I eloped when I was nineteen to a great guy, and moved to Maine, away from my family, and away from the people who knew how I used to look. In Maine I would start over. I wouldn’t be the fat girl who was once thin—a study of weakness and indulgence. I would instead be the fat girl, who overcame and revealed herself to be a knock-out. What actually happened was, by the time we moved from Maine, eight months later, I was ten pounds heavier and miserable. At this time, I discovered salvation. I discovered laxatives.
I’ve never been able to say the word “bulimic,” it seems so glamorous a title that I don’t feel I’m worthy of the sympathy it engenders. Nevertheless, laxatives became, and I’m sorry to say still are my cure all pill. Though I wasn’t getting any skinnier, I could purge myself of all the mistakes, food related and otherwise that I had made that day. I quickly became addicted, and though I’m able to stop for short periods of time, the urge is never far away.
It’s been four years, and I sometimes have to take over 200 a week for the desired effect. I’ll spend hours in my bathroom curled in the fetal position as cramps shoot through my stomach—my punishment for having been so weak as to eat in the first place. My husband finds my stashes and throws them away in a rage, not understanding that I plan my days around my bathroom breaks. I know when I wake up if I’m going to use, and then the whole purpose of my day revolves around eating as much as I can, and then the ceremony of getting it out. It is the most humiliating thing I have ever put myself through, but I can’t stop. Even when I’m sore and bleeding from the rough tissue paper I’m planning when I can do it again. My biggest fear is that one day I’ll go too far, and really hurt myself, but even that doesn’t stop me. I don’t know what this sick obsession is doing to my insides, all I know is that it has all but ruined my spirit and the way I see myself.
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