Getting Real

So let's get straight to the goods while I still have enough wine in me to let it all hang out. My last few days in San Marcos were hell. Shit, my last few months in San Marcos have been hell. Actually in the interests of honesty, my relationship with food my entire life has made everywhere I go a mobile inferno. A mobile, sulfurous inferno.

It says in the Bible that hell is a pit of burning sulfur. It can't just be a burning lake of fire, it has to smell like shit too. Double the suffering. Anyway.

So in a nutshell, I am a disordered eater. I began my beautiful little battle with food at the age of 7, when a girl I was friends with told me that she thought her dress made her look fat. At that point I'd never even realized that being fat or skinny or tall or short or symmetrical or troll-like was of any importance. So then, naturally, I turned to look at myself in the mirror to analyze whether I had this undesirable condition known at "fat". I saw that I looked a lot like my friend. In fact, I was shorter and CHUBBIER than my friend. So if she was fat, well then shit, I've been running around all of these 7 years without realizing that I wasn't any good to look at. How embarrassing. So I started my first diet.

I struggled with anorexia for seven years. Then we moved gracefully into binge eating disorder, where I reside today. My body, I am coming to understand, was so sick of the long, long periods of time where I would ban food, where I would starve it and stretch it and over work it in the interests of beauty. Finally it had had enough, and it turned off my mind and moved my feet toward the cookie jar. And I have been eating like a man starved ever since. I couldn't shut it off. I couldn't stop. I would eat and eat and eat until I was sick. My belly would bulge like a starving Ethiopian child's would, funnily enough. Not that there's anything funny about starving children, but you get my point. Toward the end of my sickness I finally learned how to make myself throw up to ease the pain in my stomach enough so that I could go to sleep, promising myself that after all the shit that I'd put my body through that night, I would go on a diet first thing in the morning. 1,100 calories a day for a month should be able to undo the damage that I'd done. The math made my head spin. How many calories had I eaten? God, could it really be in the ten thousands? Maybe we should make that 1,100 calories a day for TWO months. And then another two months of 1,300 calories to ease me back into a normal diet. And then once I was nice and skinny I'd focus on working on my obvious issues with food, I'd become a normal human being and regain long lost "normal" eating habits.

Flash forward two days into my 1,100 calorie madness. I was still exercising like a madwoman, an hour of cardio and an hour and a half of weight training a day, every day. My body was screaming at me, desperate for food, desperate for sleep, desperate to STOP. And so I would buckle. I would run for the fridge. I would eat everything. God, I was so hungry. For weeks after each failed "diet" I couldn't ever shake that hunger. I wasn't physically hungry, really, but my body was telling me to EAT! EAT! because starvation was surely only right around the corner.

For years and years, always the same cycle. Wanting to lose weight --> Starve --> Binge --> Gain weight --> Wanting to lose weight. And on and on and on and on. Until one day I just couldn't do it any more. I couldn't diet for one more day. And so I sat down and I cried. Internal crying, mind you, because I can't ever actually cry. The only way I've ever known to control my weight is to diet, and if I can't control my weight, then I will just become fat, and no one will ever want to talk to me again. I will hate myself. I will look disgusting and will no longer be relevant or sought after. What to do? I didn't find the answer to that for a long time. I've always been a very active kid...mainly out of guilt. I can't sit still for long without feeling like a lazy ass. It's like I can feel the fat beginning to settle around my thighs as I watch TV. But I had quit. I couldn't go backward and start another diet to achieve my goal, but I couldn't go forward with a new plan of action either because I had none. So instead I just ate. And I did something I've never done in my entire life, I laid in my bed all day long. I didn't answer the phone. I didn't text my friends. The only time I got up from my bed was to take a final or to buy more food. Then I would run into my room with it all shoved into my purse, lock the door, and dive back into bed.

I watched every romantic movie that mankind has ever produced. I ate six million pints of ice cream every single day. I ate Italian. I ate Chinese. I ate cereal. I ate pizza. I laid in my bed all day long, getting lost in my movies and my shitty sci-fi novels, pretending like I had a different life. I would wake up in the morning wanting to die. I was so utterly disgusted with myself that I would lay there for a few hours after waking and contemplate how I could end my life with the least fuss. I wondered which method I would choose, where I would do it, what clothes I would want to be in when I said my final farewell. Who would find me? I inwardly apologized to whoever it was.

