intervention* with my mother. It was this heartbreaking story about a woman addicted to painkillers and how her family had to deal with it. Very very sad. Then one about crack addiction came on, and I jokingly said to my mom, "If you ever get the urge to take up crack, please resist". Then she jokingly said, "Let's hope we never have to do an intervention on you." Uh -- awkward.

There actually was a mini-intervention done on me in high school. I literally just remembered this -- maybe repression, maybe because that seems like so long ago. Long story short: I got a note in homeroom from the guidance counselor to go see her, and I was like, whatever, I'm a senior, she probably wants to talk about colleges. Turns out she wanted to talk about self-starvation and sadness. Friends had sought her out. They were awkwardly sitting there and we talked for a bit, and then agreed that I'd see the counselor every so often. I was horrified and embarrassed and angry at my friends, but in truth part of me was relieved.

I was a straight-up restricter at the time and had lost a bit of weight, but not enough for the counselor to adequately give a shit. Which -- it's not like she was a bad person or anything. It wasn't apathy, I guess. I'm going to sound like a jerk, but I was a very self-aware semi-adult with an exceptional knowledge of eating disorders**, and I felt like I was smarter than her in that respect. I also had a stubborn refusal to deal with life, and she didn't specialize in EDs. So that was that. The whole affair left me feeling like a silly girl who wasn't even sick enough to warrant serious attention and obviously she must have thought that I was too fat to really have an eating disorder. It was. . . counterproductive.

When I passed out later in the semester due to hunger/faintness, I got pushed to my parents' car in a wheelchair in the middle of the hallway and I saw her and she just stared and it was this terrible, terrible moment of awkwardness and silent blame and guilt.

ANYWAY. It was an uncharacteristically weird comment from my mother, who is in all other respects educated and very empathetic in all things eating disordered. I wound up saying, "Well, that hits a little close to home, huh?" and she said, "Why?"

Why? Because I was in treatment for ten weeks. My mother (and father, and sisters, and brother) visited me at a place where girls/women were pacing around and crying and freaking out about pasta, and she cried when I told her about my suitemate at Renfrew who was dying -- not immediately, not right away, but in a wasting kind of way, in a slow-burn, slow-fade kind of way. I was -- and am -- one of those girls.

This is not a coherent post. It was just a profoundly weird interaction. Maybe she just didn't want to think of her daughter as having something in common with a 52-year-old crack addict.

*I'm feeling morally conflicted about this but I don't have the energy to write about it at 1:25AM. But I know I will soon enough.
**People with eating disorders tend to have an obnoxious knowledge of them, at least in my experience of knowing people with EDs.