What follows is an excerpt of my (yes, still) in-progress memoir.
The winter had been hard in Santa Fe. I knew it would get cold, but I wasn’t prepared for seven-degree mornings, for chipping stubborn frost off my windshield and white-knuckling my drive to the fitness center, hoping I wouldn’t spin out on black ice. I was trying to keep up with what at that point I still called a lifestyle. But winter isn’t conducive to disordered eating. It’s painful to go outside, dangerous to drive to the gym, and too damn cold to starve.
Maybe I was just tired.
Even Florida’s relative warmth didn’t bring much comfort. I’d counted the days until I could fly home, and once I arrived, I counted the days until I could fly back to Santa Fe. It wasn’t new, the way I avoided the nightly dinners my mother prepared—skillets of sausage and peppers; pasta with butter and shaker cheese—so she didn’t ask questions. I lived on my cardboard protein bars and iceberg lettuce drizzled with red wine vinegar, the gallon-sized plastic bags of cauliflower my mother would cleave apart with her chef’s knife to vent her frustration. To feed me what she could.
My parents had been keeping three boxes of Godiva chocolates in their spare bedroom—just-in-case Christmas presents, for when a neighbor unexpectedly showed up with gift in hand. It was late. I snuck from my room to the back of the house and nabbed the box that sat on top, a perfect golden rectangle accented with a single red bow. On my way back, I grabbed a roll of paper towels and a plastic grocery bag from the pantry. When I got to my room, I shut the door.
I sat under my quilt, the same one that had been there for over a decade, and plucked each chocolate out of the box, one by one. Slowly, ceremoniously, I chewed through them all: caramels and nougats, milk chocolate and dark, fruit and crème and wafer. I let the rich textures coat my tongue, gave my teeth over to their work of disassembly. And I spit each and every piece out into the plastic bag, dutifully wiping the excess sugar and fat off my tongue with paper towels.
When I’d finished, I slunk back across the house to get the second box.
And then the third.
By the time I was done, I had chewed through what I now know was almost $100 worth of fancy chocolates, the remains of which I held in my hands, shielded from the gooey mess only by the thinnest layer of plastic. The brown streaks and crumpled paper towels made it look like a bag full of used diapers. I put it inside a second plastic bag to try and achieve something like opacity; tied the whole thing up tight. Then, under the cover of the same night, I walked it out to the garbage container that lived on the backside of the house, hoping that my mother, when she next opened the lid to deposit a week’s worth of kitchen scraps, wouldn’t bother to wonder what that dense round package might contain.
It worked, I thought—at least, she never brought it up to me. But if even she’d wondered, how could she have broached it? What would she have said?
What would I have been able to hear?
The day after the chocolates, I pulled my mother’s SUV over to the side of the road. I was on my way home from the gym—of course—and only a few blocks away from my parents’ place. Flicking through the digital list of therapists I’d googled the previous evening, I chose a name almost at random: they were all women located within a ten-minute drive of my home in the desert. I’d filtered for counselors with experience in binge-eating disorder, which is what I thought I had. In the space of a session or two, I assumed, a professional would hand me, once and for all, the key to not needing—to being able to happily subsist on baby carrots and fat-free yogurt dip for the rest of my life without these box-of-chocolate interludes. I’d lose back the ten pounds I’d gained over the winter, and maybe, I hoped, a few more.
From more than 1,500 miles away, I rang the office phone of the woman who would, a few weeks later, sit across from me as I sucked in my tiny belly on her couch, feeling enormous.
Laurie read my intake paperwork in real time as I sat there, my eyes glued to the top of her head as she pored over the forms. I’d been coy: just life! trying to find balance, I’d written in the blank space after the question, “What has led you to seek counseling at this time?” When anyone asked, I’d used the ostensible excuse that it was the new year, that my insurance covered it, that everyone could benefit from therapy, right? But the symptom checkboxes exposed me. Weight loss or gain; concerns about dieting/food restrictions or rules; binge eating/purging/loss of control around eating; excessive or compulsive exercise—I dutifully inscribed an X beside all of them, along with insomnia, isolating yourself from others, and perfectionism. I wasn’t self-aware enough to mark distorted body image or low self-esteem.
“So. It sounds like you’ve got some food stuff,” Laurie said. Her level of understatement sounded intentional, designed not to scare me. It still did.
“I guess you could say so,” I responded. I wore my typical uniform: black leggings, black tank top. My clothing was chosen for its power to disappear me. The outfit was form-fitting enough to articulate the smallest parts of my body and dark enough to hide its convexities.
“Tell me more about that,” she said, in typical, open-ended therapist fashion. I proceeded to unspool to her my secrets. I didn’t understand the information I was actually offering.
I explained, as a penitent might through the screen of a confessional, the typical number of calories I ate in a day, the breakdown of the ratio of protein to fat to carbohydrate. I offered too, casting my gaze through her office window, the deeper sins: the unstoppable, thousand-calorie midnight “binges,” my body’s autopilot efforts to survive. The figures I recounted were in keeping with the energy needs of an adult human being—and far less than I needed, given my relentless workout schedule, even factoring in those extemporaneous meals. Still, I delivered them like an indictment. As a caveat, I added a kind of apology: “I work out every day for at least an hour, usually two. The day after I binge, I eat almost nothing.” What I meant to say was: I know I am dirty, but I promise I’m trying to do better. Please, show me how to be clean.
Fortunately, that was not what my counselor heard.
“Thank you for all of that,” Laurie said, her head tilted slightly in an attitude of gentle curiosity. “I wonder, though: what if you thought about food in terms of how it makes you feel, instead of in terms of all those numbers?”
Shock went to battle with shame in my body. There were no mirrors in the room, but I’m certain I looked at her as if she’d sprouted an extra head. For one thing, I’d expected a reprimand—but here I was with my hands out, waiting for a ruler that would not fall. More pressingly, her proposition was absurd. I’d been counting calories since I was eight years old. Food and algebra were synonymous. The kitchen was calculus.
I only saw Laurie for a couple of months. I don’t recall many of our other sessions. I remember only that it was uncomfortable in the way that healing so often can be—though I didn’t know yet that I was healing.
Tucked into her plush couch, I spent that spring expanding. It was slow until it was sudden—until I had to leave.