More than gravity & brighter than grace

or girl blog #6: on eating disorders

From June 2021

Trigger warning for discussion of eating disorders

I spent the month of June on a birth control I had not taken since May 2023. I lasted three weeks and four days, and then promptly stopped taking it, a decision that was spurred by the general despair that I felt had entered my body suddenly, and then immediately dissipated after ingesting the first or second placebo pill. I called my doctor the day I stopped taking it, an emergency telehealth appointment that only occurred because I desperately pleaded to the reception at my clinic, saying please, and I need to talk to her, and I don’t feel like myself and I am really worried. Please, can you just tell her it’s me, and that I really need to talk to her.

A day before I had called my mother and asked her the same question I had two years ago. Is this how you felt on the pill? If our shared dose of escitalopram is anything to go by, we appear to metabolise medications similarly. I was looking for reassurance, some kind of yes, this will be okay, this is only temporary, and then you will be blessed with stable estrogen, perfect skin, and the libidinal urges of a normal, functioning young woman.

She does not tell me this. She says, “no, I felt awful.” She says, “I just made do with it until I couldn’t stand it anymore.” I say to her I don’t think I can stand it anymore. I am on the 58 tram, and I have started to cry. I take my glasses off to hide my face in my jumper. She says “you know your body now, and you know what is right for it. It sounds like this isn’t right for it.” I agree yes, yes, you’re right. What I cannot say is that I have never known my body, that I have never known what is right for it, and that is how I have ended up in the position I am in now: a dancer forced stiff, still, trapped somewhere between her body and her mind.

My mother says “I know you keep a journal, so you should write this down, all of this, the way that you are feeling. To tell your doctor about.” I like that she thinks that I write more than I do, so I don’t correct her, but I don’t really keep a journal. I tend to write only when I pause long enough to feel my throat swelling up, a tidal wave sitting dormant somewhere between my mouth and sternum. Most days, it feels as though I cannot pick up a pen, cannot begin to write without the sense of something lingering just around the corner, something hot, heavy, and urgent. Most days, I just trudge into the city and feel my life begin and end with the press of my index finger against a plastic scanner. Finally exiting my cramped work building, I walk back down Collins Street, exhaling smoke and mentally denoting the end of another shift, another day. Sometimes I will keep walking, up, up to Bank Place, where I will sit down across from friends, or acquaintances, and I will talk, and laugh, and try not to think about how often I feel outside of myself, like a third person, maybe, or a surveillance camera. And sometimes I will just go home, legs heavy as I watch myself board the tram, sit down, open a book. I listen to the rumble of the tracks, feel the half an hour pass like a dream, or a scene from an old movie, and then I am jolted out of the rabbit hole again, my feet fast against the pavement as I scurry away, praying get me home safe get me home safe get me home safe.

I see a psychoanalyst at the moment, and I sit on a large velvet chair across from her once a week. I talk, and she will listen, occasionally interpreting a slip, or an unintended emphasis. Mostly I just speak. I feel like I spend most of my life speaking, learning as I talk, grasping at who I am, who I could be, who I was five, ten years ago, before I woke up and noticed that my psyche had fractured in a neat white line right down its centre. Today, I discussed the amber light that my father turned on to read to me when I was a small child, a dingy, metal thing that cast long shadows across the room, distorting the space and obscuring the words on the page. We read The Magician’s Nephew together, and by the time we reached The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I was old enough to read by myself.

In one of my recent sessions, I was relaying some kind of fear to my analyst, a product of a free-association tangent that I cannot remember to save my life. Blame malnourishment, maybe, or the quiet trance I enter whenever I climb the stairs to her office, a fifty minutes that seems to exist outside time, outside myself. I am so scared, I began, that I will wake up in twenty, thirty, or forty years, and feel nothing but regret and shame. I am scared I will waste my life. I’m worried I will spend every day devoted to a false purpose and not realise until I die. I am terrified of running out of time. I laughed a bit and then said but I guess that’s how everyone feels at my age, right? The other day, a gallery assistant overheard my friends talking about a similarly inane thing and scoffed.

