Extraordinary

Extraordinary.

What does it really mean?

I'm always reminded of the Mena Suvari character in "American Beauty", whose most fervent wish is to be thought extraordinary and whose most crippling fear is fear of the ordinary. In an ironic twist of fate, however, it is her very self-destructive impulses to act out and impress others with her "extraordinariness" that ultimately reduce her to being flat, dull, prosaic -- shrinking her soul to something small and mean and ordinary.

Those of us who have suffered from eating disorders have known, intimately and oppressively, the fear of the ordinary. It was never enough, growing up, to be merely yourself, precious and unique, loved and lovable, unique, unrepeatable, irreducible. Nobody ever told you any of that. The pressure was always on, and the external and internal compulsions to be Something, to be Great, to be Extraordinary, were both ubiquitous and unbearable. In our unceasing efforts to impress our parents, our friends, our enemies, to prove ourselves worthy of love, we got straight A's, were valedictorians and salutatorians, graduated summa cum laude, danced through the halls of academia with self-engorged narcissism masking the self-loathing lurking just beneath. We became great students, writers, actresses, singers, dancers, athletes. We lusted after elusive perfection, seeking with an insatiable and hellish desire to be the best, the brightest, the prettiest, the wittiest, the smartest, the sexiest -- all encapsulated in being the Thinnest -- whatever the cost. Eventually, we lost ourselves in the process, turning violently upon our own person, destroying our very selves in our desire to obliterate the imperfect bits. Embracing imperfection is still a near-impossible task for most of us. But it's time we recognized that chasing the extraordinary is what almost killed us in the first place.

What is all this "extraordinary" bullsh*t, anyway? Cosmically speaking, what kind of achievement is it to be the thinnest woman in the room? Does that really make you extraordinary? Or, like Mena Suvari in American Beauty, does it only serve to make you pathetic? If your greatest achievement in life is a weight in the two digits or the ability to shimmy into a pair of size zero jeans, if the only impact you have made on the world that will be emblazoned across your tombstone when you die prematurely of cardiac arrest at twenty-five is "She Was Thin", if the world remembers you not for the size of your heart but for the size of your waistline, then I would venture so far as to say your entire life has been in vain, has been -- dare I say it -- ordinary.

It's time we reevaluated and redefined what it means to be extraordinary, because clearly, what we've been doing all these years isn't it. In her Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir, "Wasted", Marya Hornbacher writes, "My entire identity-being was wrapped up in (1) my ability to starve and (2) my intellect. I had a complete identity crisis when I realized neither of these was impressing anyone." I think many of us have undergone a similar crisis in the long, slow, painful process of recovery, but it's about time we understood, like Marya Hornbacher eventually came to realize in treatment, that we are "actually good at something other than starving and puking," that, in her words:

"It was entirely unoriginal to be starving to death. Everyone was doing it. It was, as a friend would later put it, totally passe. Totally 1980's. I decided to something slightly less Vogue."

So be a real rugged individualist.

Do something really innovative and cutting-edge.

Try something really extraordinary.

Stop hating yourself.

Love God.

Love yourself.

Love other people.

Be happy.

I'm not extraordinary, and I've nearly killed myself trying to be -- but what I am is perfectly imperfect. That's what I have to offer this world -- and that's fine by me.

Much Ado About Nothing

Today I took my eating disorder with me grocery shopping and bathing suit shopping.

I didn't invite him, mind you -- he has an unfortunate habit of tagging along with me uninvited at the most inopportune moments, whispering surreptitiously in my ear words of discouragement, at times devolving into an all-out frontal assault.

Our first stop was the grocery store. As usual, ED rejects my sensible shopping list outright as soon as we walk in the store and begins making his own suggestions despite my loud protestations. He vacillates wildly between wanting to buy only carrot sticks, diet Coke, and low-fat low-carb tortillas, and filling the cart with gargantuan quantities of junk food.

"ED," I try to reason with him. "You know I shouldn't buy a massive bag of peanut M&Ms. I'll wind up eating all of them at once and then purge."

ED makes the counter-suggestion that maybe if I weren't such a fat-ass with no self-control, I could handle having the jumbo bag around without eating it all.

"Look, ED, that's completely unfair," I answer, irked. "You know I eat the individual packages of peanut M&Ms at work and am completely fine. I just don't want to put myself in jeopardy by pushing myself too hard."

ED is, as he tends to be, pissed at any attempt at rational discourse, and promptly begins a vituperative and wholly irrelevant rant about the size of my thighs.

"You know what? You're cut off," I say, taking the bag away from him and firmly putting the M&Ms back on the store shelf. "No one invited you along anyway."

That quells him for a bit, until we hit Kohl's and go bathing suit shopping.

Going bathing suit shopping with ED, I think, must be something akin to having your pain-in-the-ass mother-in-law with you in the delivery room. In both cases, YOU'RE trying to get something important done, but their overbearing negativity is both palpable and debilitating.

