I hear the Anorexia (I often call her Ana) tapping at the door to my soul most days even as my recovery remains strong. Well, for the most part strong. A virus grips my gut, shutting down my appetite and hunger for a solid week. I can hear the line delivered by Emily Blunt in The Devil Wears Prada, “I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight.” I don’t know my weight nor do I have a goal weight, and this iconic quote lures me towards Ana’s hook.
How long will our culture continue to subdue women by encouraging them to shrink away and become tiny versions of the person they were created to be? This line would be funny, if it weren’t sad because most women can relate to it. They can relate to the relentless pursuit of thinness as an indication of their value and worth. As long as women are pursuing the cultural thin ideal they can’t be fully engaged in their lives, work, creative outlets, or service to others.
Although the majority will not develop a deadly eating disorder as I did, they will spend valuable time beating their bodies into submission to acquire an unattainable or sustainable shape and size. Ninety five percent of dieters will gain back most of their weight. If we all ate and exercised the exact same way, there would be thin people, fat people, short people, and tall people. The size of your jeans has more to do with your genes than the billion dollar diet industry would want you to believe.
I remind myself to be careful as I don’t know where my edges drop off into an abyss. I don’t know how many days of restriction or pounds lost I can endure before Ana takes over. It is a secret held by Ana and my genes. My genes don’t care if I choose to restrict or if a virus forces it, but my genes know the breaking point between my healthy mind and my anorexic brain. After this recent illness, my brain drifts into the foggy middle ground of health and anorexia.
I know so much more about my nemesis and how to outsmart her than I did at 15, 23, 27, and 47 years old. I suppose my learned hypervigilance as a result of childhood abuse and neglect is helpful in this case. My life is full, and everything tastes better than skinny feels. I am drawn to the edges of the abyss to see and feel the void. Empty can feel so much more satisfying than full. Only someone who experiences anorexia truly can comprehend how emptiness can satisfy.
I sit on the ledge staring at the abyss. A crushing wave of shame washes over me as I acknowledge the tug Ana can have on my spirit and my being. I hate her and at the same time I love her and miss her. She was a loyal companion that kept me safe and numb from emotions that were too big for me and my family. I don’t need her anymore, but there are so many days I desire to welcome her back into my life, allowing her to make herself at home, but this means I have to welcome her back into all of me, my soul as well as my body.
She has always shown up uninvited and I have welcomed her like a surprise that I didn’t know I wanted, or needed. I suppose at the time she came knocking at my door the fourth time, I needed her. She was my fuck you to my mother. If truth be told, she was the little girl begging her daddy to pay attention to her pain. It is easier to allow Ana to be my anger towards my mother than to concede that Ana was a cry of grief over abandonment by both parents. Ana was a soothing blanket draped around me. I could huddle my small body into her lies of safety when my dad couldn’t or wouldn’t step in to save me from Mom’s wrath.
I now know that the very thing promising to keep me safe, was just like my dad, a liar, lacking any true desire to save me, and like my mother, her promise of comfort, was just another bait and switch.
Ana whispered that “thin will win, and you will finally fit in” to the younger me. She lied. Instead I became the odd girl, the weird one that sat in the cafeteria picking just the raisins out of my cookies, or puking up the self-serve milkshakes from the high school cafeteria kitchen. I survived by holding hands with Ana as she became my only friend. Other girls had eating disorders and they were washed in empathy while I was considered a freak to be bathed in ridicule and gossip. These girls had real reasons for starving, or puking. Both of these girls’ mothers had died. I couldn’t begin to compete with this, since I had no mother to lose. No one knew of the physical and emotional abuse I suffered at the hands of my mother, and my father…he was everyone’s hero except mine.
Ana convinced me I needed to try harder to be thinner. I wasn’t good enough at anorexia. She sounded like my mother’s critical voice staying rent free in my famished brain. Starving served me much better, as far as concern and empathy from my friends as a middle aged woman. I was in control of my body and food…until I wasn’t. I turned to Ana in middle age for power, and strength. I turned to Ana and asked her to speak for me. My friends’ reactions took me by surprise because I didn’t expect anyone to notice, much less care if I was shrinking away.
