Reckoning with My Lost Adolescence
The summer after I turned eight was a pretty typical summer for a rising fourth grader in central Pennsylvania. I wore my favorite pair of Abercrombie and Fitch denim shorts and a pair of grubby flip-flops from the Old Navy $1 sale almost everyday. I spent a lot of hazy days at the farmer’s market where my mother worked, buying a half chicken charred in a pile of coals by one of the Amish farm families and finishing off the day with a whoopie pie. I live in Maine now, but I’ll always maintain that whoopie pies belong to Pennsylvania.
That was the last summer I ate with abandon. Once my fourth grade school year began, something in me shifted like a tectonic plate pushing at its neighbor and causing an earthquake. My earthquake started off small, one of those transient tremblings that are so brief you question whether they happened at all.
I have three memories that mark what I consider to be the beginning of my eating disorder. I can’t quite place when the first one happened, but I remember it clearly; sitting on the floor criss-cross-applesauce looking through photos from the two years my family spent in England, I came across a photo of a friend and I hanging from the monkey bars in her backyard. A sliver of pale stomach showed like a crescent moon between my top and skirt as I stretched upwards. I stared at that small sliver, noticing how it looked softer and fleshier than my friend’s. I used my pinky finger to measure which one of us was wider across. Then, I turned the photograph over and went to the kitchen to have a snack. A two on the Richter scale.
The next incident was a three: people near the epicenter felt the shaking. I was sitting in fourth-grade gym class next to my friend, T, probably still wearing my Abercrombie and Fitch. At this point in the year, I had already started restricting my food intake, wrapping pieces of my carefully packed lunch in a napkin and slipping it in the trash bin or offering my desserts to friends that willingly, if disbelievingly, accepted them. I was obsessed with bodies-- not just mine, but also those belonging to others: my classmates, the teen celebrities on the cover of J-14 and Tiger Beat, Avril Lavigne in the lyric booklet of my Let Go CD. This day in gym class, my bare legs stretched out next to T’s, I asked her how she got them so skinny. She didn’t respond, just looked at me like I said something weird. Then, her name was called to kick for kickball, and I watched her long, thin legs make their way around all the bases.
As my tectonic plates ground against themselves inside my stomach-- a sensation that felt curiously like hunger, I confided in my best friend, Julia. Even in fourth-grade, Julia was motherly and level headed; she encouraged me to drop a note in the guidance counselor’s mailbox. “I think I’m fat. Can you help me?”
The poor counselor tried her best; I doubt she was trained in how to deal with a budding eating disorder in an elementary school student. She called my parents, recommended a nutritionist, and somehow pulled some strings to get a signed copy of Speak Now with a personal note from the artist as a pick-me-up. Little did she know that Taylor Swift was one of my earliest “thinspirations.” Yeah, she and my eating disorder go way back.
After a few months of working with the nutritionist and a psychiatrist who diagnosed me with EDNOS (eating disorder not otherwise specified), approximately no therapy, and zero weight gain, I pushed the “skinny thing” to the back of my mind. Naively, I thought I was all better, that consistently eating was equal to not having an earring disorder. I stopped paying attention. Then again, I suppose you can forgive a 10-year-old for being naive.
Then the tsunami hit. In sixth grade, after moving five hundred miles north, I spiralled to the point of hospitalization. I’m not going to include specific details about my body or what I did to myself here; that’s not what this essay is about. But I can tell you that I was skeletal, angry, and very, very sad.
The summer after sixth grade, there were no denim shorts or whoopie pies. In the partial inpatient program I was admitted to, we weren’t allowed to walk, or even stand, for more than a few seconds. Denim shorts were too stiff to sit in for hours on end. My diet was carefully controlled; at first to avoid the devastating effects of refeeding syndrome and then so that my calorie intake could be monitored. One weekend, at the point of my dietary program where my starches and sugars were still strictly limited, my mom and I went to the hot dog cart downtown for lunch. I was only allowed one serving of bread-- half a hot dog bun. I tried my best to balance the hot dog on just one half of the bun, but I ended up with tears streaming down my face and a sandwich in the dirt. That was one of the hardest parts for me as a child: being simultaneously forced to eat and denied the pleasure of food that actually tastes good.
When I left for college, my mom decided to pick up a nannying job for a local family. At first, I thought it was a way to cope with empty-nesting for the first time, and to an extent it was. But when I asked her about it, the first answer she offered me was, “I didn’t have a little girl when you were around that age. I missed out on that.” That was when it hit me. I missed out on that, too. I don’t remember what it’s like to be comfortable inside my body. It’s a strange feeling, mourning something that you hadn’t realized you had lost. I can’t get that little girl back. But I also think that struggling so young has made me more compassionate with children, and especially with younger girls who so often need compassion.
When I watch the two little girls I babysit eat, unabashedly and messily and gleefully, I feel happiness for them and sadness for myself. Little kids are supposed to stuff their faces with all the sugar and chips they can get their hands on; as children, food isn’t reduced to macronutrients and calories. It’s about joy. Although I recognize that I was – and am – extremely privileged to have the access to good food and medical treatment, that joy wasn’t something I allowed myself to have. Looking back on my childhood, I see pre-anorexia and post-anorexia, and I was so young during the former era that my memories are hazy and disjointed. Although I no longer resent the eight-year-old that threw away her school lunches, I still resent parts of the woman that she has become. It’s a constant struggle to forgive myself for the ways in which my eating disorder ravaged my young body and what witnessing that carnage did to my family. But I’m getting there.
My eating disorder is so deeply incorporated into who I am that sometimes it seems like a personality trait. I still walk past mirrors and feel the tectonic plates shift inside of me; just like the Earth, my body and soul are always readjusting. At least now, older and hopefully wiser, I know how to dig in my heels and brace against the shaking.