"Do you know how much weight you've gained since you've been eating the past few weeks?" ED asks me.

Of course I know, but I'm not going to give him the pleasure of admitting it.

He is all too willing to pipe in with the exact number, of course. "THIRTEEN POUNDS," he crows, jack that he is. "Thirteen pounds of pure, unadulterated blubber. For God's sake, Donna, you put on a bathing suit and you're going to look like a beached whale. Why don't you try on a nice muumuu, because that's all YOU'RE fit to go to the beach in this summer."

The Kohl's dressing room is a warzone, with every suit I try on a knock-down-drag out battle of the wills.

"Wow, you can't fit into a size-2 suit? You ARE a cow," he says, standing beside me in the mirror.

"I am not a cow, you jerk," I say through gritted teeth. "I'm looking way healthier now than I was a month ago. And I feel great."

"I bet you could have fit into the size 2 a month ago," he says, evenly looking my reflection in the eye.

I ignore him and try on a black two-piece.

"A TWO-PIECE? Are you KIDDING ME?" ED is aghast. "At least buy a one-piece with the most coverage possible. You don't want to go around showing off all that new poundage around your abdomen, do you?"

That particular two-piece doesn't fit. I'm on the verge of tears, and ED is amused. "You should listen to me once in a while," he says, smirking.

"Because that has served me so well in the past," I retort, trying on a lime-green two-piece with little white flowers on it.

"For the love of Mike," ED says, as we both observe my reflection in the mirror. "At least go with a nice neutral slimming color like black. You're not as thin as you once were, you know. Lime-green will only emphasize how fat you've gotten."

For a moment, I nearly listen to him, and dejectedly start to untie the straps. Then I stop and stand in the mirror, staring down my reflection, trying to forcibly peel back the many layers of psychological distortion which have congealed and built up over time and see, really SEE, the girl looking back at me.

There are few magical epiphanies in recovery. Grunting and bearing it is about the best you can do sometimes. So I can't say I think she's beautiful. It's not that easy, and I'm nowhere near there yet. But the suit fits her very well, the color is pretty, and the print cheerful and summery. She looks, well, okay, I guess. Maybe, if I squinted, even a little good.

And then, for a fleeting moment, I got outside my own head for a moment and suddenly saw myself as a random observer would. And like the observer, I could only look at the sheer ludicrousness of the situation and laugh. A cute, skinny, reasonably attractive brunette, all by herself in a dressing room, is tearfully agonizing over which swimsuit emphasizes her nonexistent fat and progressively getting more and more irked at being egged on by the obstreperous monkey-on-her-back who nobody else can see. Sure, it's tragic, but let's face it, it's also really damn funny. I was reminded of a passage in C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters:

Your patient has become humble -- have you drawn his attention to that fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, 'By jove! I'm being humble!', and almost immediately pride -- pride at his own humility -- will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt, and so on, through as many stages as you please. But don't try this too long, for fear you awake his sense of humor and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed.

And then the strangest thing happened. ED tweaked when this realization occurred to me. You see, laughter scares the hell out of ED, and the ability to laugh at yourself is an indispensable tool for recovery. The ability to laugh at the ridiculous, at the incongruous, is a uniquely human one; it is both raw and real, two traits ED hates with a burning vengeance and seeks to obliterate. And as refreshing, genuine peals of laughter erupted from somewhere within me, the whole thing got put back into perspective and I locked the jerk out of the dressing room once and for all.

"Go screw yourself!" I shouted through the door at him. "I'm getting the lime-green one whether you like it or not!"

So that's why I left ED in the junior's department at Kohl's this afternoon, still fuming to himself. He had caused me enough trouble for one day.

Then I ate a Three Musketeers bar on the way home. And damn, was it good.

Purgatory

Eating disorder recovery is, for the most part, looked upon in modern society as a walk in the park. We have at least some minimal degree of sympathy for recovering alcoholics and substance abusers, because hey, they have a genuine Problem, right? A bona fide, empirically verifiable chemical dependency will go a long way toward lending your disease some kind of legitimacy.

By contrast, if I had a nickel for every time someone told me to just get over myself and eat a sandwich, I'd be able to... buy a whole lot of sandwiches.

I think people have genuine difficulty comprehending the fact that this whole eating disorder bit isn't a bid for attention, an elaborate means of fishing for compliments, a quick-fix weight loss tactic, or a neurotic and egocentric vanity impulse run amok, but rather, a potent, all-consuming, and life-threatening addiction. I'll never forget the day I "came out of the closet", if you will, to one of my best guy friends. There was dead air on the other end of the phone line. "But you're not fat," he finally sputtered. "That's irrational."

