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The
Brownstone Journal >>
Issues >> Vol.
IX Spring 2000
The Cliché and the Crash: An
Inside Look at Anorexia
Kathryn Carvette DeVito (CAS XX) is
a freshman majoring in television communication. She is also
a screenwriter. She would like to thank Mullen Thuan, her agent,
for being her best friend and her reader.
Marya Hornbacher: I am an interesting creature,
an eating disorder Not Otherwise Specified. My weight has ranged
over the past [twelve years] from [121] pounds to [86] pounds,
inching up and then plummeting back down. I have gotten well,
then sick, then well, then sicker, and so on up to now; I am
considered moderately improved, psychologically stabilized,
behaviorally disordered, prone to habitual relapse. I have had
endless hours of therapy, been tested and observed and diagnosed
and pigeonholed and poked and prodded and fed and weighed for
so long that I have begun to feel like a laboratory rat.
FADE IN:
I am an interesting creature. There. I said it. Finally, after
many– too many–years of silence. I sit here composing this essay
because my brain is fogged and I am unable to deal with the
piles of college work building on my desk. I figured I might
as well write about the things upsetting me. They say that in
the late stages of anorexia, after the muscles have atrophied,
the body begins to eat itself, the brain begins to eat itself
and brain damage ensues. When I say they I mean what are to
me the experts; doctors, nutritionists, specialists, etc., whom
we anorexics see often and from whom we often take warnings
and instructions as little more than hackneyed advice.
It is nauseatingly humorous that I worry more about how many
calories I have consumed today than about this tragic, pertinent
fact. I think I ingested about a hundred. TOO MUCH. I already
am TOO MUCH. I’ve been battling anorexia for the last ten years-,
a stalemate seems inconceivable. I wonder how long before brain
damage.
ENTER CHARACTER LEFT:
The character, a stereotypical white, female, young, upper middle
class, screenwriter, perfectionist, overANALizer, hyper-intellectual.
THE TRITE STORY:
Nah, I won't give you one. I won't ramble on about how my life
is so melodramatic or how neurotic I am or how I am fully recovered
because the truth is, my life is trite, eating disorders are
trite. I am neurotic, and finally, after many therapy sessions,
quite proud of it. Yet I am nowhere close to “recovered”, as
recovery is a long haul down a narrow and convoluted road. Recovery
is a process I cannot describe; thoughts, feelings all too intricate;
emotions soar up and down like the pounds I've lost and found
over the years. Nothing, not even those blue morning pills,
can make the heart stop racing or the hands stop shaking, or
stop the cold from shivering down my spine.
To be great is to be misunderstood? Sorry, not in this case,
Mr. Emerson. To be misunderstood is great? Now I know from experience
that's not the case either. The causes for this disorder are
vast and varied–to expand on the stereotypes that perpetuate
this illness is inane. I do not believe in stereotypes, anyway,
just as I thought I didn't believe in the cultural stereotypes
that thinness was the be-all and end-all of goals. Yeah, that's
right. This contradiction renders me a hypocrite. The truth
is, I still incessantly vacillate on the very notion of simply
committing to recovery. That last noun, the one I approach with
trepidation, isn't easy to say. Not in the least bit. Nothing
scares me more than giving it up. My affliction has been the
only non-fleeting aspect of my life. Everything else friends,
family, aspirations–has either faded, changed, or been manipulated
over time. I’ve been manipulated over time. This, this I control.
Well, I did control it. Didn't I? I don't know anymore. I don't
even know who I am. Sick, really. Sad. Trite. The trite story
I promised to avoid. It cannot be helped.
Mary Hornbacher: At a certain point, an eating disorder ceases
to be “about” any one thing. It stops being about your family,
or your culture. Very simply, it becomes an addiction not only
emotionally but also chemically. And it becomes a crusade. If
you are honest with yourself, you stop believing anyone could
'make ' you do such a thing–who, your parents? They want you
to starve to death ? Not likely. Your environment? It couldn’t
care less. You are also doing it for yourself. It is to shortcut
to something that many people without an eating disorder have
gotten: respect and power. It is a visual temper tantrum. You
are making an ineffective statement about this or that, a grotesque,
self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, of societal
misogyny. It is a blow to your parents, at whom you are pissed.
And it is so very seducive. It is so reassuring, so all-consuming.
At first.
