Tug 'o War with Full Disclosure

My attempts at consistent writing have never evolved beyond a chicken scratch series of journal entries. Which bounce back and forth between several notebooks with little regard for chronology and a tendency to record mundane milestones without going into detail. The most important thing I've ever observed in an entry may very well be an acknowledgement that the events and feelings unmentioned on those pages tend to be the ones that affected me most deeply. A realization that surprised me when I had it, because it is seldom that I will ever go back and re-read my old journals. My father had been in and out of the hospital again, I hadn't been sleeping, and there was nary a mention. There were several pages of musings about Florida wildlife and the astonishing size of my fiance's routine midnight snacks. I don't record the big stuff. I'm not worried that I will ever forget it. For a person who elevates language to a golden pedestal as the chief facilitator of that treasured art: communication, I tend to shy away from words when it comes to matters of personal substance.

It makes sense, then, that the irregularly produced column of mine for a friend's website, The Idler, was entitled "Tug 'o War with Full Disclosure." I've been typecast as the friend prized for brutal honesty and blunt candor, and it's true - I'll give it to you straight if you want feedback, an opinion, an assessment. Personal history is another matter. I cannot be trusted to reconstruct my past. At least not completely. At least not in the format of a timeline. When your life has been as fractured and clouded as mine has by addiction, some things that happened a decade ago are still as fresh as yesterday - so newly discovered despite how long ago they took place that time becomes irrelevant. And some things that happened yesterday were so diminished in comparison that they all but evaporated into the periphery upon occurrence. Everything hurts and everything is numb. Nothing matters and everything is overwhelmingly important.

Bulimia got me into the habit of constant lying. In order to cope, to go undetected, and to, I suppose, also facilitate a safe distance that allowed me to be introspective, I always discussed bulimia in the past tense. For the few people in my life who were ever clued in to my battle with the disorder, I am sure this was frustrating beyond belief. I think that some of them suspected and let me get away with it, because it was easier for them, too. Then they could tell me what they really thought. Because I was better, right? Because they didn't have to worry that they were being too hard on me if the worst of it was over. Then it wasn't me asking for help. We could have an intellectual conversation about it. The tremendous lack of available research on eating disorders, but especially bulimia. The widely perpetuated myths about the role of body image in perpetuating eating disorders. Or how I, at least, seemed to be an exception to these notions. In that way, I circled around the root of the problem for years.

I haven't been able to decide how it is that I want to help people with what I have learned throughout all of this. What I know for certain is that I have never felt a strong a pull toward anything as I have toward shedding light on this. I'm equally certain that it's too soon for me to do that effectively, because I am still understanding what it meant to me, how it changed me, what it is going to take to move on, to heal, to repair myself. Physically, things seem to have turned a corner. Digestion is no longer the miserable waiting game of gas and indigestion, cramps and nausea that it was for many months directly after I quit purging. Mentally, I feel that I am truly just getting started. I don't feel compelled to shout from the rooftops to the masses, and I don't feel compelled to switch to psychiatry so that I can have intimate one-on-one conversations. If I was ever going to enlighten someone, it seems to me that it would be from a safe distance, with my words. If I can learn to use them as ambassadors for my story, then I can tell it honestly now. And I suppose I don't have to worry about what to do with that story until after it is already written. How much, if anything, my stories will have to do with bulimia remains to be seen.