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.

safely walk to school without a sound

For the first time in a couple of semesters, I feel eager and confident about starting classes. I'm taking Principles and Methods of Psychology (okay, not so excited about that one), Psychology of Crime and Violence, Clinical Psychology (!!!), and History of Modern France. Game time: which one of these things is not like the others because it's a requirement for graduation? I'm still looking forward to that one too.

I also have an interview to work in a research lab on campus, on a study researching mothers' psychological adjustment and father involvement. I have my fingers crossed. One of my least favorite things about interviews is that I'm sometimes asked about the lull in my grades and in my experience -- a lull that, super coincidentally!, happens to coincide with uncontrolled bulimia.

My rock bottom occurred during the spring semester of sophomore year. It was a hellish time period where bulimia finally, after three years of admirable effort, succeeded in taking over my life. I was occupied by the sickness. It was as though I was simply an eating disorder embodied: no longer Kelly the Friend or Kelly the Comedienne or Kelly the Writer, but simply Kelly the Walking Eating Disorder. Of particular importance during that semester was loss of "Kelly the Student".

Obvious physiological fact of the day: your body and your brain need food to function. And that's just the bottom line. When you throw in unmedicated depression that renders you inert and half-dead, and, perhaps most cuttingly, a sense that you no longer even have a future so why bother, reading and writing and caring about things becomes very difficult. I think my body and my brain were too focused on surviving, and so my ability to read for more than five minutes at a time went right out the window. Oh god, was that a terrible day, when I realized I couldn't read anymore. Horrifying. Obviously this all had an impact on my grades as well.

To this day I sometimes feel guilty that I wasn't able to stick it out, to really dig in my heels and power through. I get angry, sometimes, when I think about my History and Systems of Psychology class. I entered finals with a 98% average. . . and then came the final paper, worth 20% of the total grade. And I couldn't do it. I remember crying in my room at home (I had gotten an extension from the professor and left campus before completing it) because I could not think, could not for the life of me make thoughts cohere. My brain was decimated from exhaustion and malnutrition and the looming reality of inpatient treatment. So I emailed like three sentences to the professor and said I simply couldn't do it. That lowered my grade from a very high A+ to a B in one fell swoop. I sometimes think of girls from treatment who managed to pull out great semesters and get into grad programs before entering residential, and the crazy bullshit eating disorder competitiveness sets in. And I have to laugh at that: beating myself up for not being a good enough perfectionist, for succumbing to a silly thing like a life-threatening eating disorder. And then I tell myself that my GPA is still a 3.6 and I think, good Lord, I'm insufferable.

But on most days, I can accept that it's over and done. I still have two semesters, and I'm really excited for both of them. It's been a year since I've exited treatment and I finally feel like my brain is settling back into my body, back to its old self. I can sleep, and I can eat relatively well most of the time. I'm ready to go back to my old nerdy self and it feels fantastic.