WM's Story
This is by no means finished, nor will it likely remain as it is. I have received a mountain of support and praise from our visitors. I feel I owe you at least some of my personal story. Please remember this is (c)WM, rakastaa21@aol.com
WM
Eating Disordered
Obsession. Hunger. Fraud. Vice. Crutch. Need. Weakness. Selfish. Milk-fed. Stupid.
Fat. Worthless. Lazy. Sloth. Me. --No matter which word you select, they were all my
name at one point or another, yelled at me by that ferocious taskmaster that used to be my
conscience.
My first experience with disordered eating was at age four. My cousin, J., was
discovered by an increasingly frantic me purging her lunch in the bathroom of a fast food
restaurant in southeast Texas. It had been a long, hot summer(when wasn’t it), and J had
been spending time away from boring Illinois, her overbearing mother, pressure, and all
those things I was to learn later. She was also spending an enormous amount of time
becoming my heroine, idol, leader.
I have no idea who explained what she was doing. Her purging was not only the
first time I had witnessed bulimia, but the first time I had ever consciously witnessed
vomiting. So, of course, at age four, I rationalized they went hand in hand. I remember
making a mental note, licking the imaginary envelope, and filing it in my brain under,
“Future Reference.”
The next six years flew by in unending normalcy, save for an intense fear of
being disliked for my imperfections, most of which only I held in tabulation. Placed in first
grade at age four, eventually testing into a district-wide gifted and talented program, and
heralded as a young Judy Garland, I was not known as an errant failure--at least by
anyone but myself.
Something inside my deepest subconscious yearned for validation, from not only
my immediate social circle, but my own self. There are no memories of internal motivation
where emotions, wants, goals, self, or presence are concerned. My life and soul centered
around my Mother, who had been reared by a veritable senior citizen, and a dying cancer
experiment. My matronly model herself had used that now familiar post mortem to bingeing during young
womanhood.
Mom was my guide, my bootstraps, and my teacher in an unintentional school of
self loathing. She was a highly ethical, caring, and loving woman, without a clue of
responsibility for her own self gravity, let alone a child’s. No fault is bestowed upon her,
however. She was never handed that shiny red tool box usually passed down from
mother to daughter in emotionally “normal” families.
My adolescence became an El Nino of gustatory trial and error. One year I was a
compulsive eater, the next a compulsive exerciser, the next a combination. Feeling or
knowing actual hunger had not even happened to my system up to this point. While my
Mother progressively became emaciated from insulin abuse, I continued to loathe this
one-time food friend, surreptitiously plotting my own future famine.
Upon graduation from high school, top of my class, lousy with scholarships and
familial prescriptions for career selections, I moved away from my emotional totem pole
for the first time.
College was an interesting experiment. My freshman year would pass
relatively normally, with only the fleeting voice of that id controlled child occasionally
making herself known.
At the end of this low tide, a program aired on television that was very
similar--shockingly similar, to my own personality. I would come to celebrate the date of its airing as a sort of Ana Anniversary(I kid you not). It was an interview with someone who
had been battling anorexia, and it was all just too good. Realizing that being a doctor,
lawyer, President, astronaut, ad nauseum had never been a goal for me, my plan was
made. I had been clinically eating disordered before, long before, but with my family’s
views on the quackery of Psychiatry, my trials had merely been dismissed as attention
seeking brat behaviour.
Yes, I did strive during those early youthful years to be something. I strove to be
anorexic in all its cousin J glory. She was knocked up and married twice by my adulthood, but
no one bothered to fill me in as to her heroine failing horror. She was still my four year
old’s dream, perfect and loved in every way--fully validated.
So, on that air date of no return, silly me actually
attempted to “come out of the closet” regarding my prior eating disorder. My mother
shrugged, stated, “You don’t have an eating disorder,” and walked into the kitchen to talk
with the dog.
The next morning, after a night of replaying the show in my head(I, of course,
videotaped it), I had my plan. My mother would never again say I was not what I
claimed. Belittle me no more, for I would be cousin J’s successor.
Over the next two years, eating progressively less and surviving mostly on sugar free juice
drinks, I receded to precisely forty-five percent of my self. Being away at college allowed
my disorder to fester to a point where I was lost within it.
Surprisingly, instead of coming
to me during holiday breaks, reaching out to her shrinking daughter, my mother lauded me
as something larger than life. I was paraded around the office, with friends, among family
as one cohesive idol.
No matter the form of praise or validation, my starved soul fed from these
displays. On campus, the mood towards me was much the same -- everyone stopping me,
asking what my secret was, making flippant comments such as, “Don’t you blow away
now!” They needn’t have worried. I was firmly rooted in the fruits of my sacrifices.
Catching my reflection in a mirror or glass window was frightening. I was not
scared by what I saw, but rather who was not there. Walking home from the student deli
to my dorm one day, I held a mini-cupcake in my hand. I had paid ten cents for it and
thought I might actually have something besides juice, soda, coffee, boiled potatoes and
salad vegetables. I stopped at the kinesiology building to seclude my treasure-feast in the
bathroom. After what seemed like hours, I stood there holding the unwrapped treat,
leaning against the sink for support, hands shaking badly, fondling the consistency I had
not so much as touched in more than two years. “Why can’t I do it?” I begged my brain.
Collapsing in tears, I threw the vile contaminant in the trash and scrubbed my hands with a
sob-laden vigor.
Reaching my dorm, I phoned a national hot-line for eating disorders and spoke
with a buzzard-voiced, marble-statued messenger. She was unkind, cold, and closed. The
only words of wisdom she offered were, “You are killing yourself you know!”
There was no need for her to state what my body was already feeling.
Over spring break that year, I attempted to eat pretzels, lost control, ate the entire
box, took my first overdose of laxatives, and created an anal fissure.
My bones were slicing through my skin.
Returning to classes, I wore gloves in Texas in March, sat shivering and gray on
numbed legs, waiting in silent storm for release to my bed. The same people who were
singing my praises became a sea of concerned eyes, washing over me wherever I went.
Wearing shorts caused colleagues to corner me in the halls, asking, “Are you starving
yourself?” I would get close to their faces, too close, in an attempt to exert control. “It’s
being taken care of,” I lied. We’d go out to awesome restaurants, and they’d order huge
and satisfying meals. I sat with my diet soda enduring the process more than joining the
banter.
My sister died during this time. I went to her funeral and promised her memory I
would never abuse myself with purgatives again. On our way out of town, my mother and
I stopped at a barbecue place. I ordered a baked potato. Getting back on the road, I
faked a need for a bathroom. She stopped at a convenience store. Thanking my lucky
stars for keeping her in the car, I purchased a box of laxatives and downed a necessary
amount, hiding the rest in my slip. I did not even have the decency to apologize to my
dead sister.
The next year of school, life, home is a blur of sneaking, stealing, laxative
overdoses that almost took my life, and a suicide attempt.
Somehow I managed a paltry recovery by proxy and two polar opposite therapists.
That Thanksgiving, on the way home from college, I told my mother to go to hell if she
was not going to help me. We were closer after that moment until her death than we’d
ever been in our lives.
I have lived the last couple of years freely, happily at times, despite losing Mom. I
accomplished goals I was too uncertain of to merely set for my less than capable self.
Like a small child afraid in the night, however, my eating-disordered voice calls.
Anorexia As Is Home
Email: rakastaa21@aol.com
