"running into a room, slamming your door, and crying your eyes out burns a lot of calories"

In The Know: Should We Be Shaming Obese Children More?

I love The Onion as much as I hate obesity panic.

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.

"sitting with my feelings"

In Renfrew-land, "sitting with one's feelings" means experiencing discomfort, frustration, anger, and sadness without using the eating disorder as a crutch or distraction or dissociation. So, for instance, when I feel like I'm crawling out of my skin because I'm too full, which I am tonight, I am supposed to live through the absurd discomfort without purging or restricting. I should also coexist with my irrational belief that I've suddenly gained a lot of weight, that I'm totally fat now. UGH SHUT UP BRAIN.

It's noble and reasonable and worthwhile to "sit with my feelings", but in the moment it's really fucking annoying. Whenever a nurse or counsellor or therapist at Renfrew said this, at least one person would kind of freak out, either in the moment or afterwards. It's like UGH SHUT UP, YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS FEELS LIKE, STOP BEING SO PATRONIZING. I suppose this is similar to what alcoholics feel. It must be like, yes, yes, for fuck's sake, I know I can't drink, I know I'm a better person in recovery, I know I have an addiction -- but all I want to do at the end of this shitty day is have a glass of wine, is that too much to ask?

The truly absurd thing is that I'm mostly full from too many fluids. I felt dizzy at work today so I had two big glasses of OJ and about 40 ounces of water in a short time period. When you factor in the three coffees I also had at work, then the diet Coke. . . you can see how my stomach feels pretty distended. I feel gross I feel gross I feel gross, but tomorrow's another day, eh?

I almost don't want to end on an optimistic note because I need people to know that this SUCKS, that it is a terrible terrible pervasive feeling. Rawrrrrr, stupid eating disorders.

focusing on not focusing on my stomach (and face, and arms, and thighs, and argghhhhh).

Having a bad body image day is analogous to crawling out of my skin. It's this acute awareness of my flesh that creeps in slowly in the most mundane moment -- when I'm driving or reading or talking to a friend -- and then infiltrates my entire stupid brain, growing more urgent as it remains. I feel like I am sheer flesh at the moment -- just fat without discernible shape or muscle. It is deeply uncomfortable.

It doesn't matter that my weight is pretty stable at a moderately thin weight, nor does it matter that I've received a lot of nice compliments from strangers and friends, the latter of whom are pretty much universally supportive all the time. And it doesn't matter that I intellectually know that I am not, in fact, grotesque -- because, honestly, if my eating disorder were an intellectual affair, I'd've thought my way out of the whole shebang in five minutes.

Rawr. Obnoxious Pollyanna-esque silver lining: this feeling always goes away with a bit of time. In the meantime, I have to focus on not restricting/purging/being eating disordered and try to get in some yoga. It makes me feel much more connected and cohesive and sane. And, more pressingly, I should get some sleep.

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.

on hunger

I have a really low appetite, and I don't know if that's due to the eating disorder fucking up my metabolism/hunger cues or if it's just what I'm naturally like. And it's sad - I actually have no idea what I'm "naturally like" in regards to hunger because I can't remember the last time when I wasn't weird about it all.

But basically, due to a bunch of different circumstances, I didn't get to eat much today. Then my family and I went to my father's friend's private restaurant-opening party. There was a buffet, which I was actually comfortable with. . . until I realized it was not vegetarian-friendly. Long story short: I spent a while at the restaurant weak with hunger. After about 45 minutes, the owner made some vegetarian hoagies. I was really grateful - I felt like my vegetarianism was such an imposition. I was exhausted and cranky and inpatient and all I wanted to do was go home and eat "my own food" and possibly sleep.

And it made me realize that, oh my god, I was always that miserable when I was sick. A lot of my problems were psychological, but there's also the simple physiological fact that humans need food and they feel terrible without it.

It made me really appreciate recovery.

And those vegetarian hoagies were really good.

annoying eating disorder terminology pt. 1: "food rituals"

Confession: I am a serial muffin dissector.

This is what we refer to as a "food ritual". If you've even been in residential or inpatient treatment for an eating disorder, you will come to hate this terminology, because any person will come to hate anything that they hear SIX THOUSAND TIMES A DAY. To be fair, it is those counselors' jobs to kindly but firmly say things like, "See, what you're doing is a food ritual. In the real world, people don't tap their fork to their plate three times after they eat pizza."

The gist: almost everyone has a few little eating quirks. These are mostly habits they develop as little kids then grow out of: eating food on their plate in a clockwise fashion or eating foods by color (yellow first, then green, then brown. . . ). I don't know, things like that. But, as with pretty much everything in the world, people with eating disorders take this to an unhealthy extreme. They develop these rituals mostly because the anxiety of eating a "normal" amount of food and digesting it like a Real Person is suffocating when you've spent so much of your life doing the opposite of just that. So food rituals aren't just actions; they're systems, and they generally serve as a way to lessen anxiety by exerting familiar control over eating, to take the edge off of an incredibly uncomfortable situation.

They tend to make little sense, but it is extremely anxiety-provoking for the patient when they're stripped away. In treatment, there was a girl, for instance, who had to eat an apple in 20 bites. No more, no less. This was an intelligent girl. She recognized the absurdity of it, but she also fiercely clung to it on a visceral level. A few other people "had" to cut food into laughably infinitesimal pieces.

For me, there is a positive correlation between the amount of social anxiety or insecurity I'm feeling and the number of muffin pieces that wind up strewn across my plate. Muffins are an easy culprit because you eat them with your hands -- it's like God WANTED you to rip them up into countless pieces, right?

