My therapist divides a sheet of paper into three sections—one for each year—and asks what I was angry about each time I stopped eating.
Today I am spinning a story that this is all about anger. Anger is the root, the underlying cause, of everything. Of course. How simple, how easy. How could I not have seen it before?
As usual, I am very convincing. She believes it. I believe it. My mind is racing, staring at the paper, at her hand hovering, ready to write. What happened in 2003? What happened in 2009? What happened in 2017?
After ten years of not self-harming, I had suddenly started to want to again. Want is not nearly the right word, though, is it? It was more like the mental illness equivalent of developing a sudden fever. Fevers make you dissociate. They make it difficult to think clearly. You can't perceive the same way. If the fever gets high enough, you can become delirious. And that is what happened in 2017. I spiraled into a severe depressive episode, and I became delirious with the desire to hurt myself.
I resisted at first—I'm not sure how long, a few months maybe—before buying a small box of matches at the grocery store so I could give myself a few little burns in places no one would ever see. I figured that was pretty innocuous, not the worst thing in the world, as relapses go. Unfortunately, "pretty innocuous" didn't do much to satisfy the intensity of the craving I was having.
One day I walked to a giant hardware store down the street and spent hours wandering through it hunting for the best knife or blade to cut myself with. At that point, I still don't think I was committed to actually following through. I just thought, why not look, why not see what's out there? Looking back now, that day in particular stands out so sharply (pun…not intended? well, I’m keeping it, so I guess it is now!) in my memory compared to the blurriness of the rest of that time period. It was like an out-of-body experience. Or like I was in a strange semi-lucid trance—but really, it was not just that day. For months, I was not here. Or there? Wherever I was supposed to be.
There were times I couldn't think about anything else. I felt like I needed to hurt myself in order to survive, let alone for the possible relief beyond that of lifting some of the despair.
This is also how, much later, I began to know I was getting better, when I felt that desire fading away. When it didn't seem worth the effort anymore. Not because I had stumbled onto any kind of wisdom, insight, or growth, but solely because I was finally emerging on the other side. I was becoming less depressed, and the change was as noticeable to me as a fever slowly dropping. That chill leaving the body.
Unfortunately, in-between those two moments, in-between the hardware store and the fever falling, I decided to play around with another form of self-harm. I decided I was going to lose some weight.
Whatever I told myself in the beginning to minimize what I was doing, I know I did not start out with healthy motives or plans of going about it in a non-extreme way. I wanted to lose a lot of weight, fast, and I wanted it to stun me out of my sadness like a hard blow to the head. Which I knew it could do. I knew because I had done it in the past, twice—but had been able, both those times, to veer quickly back to health once it had served its purpose.
I was about six years into managing a severe anxiety disorder that no one in my family knew how to deal with and, for the most part, preferred not to acknowledge at all. Anxiety that would get exponentially worse whenever I couldn't be at home in my safe routine. Whenever I felt trapped—at school, at holiday parties thrown by relatives, on family vacations, even just going out to a restaurant or to a friend's house—I would have anxiety attacks. Years and years of white-knuckling through crisis after crisis and being completely alone with it (or having to rely on fellow 12-, 13-, 14-year-olds with their own mental health problems to look after me—which they did manage to do better than any of the adults in my life). I quickly learned that I had to endure it as silently and secretly as possible. I had to figure out coping skills on my own, many of which were addictive, bizarre, and/or self-harmful.
In 2003, I discovered another behavior that checked all the boxes on the list of things I never stopped wanting (a high, a distraction from suffering, controlled visibility, concern from others, a way to punish my family): restricting food.
I didn't do it for long—a few months, half a year, maybe. I viewed it as a choice. I felt I was always in control of it. So that later [2017], when I was constantly trying to figure out how far I could go before I was crossing a line (if I only hit myself? if I only burn myself? if I don't break the skin? if I only break the skin a little?), restricting food was a self-harm I could convince myself was less of a problem, certainly less societally unacceptable. A self-harm that wouldn't be as difficult to conceal. Safe(/r) to revisit. Maybe no one would ever find out about it at all.
