A winter morning in New Hampshire, 1981. It is just after 7 a.m., and the snow is piled high outside the window of my first-floor dormitory room. The sky is gray, ominous: More snow is predicted. There are no "snow days" at Exeter.
I am dressed already for school: corduroy pants, rubber boots, blue Shetland sweater over a white turtleneck. My pea coat is on the bed next to me.
Then I hear them, like a flock of noisy jays-- shrill laughter, whispering, joking, teasing. I hear the cluck-cluck of clogs, the clomp of boots on the tiled floor. Halfway down the hall, they are outside my door, then they are past it, the noise receding. I hear the heavy front door swing open, hang suspended, then slam shut definitively. The dorm is suddenly, strangely, quiet.
I know each of these girls, have lived and studied with them for two years already. In the classroom, I shine as brightly as they, I am a good student. Outside the academic venue I feel my own dowdiness, the self-doubt has soured already to a degree of self-loathing.
I cannot bring myself to make my solitary way through the cold to the dining hall this morning, cannot bear to seat myself alone at a long table. So, today, I sit on my bed in my dorm room, I skip breakfast. And it occurs to me that, though isolated, I need not be alone, that hunger might be my companion. This thought cheers me. I discover over the next weeks that gradually I no longer miss the company of others, no longer feel the pangs of insecurity, inadequacy, isolation with such intensity. I have a new purpose: to simplify my life, my body, to winnow both down to an essence: pure spirit.
I begin to run. I start by running four miles a day, eighty laps on the suspended wooden track inside our gymnasium. Clap, clap, clap, clap. With each step the entire structure shakes, my footsteps echo through the building. As I run, I make analogies: One mile is equal to a year of school, ten laps to a semester, if I can get through four miles, I'm done.
By Spring I am running eight or ten miles, long loping excursions through the woods or on tree-lined backroads. I have discovered that I can subsist largely on fruit, cereal and diet soda. I work each night in the dining hall, washing dishes through dinner, then sit down to a bowl of shredded wheat for my supper. I am saving money to move to Israel and join a kibbutz. I have lost nearly twenty pounds, from my baseline of 110. I tie a piece of string around my jeans to keep them up. I am pleased to not have to deal with menstruation. I am making all As.
Most of all, I am pleased to not have to deal with social matters. My rituals involving food and exercise are so restrictive that I no longer want to be invited along for ice cream, on trips to Boston, dinners and dances. For a few months, in my fifteenth year, I feel as though I have stumbled on my own personal patron saint: If I just keep her plied with offerings, she will shield me in her armor, protect me from the cruelties of adolescence and from the storminess of my own soul.
Hibernating mammals, endeavoring to survive months of freezing temperatures and famine, enter a state of biological conservation. Heart rate and respiration drop, metabolism slows down, body temperature decreases. The organism assumes a survivalist attitude that precludes any extraneous expenditure of energy.
Similarly, the anorexic’s body becomes a paragon of efficiency: though she may appear frenetically active, internally she has entered a physiological deep-freeze. Her heart beats at half the normal rate. Her digestive processes become phlegmatic, torpid. Her body temperature drops by a degree or more; to compensate, her skin sprouts a fine downy fur. Her gonads go on strike: menstruation halts, libido evaporates. Like the body, the mind also rids itself of such non-essential functions as curiosity, creativity, playfulness. Eventually, spontaneous impulses of any type are suppressed; the anorexic becomes a survival machine.
Like hibernation, anorexia is a retreat from life. It is incompatible with the bioenergetic demands of daily activity. This, I believe, is why so many anorexics become bulimics.
Enantiodomria-- literally, a ‘race towards opposites.’ Marion Woodman, a Jungian psychoanalyst who specializes in eating disorders, uses this term to describe the perilous, powerful oscillation between starvation and bingeing. Consumption becomes inevitable, and it is consumption with a vengeance.
It seemed like a good idea at first: I could have my cake and my virtue, too. I save my binges for the dark of night, while the rest of the dorm slept. I eat dry salad for supper, then consume an entire loaf of bread with jam in the space of a quarter-hour. I vomit in the basement washroom, faucets running for subterfuge.
In the Spring of my junior year at Exeter, my parents rent a car and take me on college interviews. My father brings along a bathroom scale and records my weight daily, along with notes on whatever campus we are visiting. I eat tearful meals with my parents at the teal-and-orange Howard Johnson’s lunch counter, arguing over the quantity of tuna fish consumed, after which I discuss Sartre and Camus with the local Dean of Admissions. My parents are prohibiting me from going to college if I weigh less than 95 pounds. I gain the weight, briefly.
For years I have pictured myself at Yale University. I think I love the dingy ivy-cloaked buildings, turreted and angular, streaked with rust and rain. I think I love the libraries, the long oak tables, massive leather armchairs, faded Persian runners, filtered through with a low maroon light. The place seems to reek with the stale breath of tortured poets. I imagine holing up in those dark and intense spaces, spewing forth, with Keats, “the teeming contents of my brain.”
In fact, I now realize, I was not in love with Yale. I was drawn to Yale because it seemed hard- hard to get into, and hard, austere, unforgiving in its aspect. I saw everything, then, as a test of my capacity for discipline, self-denial and prodigiousness. I never gave a thought to making friends, to the social milieu, the weather, the qualities of the city. I had become single-minded, with a unique capacity for deprivation of pleasure, fueled by the promise of food- when the work was done.
At Yale, I of course enroll in what I learn is the most difficult course of study, a survey of Western civilization, consisting of three classes: philosophy, history and politics, and literature. It is called Directed Studies, or D.S., known more informally on campus as Directed Suicide. You have to write an essay to get in. We read three texts a week, beginning with Homer, Plato and Virgil, Aristotle and Socrates, Thucydides and St. Augustine. Each Friday evening, a five-page paper is due.
