On The Grid: Personal Essay

Healing on the Tip of My Tongue

By Colleen Foster
QuailBellMagazine.com

*Editor's Note: First appeared on On the Grid Zine March 5th, 2015.

When it comes down to the crumbly, excruciating essence of it, eating disorder recovery is about letting go. Not in the Frozen, Idina-Menzel-magically-belts-on-an-iceberg way, though there are certainly metaphors to be thawed out there.

But it’s about somehow letting go of the maladaptive disease that has lurked for too long. Except for a few spurts of asymptomatic détentes, it has been a ten-year war now. Winding in and out of academic institutions and jobs, even crossing international waters, like a particularly sad scene involving boxes of alfajores in a bathroom stall in a Buenos Aires airport terminal. Battles ending in loss, win, and stalemate with some dogged resiliency beneath the surface. On a good day, we call it being a “survivor.” On a downer, the label is “chronic” or “revolving-door case” of what currently is termed binge/purge anorexia but has diagnostically shifted over time.

February was the National Eating Disorder Association’s annual awareness campaign. As purple T-shirts and #NEDAwareness hashtags were popping up all over Facebook from treatment connections, I broke out in a self-conscious, overwrought rash, flailing around about how and if to publicly address it. It knocked some control freak inclinations a few precious notches farther away from the Dalai Lama and closer to George Costanza.

As a writer, I am armed with the weapons to share my story, interwoven with so many others’, and raise awareness that no, this disease has nothing to do with too many rubber-legged Barbies and ballet lessons. That the disease is the perfect storm of genetics and circumstance, and no one factor can be pinpointed as the ricin in the rice bowl. That there is nothing glamorous about it, unless osteopoenia and ketones, blood work and ER visits turn you on. (“Ooo, that potassium IV burns so good in my arm.”)

On the other hand, I don’t want to feed the disease any more satisfaction. It’s already surfaced in published poems and a short story. It’s had its stage time, and diabolically insatiable, it will never have enough. It’s If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, It Will Divide It Into Eight Pieces, Take An Hour To Eat That, Then Binge/Purge The Rest of The Box.

Imagine a cancer of both the brain and body that wants nothing more than to erode as much of a sufferer’s identity as possible–that’s exactly what an eating disorder is. While masquerading as best friend and lover, god and taskmaster, it wants to make sure that it reduces each afflicted person to a statistic. It wants to smother my essence, the languages and movie reviews, stockpiled trivia and collaged snail mail.

So where do I go from here? It’s a paradoxical bind: talking about it removes the stigma, gets the pain out in the fresh air, but feeds into its desire to smother Colleen. I’m far from anything resembling solidified recovery, but it’s an ongoing process and if we let perfect be the enemy of the good, the good will pack its bags and leave.

Recovery comes in minute-to-minute parcels. You could call them bite-sized. It means going to my dietitian appointment, even when I don’t feel like stepping backwards on that scale and having a “blind weight” like a particularly emotionally sensitive hunk of deli meat. It means not letting the disorder socially exile me when, God forbid, I can’t feel my tailbone hitting the bathtub floor.

It means hugging my six-year-old cousin or eighty-year-old grandpa without obsessing over wrist bones. Feeling human like them, incrementally on a cellular level, with each micromovement where I kick the disease in the teeth. Human. Not some alternate species whose basic, biological function of eating is all tangled up in depression and anxiety she’s not letting herself feel anyway.

There are better ways to use creativity than the crazed, frenetic Macarena that is trying to balance symptoms with a functioning life. There are richer kinds of bonds than those based on playing the role of fragile patient. There is humor of the non-gallows variety.

The last line of the Pulitzer-nominated Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia is, “There is, in the end the letting go.” How right Marya Hornbacher, patron saint of eating disorder memoirs, is. The decision that being a flawed human being–no more, no less–is a forgivable, even lovable sin. It’s moving on.

#Real #OnTheGridZine #EatingDisorders #Recovery #StopTheStigma

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