For seven minutes my therapist talks at me (it can be very difficult to get me to actually participate in a conversation) about how a person develops an eating disorder, about the kind of upbringing such a person likely would have had, about how such a person might perceive and interact with the world around them. She doesn’t know me yet. This is only our second session. She is trying to find a way in. Finally she stops talking. She wants to know what I think; does any of that sound like me? We sit in silence for a long time.
When I speak, the words come at a crawl. My speech goes into slow motion when I want to say something that feels important, as if the path from my brain to my mouth is a backed-up queue. As if every phrase is being forced to fill out extensive paperwork proving it’s the perfect phrase before it will be allowed to exit my lips.
“It’s really weird to me … whenever someone tells me I have an eating disorder … I don’t really feel like that’s true … I’m not sure why … I think it might be because I see all self-destructive behavior as … the same. … What it seems like … to me … is … this is just another way that I am hurting myself.”
“So you’re saying to me that you have a desire to hurt yourself?” my therapist says.
I can feel myself sag a bit with relief. Yes! That one.
It makes me cringe inside to talk about it. To even write or say the phrase "eating disorder" in reference to myself. The words feel like a crime in my mouth and always tumble out fast and slurred. My stomach churns up a nice, strong shame. I know everyone's struggle is valid. That anyone who gets into a pattern of disordered eating deserves help, no matter what caused it or how bad it gets or how long it goes on. I know it's never good to compare your mental illness to someone else's. And still, there is a part of me that feels I can't claim it, not in the same way others can.
I have not fought this chronically. I did not grow up hating my body. In fact, I have always had a pretty healthy perspective when it comes to body image in general. Healthy enough, at least, given our society's very not-healthy obsession with weight and dieting. I can't pretend I'm not as indoctrinated as the average person is, but I've certainly cultivated a habit of fighting it.
I'm sure this has served me well in many ways, allowing me to filter out commercials and overheard comments and several problematic "Biggest Loser" competitions that were held at my workplace.
I grew up in a family where body hatred and fatphobia were embraced wholeheartedly. Thus, in the spirit of my desire to be nothing like my family, I boycotted caring about any of it. The same way I have boycotted drinking alcohol my entire life. So that I had more reasons to scoff at the people around me. So that when one of them droned on and on about weight-loss shakes or calories or needing to start their diet over tomorrow or how lucky I was to be thin, I could just roll my eyes and walk away. Above this. Above you.
My parents found out I was planning to get married. The fact that I had been with my girlfriend for six years had not made them any more prepared to accept this outcome. They invited me over to their house to confront me. To tell me they did not want me to get married. There was no reason to do such a permanent thing! Why not just keep living together! If I got married, I would be crushing their dreams. My mother told me she thought she needed therapy, that she couldn't bear to even say the word "lesbian." (I did not respond "how irrelevant, since I don't identify as one." I did not say "you've needed therapy for as long as I can remember." I did not say anything.)
I was angry. I was so angry I got lost driving home, following the same route I'd taken hundreds of times, because there was no route at all anymore, there was only the vicious email I was writing and rewriting in my head to help compensate for so much of what I could never manage to say out loud, a cascade of printed words floating against an appropriate red-black backsplash.
I started restricting again soon after that. For a month, maybe two. That was all I needed that time before I was able to let it go, and that time, no one, not even my fiancée, found out it was happening before I stopped. I had proven my point—to myself, if to no one else.
My family was forever complaining that they could not lose the weight they thought they so badly needed to,
but I could (because there are no limits to the spite born of trauma)
In the spring of 2016, my wife and I moved to a new city. Just a few months after we arrived (whirlwind months in which I was pushing myself to socialize as much as possible, to make friends, to put down roots in my new home, to prove myself), I was unexpectedly offered a volunteer job that required me to oversee a large group of people.
I had never done anything like it before. In fact, I do not have a supervisory bone in my body. The very idea of it was ludicrous. But despite any reservations I had, I knew I could not say no. I wanted to do it more than anything. I was stunned to even be given the opportunity; the entire situation, timing and all, felt fated.
Out of nowhere, almost overnight, I had a new label I could apply to myself. I was a "leader." Something I (like every other American) had always been told was an incredibly important thing to become, the exact form of success all people should aspire to.
However, there was not a single moment, from the very beginning, when I was able to fully wrap my mind around this concept that went against my entire identity as I had always envisioned it.