“Welcome to your 20s,” he grunted.

“These are questions for you,” the analyst noted, her tone indiscernible. “What drives you, what you desire, what your purpose is. They’re your biggest questions.”

And they are. I feel like I used to know exactly who I was, all the time. I was certain. Years on now, I am told I have “gotten myself back,” an observation I find jarring. If I did not have myself before, then where did she go? Where did that self disappear into? A shrunken frame? A boyfriend? But I still remember her then. She was smaller, yes, like that little girl being read to, but still me. I feel her body in the traces of mine now, a skeletal shadow, or something younger than that. Perhaps the child that I was, half my size still, just in a different way. Sometimes when my back aches at the end of yoga, I remember when I would lie down and feel nothing but sharp pain against the plush mattress, my body too tired to withstand the weight I had pushed down against it. I was wasting then, sure, but I felt so certain of my correctness, my devotion rewarded with pain, a kind of reassuring torment that let me know that I still existed, that I was a body on a plane, one that was tangible and real. I had purpose then, and a pure, uncomplicated drive. Towards a slow death, maybe, but a drive nonetheless.

When I was in love I managed to convert this purpose into something similarly self-flagellating. I was newly making weight, an effort that caused a mental distress so severe that I am embarrassed to even put it to words. One time I watched my then-boyfriend pour vegetable oil onto a hot pan and I cried as it sizzled. “What’s wrong? What is it?” But I just shook my head and sobbed, pushing my hands into my eyes until I saw stars, a reminder that I was real, I was real, and I was more than this. Thirty minutes later, I sat down and ate the flautas, flashing a watery smile as I said they’re good, they are really good, thank you. Later, held by the waist in the dark, I felt my breathing slow as I listened to a heartbeat that was not my own. So quiet, and steady, and completely asynchronous to my own, that sound became akin to salvation.

Love can feel like a drive. There’s a tether there, a bedpost upon which to notch one’s self, and then another mark at the point at which you begin to lose it. I get accusatory when I talk about this, talking about altering myself to fit the image of another, but really I’ve been doing it for years, sculpting and hacking at my frame until it fits a different person, even if that different person was just me. On a particularly bad week, I am speaking to the analyst about this self in flux, this monstrous contortionist that I thought was hell-bent on prying apart my chest and forcing its way in again. It is not more affecting, I say, but it is definitely more difficult to ignore, or to filter it out the way I normally would. I can’t tell if it is a hostile invasion or an old friend stopping by for tea.

“It is interesting,” she says, monotonous, non-emotive. “The way you talk about it.” The it, naturally, is the one problem I cannot seem to shake, the one problem I seem capable only of alluding to.

When I was about ten years old I remember imagining that I woke up as myself, but I looked completely different. I had brown hair, green eyes, freckles, and tanned skin, and I was thinner and sporty, less of the too-tall, awkward thing I was forced to embody. And I wanted to be this artificial girl so bad, wanted to watch her fake limbs extend out before me in the first person. And sometimes, when I’m really self-loathing (in a way that extends beyond my appearance, that goes down to the very centre of my being, of who I am, of who I want to be), I take myself back to this other self. I wake up and I am somebody else. I wake up and I am forty, alone and cold, and very confused. My back aches still, a trace of what I did to myself when I was younger, the disease that I “gave to myself.” It is largely irreversible now, degenerative.

My bedroom in January 2024, someone is lying on the bed but the presence in the photo has always felt like something greater than that

In The Möbius Book, Catherine Lacey talks a lot about God. I have never believed in God, and neither have my parents or most friends, but a bit over a year ago, I was on the train to Venice and found myself writing about God, thinking painfully about devotion and what to do after it absents. At the time there had just been a Roundtable Readings about divinity, and I was struck by the way it bothered me, an incomprehensible annoyance. In an entry from 25 June 2024, I wrote:

I thought it was funny to perform readings about divinity to a room full of mostly atheists, and then I thought some more.