Sometimes I could rouse myself out of bed late at night to walk my dog where no one could see me. I needed to get the fuck out of my bed, but was too ashamed of the bloated mess that I was to do it in the day time. I didn't want to change clothes, because I would have to see my body and the way it had changed as a result of my lack of control. So it was a night like this when I realized where I'd want to die. No one reading this will probably know what the fuck I'm talking about, but along Aquarena Springs Rd., right before it becomes C.M. Allen, there are these lakes outside of the theater building with great huge trees around them that have been there I'd swear since the pilgrims. They're so big. I remember as a freshman one time I did a bunch of coke and put on a zillion layers and went out and nestled myself in one, between the branches, watching the sun come up and the world drive by. Anyway. It was night, and it was peaceful, and the water didn't move at all, and the trees and the moon were all so perfect. I realized that that was where I'd want to die. That's where I'd do it. Lying in the grass next to one of these lakes, so that the last thing I'd see would be that caliber of beauty, that degree of stillness, that depth of calm. I wondered what I should wear. I thought about one of those dresses from an old classic movie, with my hair perfectly curled and pearls around my neck, and I'd look like I was sleeping under the shade of the trees, and it would be beautiful. And I would finally get to sleep. There would never be another morning full of dread and pain as I remembered the sabotage that I'd done to my own body.

As I walked by and pictured all of this in my head I wondered if I really was ready to be done. And I realized that I was. I was ready. And I cried. And it was so quiet and calm in the darkness as I kept walking. I could see the people in their cars driving by on Sessom, not knowing that the girl walking her dog on the side of the road had just made a decision to end her life.

The day after that I didn't leave my bed. Not once. I had no desire. No desire to do anything. I tried forcing myself to read, but couldn't. All that I could do was lay in my bed and stare at the ceiling. I don't know what I thought about. All I know is that I decided to stay my hand until I went home. Home. It became this deep obsession for me. If I could just get home, I could heal. I could go on the diet to end all diets, I could focus on my starvation, I would be away from all of the drinking and eating that my friends do, and I could restore myself to my former beauty and return to San Marcos triumphant. And I would resume my life as if nothing had happened. I did the math. I would have three weeks to lose the ten pounds that I had gained. I could do that. I just had to get home. I just had to get away. And so I stayed in my bed until the last day of school, packed up my shit, packed up my dog, and drove home in the rain.

I successfully starved myself for two days. Then I binged. Then I woke up, ready to start anew, full of hope. Two days later, I binged. The day after that, I binged. The day after that, I binged. The next day, depressed at my own failure, I binged. And so on and so forth. Until the day came where I knew I couldn't anymore. I mean, I could have...I will forever have one last hope that maybe THIS diet will work, that after THIS diet I'll get my shit together. And then my poor hungry body will shut off my mind and make me eat, and I will eat and eat and eat until I can't eat any more and then I will keep eating anyway. This was the end of the road. So I laid down on the floor at the top of my stairs and cried for the first time. Sobbed. Snot running down my face. My mouth was hanging open and my eyes were squinted against the unbelievable pain of my failure, of my badness, of my worthlessness. Of my undesirability. The weight of it crushed me and stunned me and took my breath away. I had hit an impasse. I needed to be skinny to feel like life was worth living, yet I couldn't diet for more than a day without an immediate backlash of months of binging. What a failure. Pain. Pain. Pain. Images of all of the boys that rejected me flashed through my head. Images of the boys that I wanted flashed through my head. They'd never want me now. Look at me. Pain. Can't get her shit together. Can't fix herself. Can't keep herself away from the Peanut M&Ms long enough to lose weight. Hog. Glutton. Fat ass. Pain.

I sobbed and sobbed until my dear mother finally came and sat down next to me on the stairs and started telling me about her struggle with bulimia, and about the moment when she hit rock bottom. "It looks like you're right about there," she said. She talked about how she was sitting on the bathroom floor, so desensitized to her own efforts at making herself vomit that she had to drink salt water to bring up the food she'd binged on. "Until finally I realized that I was killing myself, and that being fat was better than this shit that I was doing to myself," she said. And she gave me hope. That is nowhere near the end of the story, and part 2 will be coming shortly, but that's all that I have the heart for right now. Stay tuned.