Peek-A-Boo

More than a year into recovery, it has not been perfect. I want to know, when am I out of the woods? When does recovery end and life begin? I'm living now, but I feel like I need an exorcist.

The first time I quit, I was struck by the emptiness bulimia left behind. Where there had been fanatical vice, there was deafening silence. Nothing. Time. A void that was so peaceful it felt unnatural and put me on edge. I didn't know what to do with myself. At that point I was single and living alone. My evenings had been dominated by raiding grocery stores, making the rounds at drive-thrus, obsessing over which combination of menu items to order online for delivery. And after the binge, the purge. And after the purge, the devastating exhaustion. There was no room for hobbies or a social life. Normally I brought home so much food that there was enough for multiple binges and purges, as my stomach swelled and strained and demanded to be emptied if I was going to continue on my mad quest to expunge something, everything, all thought and feeling. Between eating and puking, I smoked cigarettes. My mouth and hands were always working to silence my brain. To this day I am not sure what I was so afraid of thinking that I would not allow myself to think at all.

Then I banished bulimia and it was gone. The motivation to change was sudden, surprising even me. Exercising rusty willpower and more determination than discipline, in one fell swoop I turned my entire life upside down. You would think it would  be a relief. What I felt was untethered. It was as if I had fallen out of orbit, drifting and lost with no sense of purpose. That space, which was so open and blank that it was terrifying, is something that I wish I had known to regard with respectful caution. Shortly thereafer, it was flooded with feelings of guilt and regret about the years I could not get back and the damage I was trying to measure. I had alienated so many friends that I had no support system in place, no one to lean on or confide in when I needed encouragement. Every day of that near-year was not just a struggle, but a full-on battle. I was at peace with nothing, at war with everything. The false sense that I was the only one hurt by my self destruction also flourished in this setting, and eventually played a part in my full-blown relapse. My heart was in the right place, but I had no follow-through plan.

Things are drastically different now. I let my fiance close to me well before I recovered. He loved me before I was "better," before I was "in control." He held fast and weathered the storms. Dependable, stable, compassionate, but so entirely confident in my ability to persevere that I was driven to live up to his expectations. I didn't want to let him down and I didn't want to lose him. In retrospect his confidence in me was likely naive or misplaced, but without his conviction I may never have beaten the odds. I believed in me because he believed in me. If he wavered, he never let on, and so it became an absolute. I was going to recover, and we both knew it. He wasn't angry, he didn't take my disorder personally, and he was prepared to wait as long as there was progress. It was just a matter of time and effort. And while it was always "just a matter of time and effort," on my own, I could not put that into perspective. I was discouraged trying to quantify an immeasurable value. But now, I was not alone. A sense of urgency and desperation was replaced by acceptance of slow but steady improvement.

The strength I had failed to see in myself was obvious to him, and I began to rediscover my better traits. We talked a lot about what I was feeling and how the focus of my recovery evolved as I progressed, from the physical discomfort and very obvious healing of my digestive system to the more complicated issues of intimacy as my body changed. With time I once spent on bulimia, we played racquetball, read aloud, hiked hundreds of miles to explore the Florida landscape, and cooked healthy meals together. We did things that nourish your body, mind, and soul, that facilitate healing and create a sense of comfort and well-being.

Yet over the months I stopped talking. One of the reasons I had wanted to move across the country and switch careers was to create a life that was full and challenging, a life with absolutely no room in it for bulimia. I had accomplished that, and dove headlong into my new responsibilities at the office. Initially, the transfer of fixation and stress was exactly what I needed to keep me from dwelling on the negative parts of recovery. Like the sense of lost time and feelings of anger or foolishness. While tremendous effort was immediately necessary to establish myself and hit the ground running at work, it meant that when I  reached a point where I needed to start addressing the emotional aftermath of bulimia, I easily dismissed it as of secondary importance. I suppressed it and allowed no time for self reflection, making no further effort to work through the topics that were too personal to even want to discuss with my fiance. The stuff that may have made him uncomfortable and certainly would have been out of his realm in which to counsel me. The psychological heavy lifting.