All this is moot. Best friend turned foe, controlling me with
such vicious debilitating power I wonder how I have endured,
and yet I still am, no matter how hard I try, or how little
I eat, TOO MUCH.
As if there was safety in stupidity alone, Mr. Thoreau. Well,
to people with eating disorders, there is. This safety we feel
in starving, in depriving ourselves of essential nutrients,
is comfort. We're doing something for ourselves. We're fighting
back; we're cutting back, we're trying to win using the only
method we know about, in the only way we see fit.
Fit? Survival of the fittest? An odd take on existing or striving
to... In our minds, it is quite Darwinian. It provides whatever
cliché you choose: a safety net, a security blanket,
or what have you. The clichés get old. The illness gets
old. I have gotten old, and I don't remember where the years
have gone. They've been lost to endless counting of calories,
fat grams, hopes of when more pounds would be shed. I just wish
I knew then that you can't win a war against an eating disorder.
Your demise is certain; it has too much skill, too much expericnce,
too much power, and too many weapons.
William Faulkner: Because no battle is ever won, he said. They
are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly
and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and
fools.
As for essential nutrients? All that comes to mind is another
cliché: we can do just fine on the bare minimum; we are
the epitome of survival. Then, one day you find yourself sitting
in a classroom, hands shaking, teeth shivering, stomach violently
turning on the combination of caffeine and pills. Maybe you're
in the grocery store buying food you know for certain you're
either going to throw away or throw up, and you realize you
no longer want to survive. You want to live. Ah, so there’s
a difference. I just hope I live long enough to embrace it.
My memory has lapsed over time, becoming more inept as the years
color themselves with uncanny similarity–food, no food, calories,
reduce, TOO MUCH, exercise, not enough. more, TOO MUCH TOO MUCH.
Oops. I’m going insane. I've lost my mind. I don't care. I just
want to be smaller and smaller and smaller until I no longer
attract attention. I don't want to be noticed anymore. It’s
too bad no one's watching me die.
Marya Hornbacher: She loses fifteen and says twenty, loses
twenty, says thirty, loses thirty, says forty, loses the forty
and dies. Oops. She hadn’t meant to die. She just wanted to
see what would happen. Wanted to see how far she could go. And
then couldn’t quite bring herself to break the fall. It didn’t
matter at all, whether or not I was thin enough, and no I was
not sure, I couldn’t be sure, who can be sure? Who’s to say
what’s truth and what’s perception? Where is the absolute standard?
It didn’t matter anyway, because I did not eat.
CUT TO:
The recounting of events in my life, therefore, mulled and
mollified by absence of feeling and absence of thought, marinating
in its desire to become smaller, vacillates between living and
dying, between eating and starving, between self and lack of
self. My whole life has been consumed by one horrible, overwhelming,
near-fatal fixation. The tragedy is that I used to like it this
way. Key words here are used to. So finally, after years of
starving and hating myself and trying to discern–not to mention
fill–the atrocious emptiness inside me with water and diet coke
and coffee, I got fed up, pardon the pun. I got tired. I got
ill. Or I got well. In any case, I gave in. The strength to
keep going, to let myself eat, to begin (dare I mention) like
myself, comes from not wanting anyone else to waste her life
the way I have. The way I continue to do on what I refer to
as the “bad days”–the days when I don't eat, when I obsess endlessly
about my weight, when I can’t stop, and when my friend can't
take my complaints any longer:
She: Do I look fat?
He: No. you don't.
She: Are you sure I don't look fat?
He: NO! You don't.
She: Well, do I look thin?
He: Yes.
She: How thin?
He: Thin!
She: Thin? Thin... Skinny?
And this goes on and on and on until he shakes me hard and tells
me to stop doing this to myself. MY SELF? What is SELF? Who
cares about SELF? And then one day it hits you. Maybe you're
Ninety pounds or Eighty or Seventy or maybe you don't even know
how much you weigh because THEY won’t tell you. First you see
your bones, then you seen your yellow skin, and finally, finally
you see the SELF. Whatever is left of it, anyway.
Only Less is left. Less. Less. Less. I do still have these “bad”
days; I have many of them. I have days where I incessantly squeeze
my ugly, excessive flesh and days I yell at myself for picking
too many raisins out of a bagel and days when I don't adhere
to my diet of water. I am simply a human being more or less.
