spent most of my mornings by the pond, located in the center of campus, surrounded by weeping willow trees. I sat on a bench and read “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
I laughed at the absurd parts and cried at his war memories. But the part of the story where the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, recounts his experience as a prisoner in Nazi Germany, working in a factory in Dresden the days before the city was bombed, shocked me into an epiphany I was desperate for. My “what have I done?” moment was suddenly in front of me. A lifetime of moments and experiences in real life and what finally spoke to me, made a real impression on me, were words on paper, an experience of someone else's life, someone who was forced to starve, rather than chose to. I found this fitting. My eating disorder had kept me from friendships, from dating, from socializing, from life in general.
I read of Billy Pilgrim's cells applauding his heroic efforts to feed himself and his fellow prisoners while they were slowly starved in their prisoner of war camp. I envisioned my body being a hostage of my eating disorder, of being the real victim here, not me, not my emotions that I thought were so important above everything else. My physical body. My responsibility. For 20 years I had let it down. I weighed 93 pounds.
My change was immediate in some areas. My “someday” was finally here. I no longer shied away from ordering food, I felt that I was entitled to it for denying myself that comfort for so long. Years of therapy have showed me that I adore food, and that is okay. Years of therapy have also shown me that, because I enjoy food so much, it would make sense that I chose to restrict my pleasure as a means of control. Depression and anxiety had convinced me there was nothing left in my life that I could control. Above everything else, an ED is about control.
At first, I could not put on weight. It was like my body was on eating disorder auto-pilot. My weight would go down to 88 pounds before I eventually plateaued. I stopped worrying about possible weight gain and started taking the medication my brain needed. Prozac. Zoloft. Luvox. Paxil. Lexapro. Wellbutrin. Abilify. A roll call of all antidepressants I have been on (some have worked, some have not worked well enough, some worked best when taken with others). My promise to myself of “someday” changed from eating food in public to maybe falling in love and having a family. Someday.
But not all of my behaviors have been corrected. I still notice weight, on myself and on others. I see thin people on the street and wonder if, ten, fifteen years ago, I would have smugly thought I was thinner than they are. I may have even considered them fat. I never stopped to think that they may have been pleased they did not look like me. Or worse, if I made them sad the way ED sufferers will make me sad today (and, I am proud to say, no longer envious).
Riding into Penn Station on the train one afternoon, a billboard on the platform caught my eye. It was for a department store, and showed a thin model in a short tight dress posed rather indignantly, her stick arms crossed in front of her flat chest and her skinny, knobby-kneed legs placed slightly apart to showcase the gaping gap between the two. Her face was turned off to the right, to enunciate the sharp edges of her cheekbones. Last time