I’ll be fine for a few days, and then all of a sudden, it surges over me like a burst of fog: panic, chaos, absolute helplessness.
I once read on a pro-eating disorder site that anorexia is control and bulimia is variety. Not true. Anorexia is insatiately and bulimia is overcompensation. I’ve never felt so completely lost to myself as I do right now, trapped in some weaker part of my mind overcome by the overwhelming urge to eat. No eating disorder can end well, as in, no eating disorder can lead someone to his or her ideal weight. It ends in death or weight gain.
In ninth grade, I had a friend who developed anorexia and later bulimia. I followed the same course.
I joined the track team and stopped eating all together. At one point, I was 5′9″ and 86 pounds. Now, I’m the same height, but 130 pounds, and just as sick. I binge and purge almost every day, but I continue to gain weight. Being anorexic brought about a kind of hunger that is incessant. No meal can satisfy it and it is always threatening to upend all the work I do to lose weight.
My middle name should be cancer. Between smoking, bingeing, purging, and huge weight fluctuations, it will be a miracle if I live to be forty. Sometimes it seems I can feel the rebel cells crackling and blackening like newspaper in a campfire, first in the back of my throat, later in the blistered walls of my stomach. Yet my health seems so separate from the appearance of my body. I measure my wellness in what I can see. When I eat normally, I gain weight, I look unhealthy; when I starve myself and purge, I look lean, although my innards are slicked with greasy stomach acid.
It’s so odd; funny even, that I can see this whole thing objectively. It’s shallow, legitimately crazy, and vain. Squalor-stricken families are starving while I shun food like it was poison. Malnourished African children clutch their swollen stomachs with knobby fingers while I feast and purge. Perhaps I need some unfiltered reality to make me feel, bodily, the insanity of my affliction. Perhaps I need some perspective, but it’s hard to find when you bend and sharpen every image to brand yourself. Nothing is neutral to me; everything reminds me of the state of my body, my BMI, my love handles, my fleshy arms.
And that is why I can never escape the panic. Sometimes I feel like some sort of sexual predator, eyeing every woman up and down to compare myself to her body. I feel the way my ass expands, like ship’s sail, to the limits of my desk chair. My shadow has the uneven gate of a pregnant woman. A thousand sensory images all at once, hammering at the same idea. The panic of an eating disorder is ubiquitous and seems, at least right now, inescapable.