However, my first discovery about being a leader was that it required incessant socialization: planning and attending parties, making phone calls, addressing groups, interviewing people, collaborating, seeking input and consensus on every decision to the point where a decision could never be made, because it was impossible to ever get everyone to agree. It was well past the point of far too much. Sometimes it takes everything I've got, all the social energy I'm allotted for a day, to grimace in the direction of a shadowy driver in a car who is letting me cross at a crosswalk. Okay, almost all the time.
However—wait a second. Is it okay to have something work out? For a lifelong dream to come true? This doesn't feel ¿what? the ¿fuck? is ¿this?
I wanted to do a good job, of course. I wanted to succeed. I wanted to use whatever small amount of power I had been given to make the world better, more beautiful, and more representative of the complete human experience. As if all that weren't enough: I wanted this to be the moment my entire life changed, and I stopped being Anxiety Girl.
How to do all these things? I gathered up every bit of the manic anxious energy I naturally have and channeled it into crafting a new persona—not a fake me, but a more ideal me, a me who was always operating at peak performance. At first, it seemed: it was working! I was doing it! Holy shit, it was exhausting, but wonderful things were happening, and everyone was so proud of me!
Maybe—in a perfect world—I could have coasted on that euphoria a little longer than I did.
In the real not-perfect world, there was one small problem. I was not a welcome presence to all the people I was working with, which they started to let me know, little by little.
They had wanted the job. I had only gotten it because I was boring and safe.
They didn't like the way I was leading.
They didn't like how I had handled this or that situation.
I clearly didn't respect them.
I didn't value other people's opinions.
I was always going to do what I wanted, no matter what.
I was alienating everyone, leaving them with no other option but to quit.
In retrospect, it wasn't that bad. No, scratch that. Even at the time the rational part of me knew it wasn't that bad. This was only coming from a handful of people within a much larger group. Most people were happy with the job I was doing (or neutral, at least), and you can never make everyone happy. Yet I was shocked to be receiving such harsh (or any) criticism, and shocked was quickly followed by devastated, my shaky sense of self-worth crumbling to nothing. What?! I'm always sweet! I'm quiet and submissive and sweet! How does anyone not know this??
The First of the Very Bad Days:
The day I called in sick to my day job and spent an entire morning in bed curled into a tight ball, sobbing until my whole body ached from it, because someone had sent me a mean email.
The day I hurled my jacket into the corner of a room like a literal child because I had gotten yet another email attacking me, one that made me want to storm out of the apartment and drive aimlessly for hours, and my wife suggested a better course of action would be to calm down, sit down, and just answer the email instead.
The day I messaged a coworker (again, at my day job, no longer able to care that it was completely inappropriate) to ask if they thought I was incompetent—knowing the only socially acceptable answer to such a question is no, regardless of what the person actually thinks, but needing, so badly, to hear someone say it anyway. No, they said, they had never seen me that way, and I cried all through the conversation, cried harder the kinder their words became.
Between the tantrums and mini-breakdowns, I would pick myself up and get back on track. I would reframe, try to shake it off with a healthy perspective. Disagreements happened, right? Personalities could clash. It didn't mean I was fundamentally useless, or even that anyone actually disliked me as a person. It was just about different communication styles. Other people had their own problems they were dealing with, influencing their behavior. Conflict resolution is a part of life! This was completely normal! I was doing fine! I just needed—say it with me—thicker! skin!
However well I was able to spin the situation, I couldn't take any of the logic to heart. It was all just words. More frantic pretending that I could will all my neuroses away, immediately, and function the way a "leader" "should."
I felt a growing desperation to be doing something, anything, right. I wanted the sense of accomplishment that I had felt within reach when I first accepted the position, when I first excitedly said: yes! I can do this!
I had wanted (though, to be honest, I hardly knew how to want in this way) for that sense of accomplishment to come out of a healthy place for once, a place of confidence and joy and relating well with others. But as it began to seem like that might not be possible, my thoughts wandered back to other things that I knew I could do well. Way better than most people. Like falling apart. Like tearing down my whole life. Self-destruction is a coping skill, and while it's not a beneficial one, the skill aspect certainly applies. The more you hurt yourself, the better you get at it, and the easier it becomes. There's little I'm more sure of than that I can hurt myself to a degree so alarming that it starts to feel impressive. Like a talent.