Of course I'm not fat. Of course it's irrational. That's the point. If it were rational, it wouldn't be classified in the spectrum of mental illnesses, and it certainly wouldn't be the mental illness with the highest mortality rate. And that is the ultimate irony of the eating disorder -- for eating disorder sufferers tend to be attractive, bright, perfectionistic, extremely intelligent, and extremely intuitive. In other words, the real tragedy of the disease is that your loved one, who is demonstrably rational about every other facet of her life, will stubbornly and in the teeth of the evidence maintain as truth something which is so manifestly false as to be ludicrous -- even if it kills her.

However, the fallacious and illogical leap that most ordinary people make from this observation, namely, that because these girls are clearly both smart and lovely, they must deep down, on some subconscious level recognize their own beauty, is a radical departure from the facts. By this interpretation, these girls are all either downright liars or attention-whores, which is a grossly unfair miscategorization of eight million American women. People, as a rule, aren't willing to die just for the hell of it.

Connect the dots, people. If all these uber-intelligent girls are utterly convinced of an untruth to the point of having their entire sense of self-worth tangled up with the size of their jeans and a number on a scale, there must be something terribly, terribly wrong, and as the Bard puts it in Midsummer Night's Dream, "this we should pity rather than despise".

In other words, the next person who tells me to "just eat" is going to get a swift kick where it hurts. They clearly have no idea what it means to have every cupboard in the world stocked with your sweet destroyer, to just look at a plate of food and have utter panic envelope and cloud your mind, the gargantuan strength of will it takes to pick up that fork and take a bite, and then have to repeat the whole damn process all over again. They have never known the tearful physical anguish of forcing food on a body whose digestive system has shut down long ago from abuse and disuse. They have never known the racking sobs and hysterical tears over the bathroom scale as the weight slowly creeps back on and all you can do is suck it up and make a half-assed attempt to convince yourself how "healthy" you're getting. They have never known the breathtaking punch in the gut you feel every time a friend cheers you on by telling you how "healthy" or "well" you're looking, since for five, six, seven, eight years all you have ever wanted is to "look sick" so somebody would care. They have never known what it means to have your one and only emotional outlet taken away in one fell swoop and to be forced to tackle head-on all those long-ago shelved feelings and open wounds and lingering resentments with no venue left for releasing them. They have never known what it means to have your cautiously-patrolled walls and carefully-constructed masks stripped away and to be laid out, bare and exposed, for who you really are. And they have never known the iron grip of sheer terror that engulfs you as you realize that the only way to save your life is to give up the only defining sense of identity you have ever known.

You are no longer the Sick One, the Skinny One, the Girl With Issues -- and who are you without that, anyway? The process of self-discovery and self-recovery is a hellish one, but I have every confidence that at the crux, it is really only purgatorial, and that Bunyan's celestial city awaits me on the flip side.

Sometimes I really am Eustace.

The first taste of freedom is always the sweetest.

Last Tuesday, May 27th, I moved out of what has become an increasingly toxic and destructive environment with little more than a quarter-tank of gas, the clothes on my back, five bucks in my pocket, and a wing and a prayer.

I was more than a little apprehensive, for although spontaneity is one of my most prominent (and some would say most insufferable) traits, strong follow-through is not. And in this particular instance, I could not afford to lose faith, to give up, to wuss out. Too much was riding on it.

And so I left, and in less than a week of a nomad's existence, I have discovered a great many things. The first, and perhaps the most important, is a principle that is now etched upon my soul: that I am loved, beyond measure; that, in the words of Victor Hugo, "the supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves." Mustering up the humility to admit that you are in a tight spot and need a couch to crash on is made a little easier to bear when you are surrounded by as many incredible friends as I have had the good fortune to accumulate over the years. If I ever again feel the throes of cynicism or the temptation to lose faith in humanity coming on, I will remember these days as the week in which I discovered that, a la George Bailey, no man is a failure who has friends.

Secondly, though, I have realized that most of us are a great deal more competent and capable than we dare to think we are -- that that which seems most difficult and unattainable is actually, more often than not, quite within our grasp, provided we have the courage and wherewithal to seek after it.

Thirdly, I have realized that there are an enormous amount of character flaws and foibles, diabolical pet sins, and atrocious habits, which I have shelved and avoided the unpleasant reality of confronting for some time, and which the time is now ripe for tackling. I may not enjoy it -- I imagine I won't -- and like Eustace in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, will be forced to undergo the wrenching but necessary transformation of having my scales torn away by loving claws, but the unpleasantness or difficulty is not really the point. The time to be happy, to learn to love life again, to be the woman that I was called to be, is now. I sit on the threshold of a new and greater adventure, and while it is far easier to wallow in your own self-pity than to get up off your ass and do something about it it, it is only in the Doing Something that anything may be achieved at all.

"Get busy living, or get busy dying." And it's the living that takes a hell of a lot more courage.