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.