I began to wonder if it had been ridiculous to think I could ever be as good at anything as I am at being sick.
Sure, I can say I have an eating disorder. Per the diagnostic criteria, I qualify. Per the diagnostic criteria, I have qualified for a couple different depressive disorders. Five or six different anxiety disorders. One diagnosis fades into the background, another steps up to take its place for a while. A year, two years. I switch over into the groove of another.
At this point, it seems much simpler to say that my brain is inherently fragile. It finds so many more things stressful than a neurotypical brain does, and when that stress gets to be too overwhelming, it loses all desire to react with productive behavior.
No, it says. Set fire to everything. Fire is the obvious way to go. Start with yourself. Who cares what it does to you. Who cares what it does to your life. Who cares what it does to all the other people in your life. Does anyone here care anymore? Nope. We've voted, and unanimously, no. Also, in case you couldn't tell, we're really fucking angry.
If someone had come along somewhere around May 2017, stuck a finger in my face, said "NO! I see where this is heading, and NO! You're just going to make everything worse. You can't be here in your life anymore," and tackled me and dragged me off to an institution against my will and monitored me for days weeks months years until I finally began to come out of the extreme burnout and depression I'd fallen into…well, that would have been horrible, and I would have hated them, probably forever, and thought they had ruined my life, probably forever. And it also might have been the only thing that could have stopped me from plunging into an eternity of inextricable health-damaging self-harm.
As much as I've gone over and over it in my mind, that is all I can come up with. The one solution. To have been physically arrested at the last moment I could have been arrested.
But that's not a thing. People don't get locked up to keep them from making terrible choices.
When I was younger, I had a boss who married a man she didn't want to marry, who came to work the literal next day and told me that she had been sobbing in the bathroom right before walking down the aisle because she knew it was a mistake. She didn't get locked up. No one led her away somewhere where she could pause and think, where someone could sit her down and patiently explain to her that she did not want to do this to herself, that if she waited long enough, her head would clear, she would figure out a different path forward. And then kept her there. Chained to the floor. Until she believed. However long it took.
That is not how life works. We stay on the paths we're on, usually. We keep going, and no one around us even realizes we're about to do a thing that will make everything harder and darker and more difficult, and we don't realize it ourselves, or we don't see another way. We wake up and get out of bed and look at our clocks and calendars and options and make our chaotic wrong decisions in the chaos.
And then? We weave it into our story.
Somehow I had put myself back in the same hell I was in as a child and teenager, dragging myself through an endless series of high-anxiety situations and convincing myself that I had to pretend everything was fine. Or if not fine, at least under control. I want to say I've never been good at that kind of pretending, but that's not exactly true. I'm excellent at that kind of pretending. I've had enough practice. But long-term, no one can be good enough at it. It's simply not sustainable.
I had long ago reached the point of not caring that much about protecting my own personal image, but now, I felt, my image wasn't just mine. It was representative of this large group of people I was overseeing. It was representative of people I cared about. It was representative of an organization, and through that, tied to an entire community and the general public. It was even tied to people who were not involved but were rooting for me from afar. If I was a complete wreck, what did that say about all of us? In theory, my failure to function could ripple out and tarnish anyone, everyone.
But the fear of letting everyone down was not the only reason I ignored the rising fever far longer than I should have. I still had my own selfish motives I was clinging to. I simply wanted to learn to power through my anxiety. I have always wanted that. I wanted to make the life I was living work, because, in many ways, it was perfect. I felt like I was exactly where I belonged in the world. I was doing work I had always dreamed of doing, something I had never imagined I would be able to do. Everything about existence seemed to glow with promise, like I had inexplicably been lucky enough to stumble into the happily-ever-after ending of a narrative I set in motion at the age of 5.
I refused to stop. I kept going. Getting sicker. Losing more and more weight. Until I reached a point where, even though I wasn't sure I could survive resigning, it was starting to look like I definitely wouldn't survive not resigning. Finally, I gave in, said I needed to step down, and that I would do so as soon as they could find a replacement for me.