Part of this stems from that fact that when you have so closely involved another person in your recovery, no matter how patient and understanding they are, you hit a point where you get a sense that they are waiting for you to simply be better. This is especially true if the person you are sharing your life with has no penchant for or tendency toward addiction and despite their willingness to be supportive and compassionate, they don't fully understand the depths to which your core and confidence have been shaken. My fiance also comes from a family with remarkably moderate, balanced attitudes toward food and has never before been close to someone affected by an eating disorder, let alone a severe, pervasive case. I had more energy, was no longer complaining about digestive distress, and a year had passed. Wasn't it over? Now, he never would have put it that bluntly, but the truth is, the time to move on was upon us. And I am still edging my way up to that plate.

Recently, my unhappiness, listlessness, and self doubt has returned. This caught me off guard. It was disconcerting. It was disappointing. I thought that with bulimia behind me, I wouldn't get so depressed. I had a good job, a loving fiance, a bright future, heck, even a puppy. And the mental cloudiness, irritability, and discontent continued to grow. I have reached a critical juncture. The superficial act of healing is complete.

As I'm writing this, I see a little more clearly that I have failed to develop a new identity or to excavate the positive elements of my old one. I skipped that step being preoccupied with work and neglecting myself. I replaced my identity as a bulimic with my identity as a work-a-holic, and while it's an improvement, the rest of me is screaming for a chance to be heard. I am healthy, strong, and the only thing holding me back is myself. The task is to figure out what is important to me again. To rediscover the passions and interests that define a person and give their life meaning. These are things that I should look forward to getting back in touch with, yet I am approaching this stage with great trepidation. Who is the person buried inside of me? She hasn't been out in years. Will my fiance like her? Will my friends like her? Do I like her?

It's not possible to move past something if you're not willing to let it go. Reminiscing, or its uglier counterpart - over-analyzing the past - are things I indulge in too frequently. More than that, the guilt I harbor has left me haunted. It is more than guilt about how I have hurt myself and others through deceit and the usual ways in which addicts prove unreliable. For more than a decade, I completely forgot how to listen to my moral compass and my intuition, allowing myself to be governed by impulse and fear. My personality was so markedly defined by my weaknesses and negative qualities that it pains me to identify with that person at all, and it's hard for me not to look back at the past and make the sweeping generalization that it was all bad.

Taking myself to task in this case actually means slowing down. It means living in the moment, celebrating the present. Doodling, scribbling in my journal, making long distance phone calls to loved ones, engaging with my surroundings so that I engage with myself. It sounds so simple. For a person who spent years in an alternate reality, a universe governed and censored by the lens of bulimia, that is going to be my biggest challenge yet. Baby steps.

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.

No One Saved Me, and I Didn't Die

The first book I ever read on eating disorders was Marya Hornbacher's Wasted. I was 15 years old. It was one of the few times my mother would ever try to start a conversation with me on this topic. She had read it first, screening it before deciding to hand it over. Wasted was honest in a grim but eloquent way, managing to be both romantic and alluringly depraved. It expanded my brief freshman year health class understanding of bulimia from the fat girl who baked a pan of brownies and ate them all at once to something more systematic. I took extensive mental notes. To this day I recall in vivid detail descriptions of how once-tight clothing hung from the author's hipbones and how she started her binges with brightly colored foods so that when it all came back up in the toilet bowl, you'd know you were done. First thing in, last thing out. I used Cheetos for this purpose the first time I tried.

A book was not my tipping point. Reading it did not catapult me into what would become a 14 year cycle of bingeing and purging. When I read Wasted, I found what I was looking for, and if I hadn't found it there, I would have found it elsewhere. I was starving as I ingested those pages, and I didn't want to die. I needed something that would replace calorie counting and evenings on the treadmill. I needed something that would consume even more time, even more energy, and do so without the obvious change in physical appearance or performance. I was having trouble concentrating in class or mustering the energy for soccer practice while hungry. My parents were suspicious. Older boys looked at me like vultures in the hallways at school, drawn in by my big, haunted eyes and the toughness that betrayed vulnerability. I wanted to disappear completely. I wanted everyone to stop noticing me, let me catch my breath in privacy. Lacking this ability, I aimed to draw less attention to the vice that was my primary source of solace. I chose bulimia and said goodbye to anorexia.

