Coming Out: I Was a Patriarchal Statistic

In honor of National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, I'm coming out to all of you:  I had an eating disorder in college and at the beginning of grad school.  Not a lot of people know, mostly because I've only been comfortable talking about it to much of anyone in the last year or so.

I don't look like the "type" to have an eating disorder.  By that I mean that I've never been skinny.  In fact, I reached my highest weight--267 and a size 22, to be exact--at the height of this eating disorder.  For people who do not understand what an eating disorder is, I'm sure all of that sounds totally irrational.  But if you understand that disordered eating is not just anorexia or bulimia, but a whole variety of other things commonly referred to as EDNOS (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified),  then it'll start to make some sense.

My eating disorder was rooted in much of the same stuff as the depression I went through around that time.  I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life.  I was going through a time of some really profound transitions and self-discovery, and contrary to what gets portrayed in the media a lot, my time of self-discovery wasn't all that pleasant.  My religious beliefs were undergoing a pretty radical shift, and I felt groundless.  I was getting ready to graduate college and I had no idea what I wanted to do next.  But most of all, I had the realization that I really didn't like the person I was.  Seriously.  I would never be friends with me or hang out with me.  I was hateful and spiteful and bitter.  I was petty and cruel and derived joy almost exclusively from other people's misery.  It's a really horrible and scary thing to wake up and realize that you're a bad person.  And that's what I was.  I felt trapped.  Trapped in my hometown, trapped in my own past, trapped by expectations I couldn't meet.  Most of all I felt trapped because I had pretty much alienated every single person in my life who might've been able to help me by being such a heinous bitch all the time.

I acted out in some really bad ways.  Some of them I'm still not comfortable talking about, but I think the worst was how I took all of this out on my body.  It's amazing how, when you feel like something is wrong on the inside, you'll immediately try and fix how you look on the outside, as though you can cover up the bad stuff.  I would decide to go on a really strict diet or exercise regimen, and when I inevitably failed within 2 or 3 days, I would then proceed to "eat my feelings," to the tune of thousands of calories a day.  Sometimes I got sick.  I always felt like shit.  This fed into an ever-growing cycle of feeling unworthy, getting more bitter by the day, and then promising I would be perfect again.  I seriously have no idea how the friends I had at the time put up with me.

All of it got even worse when I graduated from college.  I had just been fired from a job for what I still believe to be personally-motivated reasons, and I couldn't get another one.  I'd just spent 5 years with everyone telling me how brilliant I was, and now I couldn't get a job.  I was grasping at anything, including a bank teller job that paid $7.50/hr.  I was at the interview for that job (which I didn't get) when my grandpa died.  We were super-close and it was really awful to not be there.  This continued to feed my growing self-loathing.  I ended up working in a mall, 40+ hours a week, doing nothing but eating the entire time I was at work because I hated it so much, and then eating all the time when I wasn't at work because I didn't want to think about work.  (Oh, did I mention I was selling jewelry?  I study conflict in Africa, for heaven's sake.  And I was hawking diamonds to working-class people in Southern Indiana.)  I felt like I had no life, no future, no prospects.  My friends went out on dates.  The only attention I could get from men was the kind that basically amounted to sexual harassment.  My friends had fun when we went out.  I just hated it, and resented everyone around me for being happy.

The thing that started to break through this bad stuff was when another of my bad behaviors (not one I'm going to blog about today) brought all my messiness out in the open.  My mom and my best friend found out about some stuff I'd been doing, and instead of completely writing me off as I'd predicted, they both immediately jumped in to help.  I started going to therapy, and began the very, very long process of figuring out who I was and what I wanted to do.  At that point, I just didn't want to do what I was doing anymore.

I started grad school about 6 weeks later.  It was around that time that I discovered the Fat Acceptance Movement and Health at Every Size (HAES).  It was a revelation for me.  I had spent my life watching women that I loved and respected always on a diet, always doing a new thing, but never just being contentedly "in" their bodies.  Maybe some of them were.  I don't know.  But the thing that all of their dieting and working out communicated to me was that there was something wrong with them, and it was something that never got fixed.  Nobody ever stopped.  It was ongoing.  Grown women, when alone, always talked about food and dieting.  If you weren't on a diet, you should be.  If you were, how was it going?  Diet talk, all the time.  It meant you were a woman.  It was a mark of maturity to hate your body.  Finding a community of people who DIDN'T do this?  It was equal to finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Grad school itself helped to.  The women I encountered every day didn't engage in "fat talk."  They talked about other things.  They talked about liberation and politics and art and music.  They didn't model the same type of body-hatred I'd seen before.  This was a really crucial time in learning how to love myself and live in my body.  And it didn't hurt to feel like I was actually doing something.

I stopped paying attention to what I ate or didn't eat.  I almost completely stopped exercising (except for swimming in the summer, which I really really love).  I didn't lose any weight or gain any weight.  But this was an extremely important step in healing.  In order to love your body, you have to accept your body.  As it is.  Right this minute.  Not in 3 months when you've lost 20 pounds, or after you get laser hair removal next month, or when you get your boobs done.  Now.  You need to be able to look in the mirror and see that YOU are the body you live in.  Hating your body is hating yourself.  You are not a separate entity.  I'm sorry that old-school thinking about the dichotomy of spirit and body has infiltrated our society so much that people walk around saying that their body is "just a shell."  You're not a hermit crab.  This is the medium by which you experience the world, that you touch it and smell it and hear it and see it.  Your body is as identifiable and unique as your soul.  It's a lesson I'm still learning.

Grad school, of course, is like a crash course in insanity.  Nobody takes care of themselves in grad school the way they should, and I'm no different.  So, I try to make good choices, and pay attention to what I'm doing to myself.  The urge to be healthy comes from a different place now.  In fact, it comes from a desire to be healthy.  Not perfect, but healthy.  This new emphasis is better in ways I can't even describe.  I'm actually happy now.  I don't walk around all bitter and hateful.  I can enjoy other people's happiness.  I can stand up for myself because I know I have worth.  I don't have to walk around all the time lecturing people about my accomplishments or telling everyone how awesome I am.  They can figure it out on their own.  Learning to love my body taught me to love myself. 


I know other people have very different experiences with eating disorders, and I would never try to say that my experience is representative.  But I think this is one of those things we should learn to talk about, and not to be ashamed of.  It's not a sign of weakness or insecurity (and isn't everyone insecure about something?).  The more people talk about these things, the more we can combat a culture that hates women, and our bodies, and anything we do that isn't in the service of patriarchy (yeah, I said it).  It frees us to love ourselves, to love the women around us, and to be loved.  Have you ever tried to love someone who doesn't love him/herself?  You can't.  They won't let you.  And it's tragic. 

We have to talk about this.  Talk about the fact that the media isn't real.  You may feel like, "Duh, I know that."  But maybe that's because you're a grown woman.  Your daughter doesn't know that.  Her friends don't.  Maybe your friends don't.  And even if they do, do you think that makes them immune to it?  Are you immune to the 5000+ images you see in a day?  There's a reason marketing firms hire people with degrees in Psychology. You have to fight back every day.  WE have to fight back every day.  We must be a community, a support network.  You're not the only one.  I wasn't the only one, but I felt like that for a long time.

In the immortal words of Harvey Milk, "Come out, come out, wherever you are!"  I'm out.  Are you?