For me, there was something holy in disappearance. Of a body shrinking, a space smaller, a relocation; in absence, as it gnaws at the pit of the stomach, rendering the soft inaccessible and imbuing the spirit with reverence. I recall one day when I walked in the late Autumn evening, feet dragging me across the small distance from campus to my shoebox bedroom, and I felt a weakness that transcended euphoria, a pain so sharp it was blinding. Naturally, no whiteness enveloped me, no angels sang, no turtle doves cried, but I felt in that moment an elation that bordered on spirituality. There, in my jeans that were too big (they fit now), and my hollowed cheeks, I did understand devotion, or at least a version of it.

Chris Kraus writes that at 19 she was an “anorexic open wound,” and as was I at 17, 18, 19, (and quietly now, at 20). My memory from that period is spotty and often exclusionary of the brutality exerted by a mind set on destroying its owner. As my heart rate slowed, my hair thinned, and my muscles atrophied, I viewed my surroundings from a platform of insular superiority, of divinity, so far away from my body that I felt that I had an interplanetary existence, as though I could be an alien, or a spirit. That removal from myself, that distance placed between reality, rendered possible through starvation… that was holy to me. But you can’t say these things aloud, so you have to write them furtively, or speak them to someone: a person you have paid to make you an atheist, or perhaps to a new partner, a confession whispered in the dead of night, so quiet, so ashamed, and yet still so proud.

To have anorexia is to want to be a martyr, a saint, something “pure” and liberated from worldly disgust. It is to want to die at the altar of a religion carved by your own two hands. It is to want your loved ones to cry. It is to walk along a spiritual plane in sororal affinity with all those who died perfect, forever sick, and defined by their aspiration.

I remember writing that passage and thinking that I could never, ever speak it to anyone. I spent three years poorly trying to conceal my eating disorder, and then the following three poorly concealing my recovery. Even now, writing this feels wrong, an overstep, or a transgression, a threat to the sturdy walls of the safe-house I have built around my heart, or my body (they have always been one and the same). And perhaps worst of all, it all seems so romantic, this conflation of starvation and salvation, divinity and dying. But I cannot help how I feel, how I still feel, how I perhaps will always feel. Coco Stallman wrote an excellent essay called Unholy Anorexia that articulates this idea far better than I ever will, but I wrote that passage when I had only just begun to search for how others felt, when I picked up Kraus and Simone Weil and found traces of belonging alongside these ascetic anorexics. All I had ever felt before was guilt, my disorder driven by control and vanity, my low self-esteem translated into a desire for complete erasure.

Explaining my eating disorder in terms of religion or devotion has been helpful in that it converted an incredibly isolating experience into a relatively communal one. I had an atypical treatment process, and it frequently made me feel both invalid and unable to identify with the struggles of others. I was never hospitalised, never stuck on a meal plan, and never could say the word anorexia out loud, too ashamed of the privilege that accompanies the “choice” that is the denial of nourishment. Though complicit in the cult of thin, white, middle-class girls who aspire to burden others and “create their own problems,” my refusal to be perceived as such led to complete and utter alienation. Hideously afraid of getting “found out” and ostracised for a disease I had willingly engineered and automated, I slipped further and further into its grasp, a voyeur transfixed by the spectacle that is the synchronous disintegration of both body and spirit. My mind set loose from its tether, I was intoxicated by the graceful shape of my spiral, the simplicity of days spent addressing no more than the sum of my gravity culminating in time that passed like lights on a dark highway, absences framed by a ritualistic interruption. It was euphoric, I wrote in May 2022. I know it’s terrible but in a fucked up sort of way I like it, December 2021. It hurts so bad but I have no purpose otherwise, undated 2022.

There was no divine intervention when I decided to recover. I did not hit a rock bottom. No one sobbed at the feet of my emaciated form and begged me to “please get better, please, we love you.” I cannot even recall the date it began, and I am fantastic with birthdays and anniversaries. What I do remember is that all of a sudden my life began to fill up and there was simply not enough space for everything to fit as it did previously. My sense of control, this calibrated perfection I was once so proud of, was now recalcitrant in the face of new friends, and love, and wanting to think, and laugh, and have some fucking fun. I grew sick of being sick. I needed more than this damnation I had assumed was innately deserved.