Was that the end of it? Not quite. The search process took several more months, during which I flew wildly among Three States of Mind:
desperation for it to be over.
self-doubt and wondering if I could, should, wanted to(??) say: never mind! I was just kidding! I want to stay. I'm fine. This is fine.
not caring either way, moving through existence in a general fog.
But then, one day, strangely, it was over. I was not one of them anymore. I was just me again.
Just me again. Just me again.
By then it seemed like it hardly mattered, like it could not possibly have a positive impact on my health. By then it seemed like nothing would help, in large part because I was far past wanting to be helped. I was sick to the point of only wanting to continue getting sicker, as sick as possible.
But at least I was just me again. I would not take the ship down with me.
I am making my way through an intake survey with a dietician I just started seeing. We are talking about unhealthy behaviors, which is to say, she is making a list of the horrible things I have been doing to myself over the past several months. She looks up at me—serious, pointed eye contact—and asks if I want to die.
All I can think to say in response is: “not exactly.” In the moment, it is too complicated a question for me to even process. What would the actual answer be?
I don’t want to die, but I want to be dying. I know it doesn’t make sense. I know I can’t have it both ways.
But some part of me still thinks: maybe I can figure out how to have it both ways. Maybe that has been my secret talent, my only talent, all along. Maybe I’m that powerful and that angry and that inhuman, that I alone can find the sweet spot of killing myself forever and never reaching the point of dead.
What “happened”? How can I even answer that question?
I blinked, and a ridiculous amount of my life passed.
Nothing. The relentless, boring work of keeping myself as shut down as possible. Or at least any part of me with the capacity to care about anything beyond the borders of my body.
When I was restricting, the reality of food changed, and the reality of desire, of satisfaction. I was no longer able to be satisfied in the way I had been.
If I ate anything that was sweet, it was never sweet enough. I wanted to swallow 100% pure sugar. Even that wouldn't have been sweet enough. Nothing would have been sweet enough. I could constantly feel this craving in my throat, what I started to think of as my "throat longing feeling." It was always pining for an extreme sweetness that wasn't real.
I was told by one of the therapists I saw that I craved sweet things as a replacement for mothering. Despite how far gone I was at the time, I knew this was ridiculous the moment I heard it. I craved sweet things because sugar is what the body wants and needs when you're severely malnourished.
I often wanted to mash foods together that didn't go together. Literally mash. Take one food in my left hand, one in my right hand, shove them into each other, two flavors that seemed they should never be together. Make a giant disgusting ball. Then devour it. At times I wanted this so much more than just to calmly eat something "normal." I think I wanted to eat as an animal does: who cares; it is only nutrition; this may be a giant disgusting ball, but it's a giant disgusting ball made of calories; all that matters is that I don't die.
I drove around in the middle of the night to kill time, in part because I was too hungry to sleep, and I couldn't stop my brain from reminding me of every place nearby where I could get food at one in the morning. 24 hour Denny's. 24 hour grocery store. Gas stations. McDonald's. But after a while, those too lost their appeal, and I wanted something "more." I wanted food to be such an important, magical experience that its origin needed to be magical too. I fantasized I would stumble across a secret, middle-of-the-night ice cream shop that only people driving around late at night could see. A place that only existed for those who were desperate enough to find it.
Depression had brought me to a point where nothing seemed worth being alive for, where I didn't want to succeed at work, and I didn't want to go out places, and I didn't want to see or speak to anyone, and I didn't want to write, and I didn't want to pursue any goals.
I fell so in love with these feelings of wanting related to food. It was wonderful to want anything as strongly as I wanted to be satisfied physically, and it was wonderful to know that satisfaction was never possible. Because I wouldn't let it be. Because it became too big a fire to ever put out, at least not with a single act (or a single meal). When I knew that (though I can't say I knew it on a conscious level at the time), it was a pure, sweet relief. I would never be rid of wanting completely, and that meant I would get out of bed the next day. I would keep existing.
I know. Who cares, right. It's not one of the three years we've been discussing. Except in the sense that every year is.
It was my last year of college. As part of my relentless quest to experience what it was like to be satisfyingly parented, I had spent most of my four years there in the grip of an intense and unhealthy infatuation with a woman who worked on campus, someone who exhibited a very maternal vibe towards me.