Occasionally it extends elsewhere. Once, on a date, I ordered a Nutella and strawberry crêpe. (When I'd realized that we'd be going to a crêpe place, I spent the rest of the afternoon/evening stressing out because I had just eaten a big meal and wasn't intending on eating anything else and oh my god the world is ending, omg.) I cut it. . . and cut it. . . and cut it. Over and over, until it looked like a crêpe massacre had taken place on my plate. I was aware of how stupid it looked, how childish, but I couldn't help it, and it was embarrassing. And on the outside I could see that it looked like a coy oh-look-at-me-eating-like-a-bird-how-precious-and-feminine scenario, but it wasn't. It was actually more of a you-are-evaluating-me-right-now-and-thinking-I'm-probably-inadequate-and-of-course-fat-so-I-need-an-eating-disorder-way-of-handling-this. This kind of behavior existed long before the advent of my eating disorder, too: I remember being pretty damn young, definitely pre-teenaged, and conflating people-hate-me anxieties with my perceived overeating and high weight. (In reality, I was eating a perfectly normal amount and I was really quite thin. I didn't go on to develop an eating disorder for no reason.)

The crêpe affair actually happened when I was like. . . six months out of treatment. So, suffice it to say, there is still headway to be made in this particular arena. The Ziploc baggie in my pantry full of leftover muffin crumbs from breakfast could tell you as much.

how intelligent people come to believe in absurd things

A while back, I was writing a piece for a fiction class about the children of a mother with schizophrenia. At some point in the story, I was working through a way of describing what schizophrenia must be like, inspired in part by a throwaway comment in Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind: "The nightmare of schizophrenia is not knowing what’s true. Imagine if you had suddenly learned that the people, places, and moments most important to you were not gone, not dead, but worse – had never been. What kind of hell would that be?"

Anyway, in the story I was trying to inject some of this truth -- the hell of not knowing, the gap between objective reality and personally experienced "reality". I wound up cutting the scene because it was sub-par (I am a proudly ruthless self-editor), but in writing it I found what remains my working layperson's definition of mental illness and disease:

Believing in untrue things that make your life hellish.

Simplistic? Oh hells yes. Simplistic enough that I've never mentioned this theory to any psychology major or psychotherapist or anything like that. But to me, it tends to encompass a lot of different mental disorders, eating disorders of course included.

For example, something that came up yesterday: I have a specific weight in my mind that I would like to reach -- a number far below what is medically or personally healthy. After a couple of weeks of zero appetite and lessened caloric intake, I am now closer to that weight than I've been in while. (Well, relatively speaking. I'm talking about a rather sizable loss, here. Because I'm nuts.)

Anyway, even now -- even before I reach that number -- it is already inadequate. It is already not enough. I am acutely aware of the pointlessness of losing weight. I know it will not take me anywhere worth going, and I know that it will never satisfy me. I know that it will cause me incredible anguish and isolation and sadness, because it will involve diving back into ED.

At the same time that I know this fact, I also believe its logical contradiction: I will feel better at this weight and I will look better at this weight; ergo, I must reach this weight. I will be able to reach this weight and maintain it without spiraling into an eating disorder frenzy. Once I reach this weight, it will be enough.

Both of these ideas are constantly yapping around in my brain, shrill and shrieking, jockeying for position, and I tell them to shut up because I don't care any more, don't have the energy or will, but the sheer fucking loudness of it all is enough to drive you crazy.

The only thing I knew how to do was keep on keepin' on like a bird that flew, tangled up in blue. Thanks, Bob. You've got my back.

beginnings

I can't start with a carefully honed history of my eating disorder or a nuanced explanation of the neuropsychological or existential or psychological underpinnings of my eating disorder or any one else's eating disorder. I can't offer a definitive list of What An Eating Disorder Is and What An Eating Disorder Is Not, partially because no such lists exist and partially because I lack the colossal emotional/intellectual energy making such lists would entail.

It's well within the realm of possibility that three people will ever read this, and that's okay. I started this because it's been roughly a year since I've been discharged from residential treatment for bulimia, and though I am doing well, I am also so tired of fighting eating disordered thoughts every single day that I want to scream. So here's an outlet, I suppose. I'm not going for emo ramblings of how ~*hard*~ recovery is. Though it is without a doubt the most difficult thing I've ever attempted, that's besides the point, and it's also boring. I mostly just want to write about this because it dominates my life, because the eating disorder and the ensuing recovery have been the most formative experiences of my life. I write if only because it's impossible not to. Also, I have to say that I find eating disorders sheerly fascinating on an intellectual level, so there's tons of interesting theories waiting to be expounded upon out there in the philosophical ether.

Anyway. The beginning and middle of this poem encapsulates where I'm at right now, and the end is just lovely.

You are tired,
(I think)
Of the always puzzle of living and doing;
And so am I.

Come with me, then,
And we'll leave it far and far away—
(Only you and I, understand!)

You have played,
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of,
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break, and—
Just tired.
So am I.

But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight,
And knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart—
Open to me!
For I will show you the places Nobody knows,
And, if you like,
The perfect places of Sleep.

Ah, come with me!
I'll blow you that wonderful bubble, the moon,
That floats forever and a day;
I'll sing you the jacinth song
Of the probable stars;
I will attempt the unstartled steppes of dream,
Until I find the Only Flower,
Which shall keep (I think) your little heart
While the moon comes out of the sea.

-- e.e. cummings