I wanted to wait until I felt “fully recovered” before I ever wrote about my anorexia, but that feels like an illusory point, a mirage of a finish line that I will never breach. In the same way that there was no “beginning” to my recovery, there will likewise be no end, no miraculous day where I wake up and find that I am completely Normal and Fine About Everything. Three years on, there has still been no magical day where my “eating disorder voice” abdicated my mind and my rational self took over, thereby forcing me to realise that it was all a lie!!!!! and I am beautiful just the way I am!!!!! A common exercise in eating disorder therapy is to have the patient write a letter to the disordered voice, a process that is supposed to highlight the extremity of the anorexic chokehold and the falsity of its destructive doctrine. The patient is encouraged to “challenge their thoughts” using their logical brain, supposedly combating disordered panic and malignancy through the rational dichotomy of true/false (and the subsequent categorisation of all disordered thoughts as belonging firmly to the latter). Divorcing yourself from this master deceiver that has momentarily invaded your mind, the exercise encourages an alleviation of the anorexic identity through a portrayal of the voice as exorable and impermanent. This, in my experience, is ineffective.

Viewing myself in opposition to my eating disorder kept me within its grip for longer. In believing that I was a separate entity from my sickness, I was making myself smaller than it was, shrinking down my essence to make room for an entire other self. So profoundly did I believe in my anorexia and its crystalline guidelines that it transformed into more than just an illness. Rather, it became an entirely autonomous spirit, a mercy-wielding Other that I had permitted to possess my mind and body. It was all-consuming, and I found our battle to be too difficult, concerned that my occasional behavioural complacency was “letting it win,” and what was the point of even trying anymore?

“You have to be stronger than your eating disorder,” was the advice proffered by my old dietitian. I felt like screaming, my hands turning over and over in my lap as I avoided question after question about my intake, about the steps I was taking towards my recovery. Do you know how difficult it is to perform a fucking exorcism? It was impossible to imagine my life without the presence of anorexia, so difficult to conceive of myself lighter than I was then, my body weighed down by the demon that had been gnawing at my life force. It felt like being sent to war with nothing but a wishbone and a bouquet of funeral lilies. There was no route to victory in the face of my canonised Other.

I read Love’s Work by Gillian Rose last week and was surprised by the form of its resonance. Rose, a writer and linguist, was diagnosed with an aggressive ovarian cancer in 1993 when she was only 46 years old. Determined to write through and in spite of her sickness, Rose had to “learn the language of cancer” to coexist alongside it, a dialect of sickness and death that “is also the language of humanity, legible to anyone who has loved, worked, and suffered.” This language of illness, and of love, work, and suffering, is also one that I know, one that was once indistinguishable from my mother tongue. A dialect of pain and devotion, there is no aspect of my life that I have not expressed in the language of my sickness, a vocabulary taught in childhood and cemented through mirrors and changing rooms, anonymous internet forums, a few off-hand comments. As I grew increasingly fluent, I began to craft my own scripture, a scroll of commandments passed down from a sea of fellow devotees, my holy writ adapted from those who had learnt the words before me. I accessed this language like a current, a linguistic flow that felt at once like hell and like home.

I will always know the language of anorexia. I draw from it when I write, a vocabulary of who I was, and am, and have loved. In the second part of The Möbius Book, Lacey writes “every time I’ve written a novel something happens in between its completion and its publication that makes it clear to me that I knew something I didn’t know that I knew while… writing,” and I suppose that is why I have written this now. I needed to lay bare my perspective so I could cherry-pick its integrity: where am I coming from? Why am I saying this? I needed to know that I was more than just love and devotion, needed to access the language of my illness to recognise that it was always just that: a language, a religion constructed by text. Didion, again: “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” What it is to be me: the little girl in the amber light, the anorexic open wound, the person in love, the woman I am now.

In Venice at the monastery, June 2024