I join the cross-country team. We do distance runs in the morning, sprints and hill workouts in the afternoon. I eat little during the day; at night I eat a dinner of fish and salad, which I purge. I am, perhaps as a result, not a very fast runner. I study till midnight or so, then eat and purge again. Thursday nights I invariably pull an “all-nighter,” working on my paper.
By January, my weight hovers in the low 80s. My ankles are chafed and bleeding from where my running shoes cut into the skin. It is a myth that anorexics universally think they are fat. I know I am skinny, that my pants hang loose around my waist, that my limbs look grisly, every sinew and tendon showing. I am past the point of changing- I ceded control long ago. The only parts of my body I can bear to look at are my calves, which remain oddly muscled.
My roommates, too, find me disquieting to look at. This is the word they use in speaking with the Resident Advisor; Yale students would use the word “disquieting,” rather than saying I look disgusting, but the effect is the same. I am moved out of the Freshman dorm, first to an empty room in the Dean’s cottage, within my home college, Branford, then am relocated again, as if I have become a geographical problem to solve, to the vacant third floor of a dorm in a different college. Here, I know no one.
Perhaps it is this last transfer, to a remote place, untethered now by the few still-friendly faces, the face of the kindly Dean, that marks the beginning of the end. I am now completely alone. I hear voices below, laughing, hooting, sometimes shouting, but they are the voices of strangers. I am always cold, and stand under the shower for long half-hours, shivering violently in the thin stream. At night, my body cramps up, jack-knifing into itself like a slim pair of scissors. I get out of bed, hop on one foot to relieve the spasm. In class we are studying Dante and Milton, and I write a canto to accompany The Inferno: I know what he is talking about.
In late April, New Haven remains gloomy and cold, mounds of gritty snow piled on the sidewalks. I have one more paper to write before finals, on Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse”. The least antiquated, most accessible book we’ve read all year. (And the only one by a woman.) The slim paperback, with its geometric blue and yellow cover, all wrong for Woolf, lies unopened on my bed. I cannot seem to stay awake to read.
One evening I push away from the dinner table and head as usual to the bathroom to purge. At the door of the dining hall I stop, stung as though I’ve run into an invisible sheet of glass. No more, I think. Not one day more. I leave the dining commons, not even sure where I am headed, until I find myself walking across campus to the infirmary. The puzzled nurses allow me to spend several days in bed before contacting the Dean of my college. Once again, I am a geographic problem. This time, the solution is a transfer to Yale-New Haven Hospital, to the psychiatric unit.
I have spent a few days in a hospital, a brief stint in an eating-disorder program, before this, but this time, I do not have the identify of student to anchor me. Though my status is still undetermined, I cannot imagine going back to school- and I soon learn that the University is of the same mind.
School falls away, and with it any remaining shred of dignity. I am simply a psychiatric patient, and a reprobate one at that. I turn my powers of concentration to outsmarting the staff, in their attempts to feed me. I am forced to drink protein shakes, but I find that I can meander to the water fountain, pretend to take a sip, and slyly spill a portion of my drink. When the staff catches on, I am barred from the common area and must sit alone with a nurse.
I have become an animal, kicking and fighting. The line between sanity and dissolution is shockingly tenuous. I pick at my scalp until it bleeds, and the nurses tell me that if I do not stop, they will put mitts on my hands. If I do not eat, I will be sent to a state hospital. I do not know what this means, but it sounds, and is meant to sound, like prison.
Shame is a fall from a height, it is an abrupt loss of status, a loss of esteem or regard from those whose regard or esteem we need. With my departure from school, I feel for the first time something I have never had to feel in my life: the full weight of my parents’ disappointment. It is that much more devastating because it is unfamiliar. Although they are 3,000 miles away, in California, through the phone line I can hear the defeat in their voices.
There are other kids and teenagers on the unit, all of us lost in our own way. I know this, now: that anyone who finds herself in a psychiatric ward is lost and at the nadir of her life. It is a fact that staff, ensconced within their glass-enclosed stations, laughing and doing the crossword, too easily forget. There are seven or eight of us, ranging in age from twelve to eighteen.
One day, a girl named Vanessa is put in restraints. She is only twelve, dark haired, slight, a child, I do not know what she has done, and do not understand why it has taken three large men to sedate her and strap her down. I have been here long enough, now, to know what this means: when one kid is restrained, the others become distressed and dysregulated. More restraints, more trauma, will soon follow.
Somehow, I am roused from the stupor of my shame and self-absorption. I get up and go room-by-room, talking down the other kids. I say nothing much, I speak slowly and gently, I soothe. I walk down the hallway with a sense of purpose, for the first time since I’ve been here. The weight on my bony shoulders lightens a smidge.
Vanessa is out cold for 24 hours.
No one else is restrained. The remainder of my time on the unit is clouded in shame, and this is only a prelude- still more shame, and loss, will follow. But for a brief moment, through the glass-shard glare of my madness, I see a future: I will someday be in this world, on the other side, and I will do this differently.
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As someone who has been in elevated levels of care, this is brilliant. You and your words are brilliant. Thank you.
I have struggled with anorexia for over two years and this piece is very relatable, especially the last line. Right now, recovery feels impossible, but I also imagine a future full of freedom and independence. I created my own Substack last week called Swimming Through Molasses where I share my own experiences with anorexia and the recovery process as well as opening up the comments for other people to share their stories. I just wanted to comment on how much your piece meant to me as well as asking if you have any feedback for a new writer and young person struggling with an eating disorder.