odd. In the first grade, a teacher publicly humiliated me for throwing out a bag of unopened cheese doodles. “There are starving children in China,” she had said about that unopened bag of cheese doodles. In the second grade, a friend tattled on me to my mother, reporting that I occasionally threw out my sandwiches in the cafeteria, uneaten. “That better not be true, Elizabeth,” my mother scolded. This was also the same year I went on my first diet, which lasted about half a day.
But in middle school I somehow became embarrassed about food, speaking about it, or being seen eating it. I am not sure how it happened, but it happened gradually. I did not wake up one morning grossed out about eating in public. I would sit in the cafeteria during lunch and pretend to socialize with friends when in reality, I was fantasizing about their lunches. I would imagine those delicious lunches were my lunches, the poppy seed sandwich buns bursting with mayo, cheese, bacon, shredded lettuce, and tomatoes; the everything bagels oozing with cream cheese; even the middle school hot lunches, with their tomato sauce that looked like warmed ketchup, appealed to me. The idea that my friends could eat these foods in public, in front of people, astounded me. I couldn’t figure it out. To me, eating in public would have been acknowledging a weakness to everyone, “look, I need to eat,” like waving a white flag of surrender.
I would imagine myself at home, alone, in the kitchen, eating the meals my friends had for lunch, one after the other after the other. In real life, when I got home from school, I would eat whatever I could get my hands on, mostly junk, like ice cream or potato chips, or cereal, nothing as exciting or good-looking as those sandwiches or hot lunches. Then I would retire for a long nap, having stuffed myself silly after functioning on an empty stomach for most of the day, while promising myself that, some day, I would eat those delicious lunches, too, and whatever else I wanted, without guilt, or caring. For now, eating was to be done in private, or begrudgingly with my family members.
But my half-day-fasting-half-day-binging sessions became days of full-on fasting when I reached high school. I had discovered fashion magazines, mirrors, and my own scrutiny. My want to be thinner mingled with my embarrassment of eating in public (and of being looked at, in general) and I had officially entered the realm of EDs (eating disorders). My parents grew frustrated with me, my siblings impatient. I had taken to wearing my father’s old flannel shirts, designer jeans in a size that were much too large for me, and clunky Dr. Martins. I was 16, was 5’6”, and weighed 118 pounds. I knew I was thin, but I wasn’t thin enough. I wasn’t the thinnest. I felt sick, my low self-esteem and lack of self-confidence convinced me I was not normal, not like everyone else, and ugly on top of it all. So I wanted to look how I felt, to have an excuse, when people looked at me and saw how unattractive I was. I wanted people to be able to say, “If she wasn’t so thin, she’d be pretty.”