In Honor of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week

Marya Hornbacher, in her memoir "Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia," states: “It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength.”

The contradiction is that I was very much, at the age of sixteen, catering to the male gaze, the patriarchy, or whatever other evil psycho-social forces dictate a woman's fate in the United States. I wanted power, but I was not, ultimately, the one who had any power.

I remember walking down the street one day, at sixteen, weighing in at just over ninety pounds, and I will never, as long as I live, forget the way people looked at me.

"... a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength."

I remember one little boy, who might have been five or six. He held his father's hand. He looked at me like I was something other-worldly, something to be feared. I say that because his eyes were wide open, and he could not look away from me, my body, my choices.

Choices. Such a loaded word. At some point in the process of developing an eating disorder, you lose the choice to restrict, and I imagine, to purge. You just lose that choice. It becomes clear, after a certain point, that you no longer have control over it. You must follow what it tells you to do. You must hide your food, skip meals, and pretend you ate. You must cut your food up into little pieces until it looks like you made a dent in your plate. You must suffer, because by virtue of being you, you must suffer in this very specific way.

I remember eating dinner in front of the TV with my family and hiding steak and potatoes in my napkin, shoving it down into the couch cushions, and waiting until it was safe to throw it away. I remember passing out. I remember that I only allowed myself to eat twice a day, at 11AM and at 5PM, one apple each time. That was my only sustenance for months.

Sometimes I wonder at the lasting damages of this deadly disorder. I was only sixteen: did my brain develop properly after years of restricting my food intake? I will perhaps never know. I read that on average it takes six years to recover from an eating disorder, and for me, that's exactly how long it took - six years of not just denying myself food, but hurting others in the process, of treatment centers, doctors' offices, medication, and therapy.

I hurt a lot of people. I lied to a lot of people. I had to lie because I had to be thin. And being thin was the only thing that mattered, for six years.

I remember the treatment center, the girl who cried while cutting her food. I remember the girl who broke her ankle after running for miles to burn no consumed calories at all. I remember the gym teacher, one of the only bulimics (the rest of us were restrictors), who ate her food like it was poisoned. I remember the woman whose sons had begged her to get help, to go into treatment.

Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder. Someone dies as a direct result of their eating disorder every 52 minutes. I would get comments that I didn't look pretty, or just didn't look good, period, when I weighed less than a hundred pounds. As if it was about being thin.

“It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength.”

I come back to this quote because it summarizes it best: the power being thin gives you, that "thin privilege" so many women seek. It brings you special attention, special treatment. But at the same time: I didn't want that attention, not in that way. I wanted attention for being thin, but when it would come up that I looked "too" thin, I would shrink away. No, I'd think. It's supposed to be unspoken, this is supposed to be me quietly suffering. Don't make it "a thing" that needs to be discussed. It was embarrassing, after a while. It was just plain embarrassing to have an eating disorder.

You want people to notice your thinness, but you don't want to be labeled that way. It's a walking contradiction, like when I walked down the street and that little boy stared at me, horrified by what he saw in front of him. I felt bad, but also powerful.

I felt powerful until I didn't. Until I felt really, really sick.

This week, it's National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. I want to shed light on this disease, because that's what it is: not just a bundle of contradictions, but also a deadly lapse under the guise of being "pretty" - and above all, "thin."