The truth is that, for me, the disorder served a purpose. At least in the beginning. I was grieving. I was 14 and had lost a best friend, a role model, a cousin. She was the person I sat next to at the table during holiday meals. A pen pal. The co-star of so many of my childhood memories. Her unexpected death undermined the premise of certainty in my sheltered early adolescence. My family was reeling, and we pulled apart. I felt that I myself was pulling apart. Bulimia numbed me. It consumed me. It was always there, whenever I called for it. It was predictable and comforting. And when I wondered if I was out of my element, if I had gone too far to get back alone, the illusion of control made me arrogant and the realization that at least I was choosing what hurt me was my consolation.

The purpose bulimia served evolved into habit, which progressed to dependency. The transgression was natural and gradual; I relied upon bulimia to serve as an all-encompassing preoccupation. It was a control game where I felt at home, even if the ultimate outcome was self-destructive. I was OK with being the one in charge of hurting myself, but terrified of taking emotional risks that might put me at the mercy of someone else. For years, bulimia exhausted me of my passions and my sensitivities. Partially by the solitude that concealing it demanded and partially because I had no energy to invest in other people or other pursuits. I skated on thin ice in every other facet of my life. Functioning, but barely.

Over the years, my ability to cope in a healthy way, exercise any kind of discipline or willpower, or take full ownership of any responsibility diminished significantly. I was out of practice in some areas and had never grown into the adult version of others. Bulimia is enormously self-indulgent. It is all-encompassing and absolutely terrifying. On more than one trip to the hospital for extreme dehydration or my compromised immune system (i.e. cellulitis and walking pneumonia), I wondered if I was going to die. There were moments when I fantasized about someone intervening. Showing up at my apartment when the coffee table was a buffet of fast food, pizza deliveries, loot from the snack aisle, and melting ice cream. Hauling me away to a "facility," but of course nowhere for crazy people, where I could rest. I began to fantasize about sleep when the escapism of bulimia became something else that I wanted to escape.

I recently moved across the country, from Michigan to Florida. When I started the drive, I was still bulimic. It was the stage of recovery that is more starts than stops, when you're beginning to get tired enough of tripping that you might as well just do it right, muddle through it, and move on. I'd made it almost a full year without purging in the past, but without addressing any of the root reasons for my disorder, all I had done was strip away a coping mechanism without preparing myself to survive minus the buffer provided by the coping mechanism. It was a very difficult, isolating, and emotionally raw year. I never managed to get my life in order to support the positive change, and when I relapsed, I did so massively. This time, unlike last time, I was 100% sure that I wanted to recover. What scared me now was what was at stake if I did not.

For 1,102 miles in a U-Haul, I shared the bench seat with my fiance. Who was counting on me, who had endured the mood swings, the deception, the canceled plans, the strange ailments. We crossed the state line into Florida and I told myself, everything is changing. If you don't start to swim, you are going to drown.

There is a risk, I think, to sharing stories like mine. No one saved me, and I didn't die. Part of relocating is finding a favorite supermarket, a great dive bar, the cinema with the most comfortable seats. I had to get established with a new physician recently, and he asked me something that none of my other doctors have. "What do you think could have been done to stop this when you were much younger? At the start?" I told him that I could imagine no way to convey to a girl that young how much of her life would be compromised. How absolutely devastating the cumulative effect of a repeated mistake, however seemingly insignificant, can become over time. Repeated mistakes gain momentum. They become defining.

The truth is that I probably was incapable of grasping how pervasive bulimia would become in my life. How many relationships it would destroy, whether friendly or romantic. How many opportunities I would miss because I was at home throwing up. How much debt I would accumulate from the massive quantities of food and the medical bills. What I didn't tell my new doctor is that I had long since stopped asking myself this very "what if" question.

There are a million different permutations, but this is the one I lived. And I am here. No one saved me, but I didn't die. Will others read my account and think they may also be so lucky, that the risk is worth it to continue harboring an eating disorder? I am guessing that there are others like I was at the age of 14. Half trying to quit by finding a firsthand tale wretched enough to scare them straight. Half morbidly curious for proof that they can put off getting better. My story is both of those stories: recovery and triumph, wretchedness and despair. I am focusing more on the present now, trying to be better to myself. But there is no way of knowing what lies down the road for me, with health complications or retribution for my indulgence and neglect. I am lucky, and with each passing day of recovery I feel more hopeful that this is truly a second chance, but I wouldn't wish my experiences upon anyone else.