Mr. Bellow. And I really do feel bad at these times. It's hard
to imagine feeling like this if you don't have an eating disorder;
it's hard to understand the fear, sweat, and agony: it's hard
to feel the panic of you being TOO MUCH as it slowly rises up
through your body until you think it is taking over your brain
and you are going insane. Eventually, just like my sex drive
and my feelings, my mind goes numb.
Emily Dickinson: I felt a funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro–
Kept treading–treading–till I thought
That Sense was breaking through
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum–
Kept beating–beating–till I thought
My Mind was going numb--
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space–began to toll...
Nevertheless, having lost so many friends, so many lovers,
and so much of myself, I decided to commit at least half of
the energy I had worrying about my excessive flesh to worrying
about the minds of others. So many. No, Dante, I had not thought
that death had undone so many. I do not want anyone to induce
the same hell on themselves that I am living through. I started
an organization called F.E.D. U.P. (Fighting Eating Disorders
and Uniting Peers). This is my fight to save others from the
battle with self-perceptions and it's the worst fight of all.
It kills the soul. I want to save others from a swift fall into
a convex mirror; I know I cannot change the past, but my personal
fight can rescue others from the hell I suffered. I do not want
others to be robbed of their childhood, their adolescence, their
college days, or the rest of their lives–their essence of being.
I was not so lucky. It is a difficult task–resurrecting the
pieces of a body, and an even more difficult task to resurrect
a soul. I can tell you that if I had been wise enough, open
enough, or informed enough to listen to what is important and
relevant in life, perhaps I wouldn't have bought the cultural
party-line that thinness was everything; that my worth was inversely
proportional to my size. Perhaps then my past would not solely
consist of the counting of fat grams or the allotting of calories.
DISSOLVE TO:
Doctors are always saying that eating disorders are the third
most common form of chronic psychological illness among American
women. Although eating disorders commonly begin between the
ages of l3 and 25, they are becoming more common among younger
children. Almost half of American elementary school students
between the first and third grades want to be thinner; four
out of five children at age ten are afraid of being fat; half
of nineteen year old girls say they would feel better about
themselves if they were on a diet. There is no “cure.” A pill
may help, therapy may help, support may help, food may help,
but ultimately, you have to do it yourself, and you have to
want to do it for yourself. Some never fix it. For them, the
disorder becomes chronic, exacting medical and psychological
complications and sometimes even death. In fact, the death rate
for eating disorders bears the highest mortality rate of any
psychiatric disorder: after five years, 8% die; after fifteen
years, 13% see their demise, and after thirty years, 20% do
not make it.
Emily Dickinson: As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here–
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down–
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing–then–
Prevention, then, is the most effective way of managing eating
disorders. Educating the young, teaching self-acceptance, health,
and the ability to reject improper societal messages that can
contribute to eating disorders, are imperative. It is frightening
that with the forty billion dollars Americans dispense on dieting
and diet-related products each year, fewer than one in ten approved
research grants to study eating disorders receive actual funding.
So this is the plea of a passionate filmmaker to those who can
help shape a child's, an adolescent's, an adult's life. It is
important that we educate people about eating disorders. There
is TOO MUCH at risk to be silent, and I have been quiet too
long.
Marya Hornbacher: I do not have a happy ending... I cannot
sum up and say, But now it’s over. Happily ever after. It's
never over. Not really. Not when you stay down there as long
as I did, not when you’ve lived in the netherworld longer than
you lived in this material one, where things are very bright
and large and make such strange noises. You never come back,
not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you
and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin
as the glass of a mirror. You never come all the way out of
the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot
in this world and one in another, where everything is upside
down and backward and sad...
It is quintessential that we who struggle with “recovery” are
really struggling to find ourselves, since for years all we've
known is one thing: how to starve. I created this project for
a number of reasons. Too many people do not understand this
disorder, thinking it is some sort of a mental instability or
insignificant problem, yet they end up running in the other
direction. Nevertheless, it is neither. Anorexia is an illness,
an addiction, an affliction, an obsession, and even a way to
avoid life. It's a way to avoid facing the pain each of us holds
in that deep void we cannot quite figure out. I want other people
to be aware of such an endemic problem so that their reaction
may not be so terse or so cold. So that their reaction won't
be TOO MUCH.
FADE OUT TBJ
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