Last month I had my first sandwich in years. I had forgotten the way a complete meal could satisfy the mouth, fill the stomach, and quiet the quaking hand of a starving body. Before that sandwich I hadn’t had a meal in days. Months of whittling my daily food intake down to string cheese and a dozen cups of tea had reduced me to a pale, shriveled Gollum, lurking in the shadows, obsessed with her precious string cheese. Nothing else mattered.
Though it was not my goal to die in a hypothermic puddle of nausea and heart palpitations alone in my apartment, the reality was that I was about to do just that. What I discounted as “just another diet” quickly became the outlet I relied upon to dispel the stress I could not handle. It was an outlet I discovered in my last year of undergrad. College was ending and the big existential questions, like who I was and where I was going, remained unanswered. I found that losing weight could replace these insecurities with a sense of ultimate power, exercised each time I denied myself food. So, as the end of law school neared, and the old anxieties began to scratch at the door I thought I had long since closed, I turned again to my old friend—anorexia.
Several months deep in the throes of my eating disorder, I couldn’t make it out of bed without a serious pep talk and a solid object against which to prop myself when inevitably my knees buckled and my vision darkened. The physical pain of my bones grinding against the springs in the mattress or the seats in the classroom, and the startling sharpness of my ribs jutting against my insides did little to deter me. However, the emotional toll of watching my life narrow to the fifteen minutes once a day that I would take to savor that string cheese made the time in between unbearable.
Life fell away. My hair came out in clumps whenever I motivated myself to brush it. Showering became a struggle between the need to get warm and the need to stay upright as the scalding water drained my blood pressure. I used to crush two hour-long spin classes and now I had to take sit-down breaks when I bathed. Each day was more miserable as I both fought against and wallowed in the hunger pangs that never went away. Yet I celebrated each moment that passed without eating. String cheese meant defeat, starving was victory.
But I was often defeated. When the angry, starving hyena that was my empty stomach finally took down my frail, limping resolve, tearing at it until there was no more fight left, I surrendered. Steadying myself against the counter tops, I retrieved the sacred stick of cheese from the fridge. Then I scampered back to bed, burrowed under the covers, and pulled the heater close to ensure maximum enjoyment of my one, daily reprieve. There I huddled, sucking on my cheese, trying to make do with just the taste in my mouth.
Afterward, I began the countdown to sleep and the escape from the painful, lingering hunger and the deafening voice that railed against my weakness, my ordinariness. By eating I had ruined the only special thing about me, the perfection of starvation. I could only promise to do better tomorrow.
Even if I could quiet the internal histrionics enough to drift off, I was soon wide awake, counting the minutes till sunrise. To pass the time I would calculate the calories I had consumed. Two a.m. usually found me on the kitchen floor, crouched on a heating pad, charting my weekly intake on the whiteboard. There I concocted dozens of alternate meal plans, finding areas of slack (like the stick of gum or the splash of milk in my tea) where I could shave calories. Nightly I ripped apart my fridge, emptying onto the floor the staples of my diet—lettuce, cucumbers, and the condiments I covered them in. Calories were counted and tabulated. Chili sauce will forever remind me of a recent visit to my parents’ house, when I frantically dug lettuce spines out of the trash so I could eat those dipped in Sriracha instead of having the dressed salad my dad made for dinner.