One day, having just returned to school from our month-long winter break, wearing a new shirt I knew she would like, something I had bought specifically with her in mind, I went on my usual search for her. I found her on the second floor of my dorm building, talking to another student.
She lit up as soon as she saw me. "Hi baby!" Then returned to the conversation she was having. I awkwardly waited at a bit of a distance for them to finish up, which they did a few minutes later. The other student left. She shifted her attention back to me. "Hi baby!" she said again, giving me a big hug. "Nice shirt!"
Before there was anything resembling an attempt to recover, before there was even a kick in the direction away from sadness, there was this: "hi baby." A scaffolding. The bones of self-compassion. An entire city of "hi baby" that I hastily built and moved into, because I was done, so done with everything. I could not live anywhere other than that city anymore.
I taught myself a new voice, and the inspiration for it came from her, but it became something that was just mine. For months I wrote in that voice. I sat in my car and recorded audio messages to myself that began with "hi baby." I began to think in it. To leave myself "hi baby" notes on my calendar, on my phone, on dry erase boards.
No, I didn't always get the words right. Sometimes the voice said things a loving voice would not say. But it tried, it was always trying, and more importantly, I could feel the compassion behind it. I could feel the sentiment, something along the lines of: that's enough of this / there is so much that is good / about who you are / do you hear me baby? / we're not staying here anymore And I gratefully let it lead me away to a place where I could breathe.
In high school, a friend of mine fractured her arm and had to have a plate inserted in order to heal the fracture. But there were complications with her recovery. The arm wasn't healing smoothly. She had to miss a lot of school and was out an entire week at one point to undergo additional surgery.
When she returned to school, it didn't take long before I started to notice a tension between us. And, being me, I didn't address it directly with her, but instead began to talk to other friends about it and to write long, paranoid journal entries. Soon she stopped speaking to me at all, other than sometimes a cold polite hello in passing, and seemed to be avoiding me as much as possible.
A few days after that started, a different friend called me. "I think I know why she's mad at you."
"Well...we were talking, and you came up, and she said 'all this bad stuff happens to people like what happened to me with my arm, and Lauren goes and messes up a perfectly good arm on purpose.'"
I didn't know what to say to that. In fact, I suddenly felt like I didn't know how to form language or breathe anymore.
We never spoke directly of this. The tension between us passed after a little while, and we were friends again. And I wish I could say I changed, that I never self-injured again, that her words rattled me so much that I shook off all my terrible patterns in that exact moment and lived from a place of total wisdom and gratitude from then on, simply taking pleasure in all the blessings I have been given.
But of course, that's not even close to true. I still mess up my perfectly good arm, and my perfectly good heart, and my perfectly good liver, and my perfectly good relationships, and my perfectly good life, "on purpose," every few years, like clockwork.
And then, in the less feverish aftermath, I do what I can to repair them.
It's like an arms race between the sick and the well halves of me, both scrambling to win, both getting stronger each time. I used to be convinced that the well part would prevail in the end. I don't think this way anymore.
What I do know is that my healing process in the past has been incomplete, that I have always neglected to include what is possibly a crucial component: acceptance of the fact that I will struggle again. I can't fully escape mental illness. I can't learn to power through it. I can't “grow up” and “put it behind me.” If I am doing well, that is every bit as temporary as when I am unwell. I have never known this the way I should, and the strange optimism I have cultivated about one day finding my way to an everlasting state of bliss makes as little sense as someone with a chronic physical illness having a day where they feel okay and thinking, "well, thank god that's all over."
I guess, to put it another way, I don't think the well part of me will win, and I don't think the sick part of me will win, just as I don't think I will settle into a permanent happy mood or a permanent sad mood. I guess, to put it another way, there will be no neat ending to any of this. To anything.
I guess, to put it another way, there is no story, or at least not the linear kind I've been attempting to write since I was born. The kind I'm trying to compose even now, at this very moment, with the hope that it will reach some meaningful conclusion. There is only stumbling around in various directions, hoping I'm slowly learning something along the way. How not to fall into the deepest holes. How to stop caring that I can never use language to freeze the process of living into something coherent and immutable. How to, in some sense, be the best self I can be, despite also being the messy, fractured self I am.