Somedays, even as I write, I wish Ana had snuffed me out, leaving nothing but a plume of my spirit rising into nothingness like the smoke from a candle burning itself out. Living in recovery and weight restoration sucks. Some days it is hardly the sense of freedom and joy I longed for. My body might not be starving, but somewhere in my soul, I long for the protruding bones to expose my pain, or suggest that people need to be careful with me.
Does my body say I have succeeded at recovery, or failed at letting Ana live in me? Does it advertise that I have let myself go, succumbing to laziness and gluttony? (I have not). Who wouldn’t want to invite Ana back in when recovery initially means being miserable in my own body.
She is a temptress. I am weight restored and think I have been here long enough to shield myself from her seduction. Ugh! I need a better shield, or maybe noise canceling headphones so I can’t hear her. She tells me to hide my body, and conceal my rolls of flesh, and she tells me to eat plain chicken and salad, when all I want is a cheeseburger and fries. I wonder if the freedom of recovery is just a lie sold to me to keep me alive. Is it Ana that compels me to make excuses for my body before people can comment? I body shame myself before others can.
I am not sure if it is Ana I am angry with, or myself for being naive enough to play with her again in middle age. Honestly, I didn’t know she would take over again, and again, and again… She is a pretty stubborn gal and evicting her is like trying to evict the mice from my cottage in the woods. When one leaves, another one arrives. Or…Maybe it is the same one finding the crack in the foundation, and just lets herself back in.
Writing about Ana is painful. I feel stricken with grief, but is it because I need her, let her go, do I want her? She creeps up on me from her hiding places of pictures, the mirrors, my drawers filled with clothes I either cannot wear, or I am terrified to try on my recovered body. Is my hate directed at Ana, or myself for playing her game? I hate the trauma that my body stores that is illuminated now that she doesn’t conceal it.
She is relentless – pick, pick, pick. She can steal my joy, my ability to make decisions, and is a master at distracting me from days and moments of human connection. How can I engage in the moments that can bring me joy, when my focus is on how this recovered body looks and feels.
It isn’t fair that I live in her haunting shadow when I truly do not need her to speak for me anymore. My voice is strong and my boundaries clear. My mom is tucked away in a care facility and I get to choose how much, or little contact I have with her. I am physically strong, much stronger than when Ana convinced me that there was power in my frailty. I do miss the frailty calling for people to be careful with me or ask me how my recovery is going.
Looking “recovered.” is vastly different from a full recovery. I honestly don’t know if I believe in full recovery, or one that doesn’t have Ana whispering in my ears. I hear her whispering, “cover up, people think you are lazy, and you look just like your twin now.”
I have grown tired of Ana’s covert and overt means of sucking me out of my life. I wish I didn’t have to be so vigilant, remembering that a stomach virus can be a hook to lure me back into her fold.
So Ana, it is time for me to speak directly to you and not about you.
Dear Ana,
You, my friend, are no friend, but you are a pesky bitch. I don’t want you, nor do I need you. You keep showing up to ridicule me, criticize me and my “fearfully and wonderfully made,” body, pointing out its flaws, and my flaws of being a human. This is my body and I get to decide! I get to decide that my curves, and full breasts are okay, or even (gasp) beautiful. I decide if dessert and pasta are okay, that fat isn’t a feeling and food doesn’t have some culturally constructed moral value.
I am tired, so very tired of playing tug of war with you. My inner dialogue feels so much bigger than normal female angst when you engage me. Your voice can paralyze me, ruin my day and make me be so cruel to the me that lives inside my body. I won’t stand in front of the mirror telling my reflection that she is a worthless ugly bitch while I pummel my gut, and pinch my folds and rolls. We are breaking up. I want to treat this body like someone I love lives in it, because I do.
No longer yours…
Until we meet again,
Lisabeth