....................................I held the uniform's skirt in my hand and studied it for a second before deciding to pull it on. Would it fit? I slid one leg in and then the other. I was joyous to see that it went on with room to spare. It was way too short, but the waist was loose. I then got really scared; this was wrong. Even I could see this now. I was twenty-one years old and the skirt I had just fit into was my Brownie outfit. I had last worn this when I was seven.
What had happened? How did I, a smart person attending university find myself in front of a closet furitively wearing a child's outfit? I'd been on the track team in high-school yet I no longer had the energy to run. In fact, I had tried to kick at something the other day and had literally toppled over. My lips were black from malnutrition. They looked like I had eaten licorice ice-cream; incredibly ironic in that it was an item that hadn't been enjoyed in years. My hair was falling out and had taken on an odd copper colour.
I have always fought for justice and the under-dog. Had somebody told me the story of a woman who was starved and made to walk or work long hours merely to eat sustenance level rations lacking any nutritional value I would have written letters in protest and done something to help. I would have sought vengence on the individual who perpetrated the deed. What do you do when the victim and criminal are one and the same? Who do you fight for?
To be honest, I had known something was wrong long before this moment. Like the abused child who drops signs in front of school counsellors hoping that somebody might notice I had mentioned things to various people. I had gone to the health department at university reporting that my period had stopped. I was actually glad that it was gone as I no longer suffered from cramps, but I knew that something was amiss. Nobody stopped me...they all missed the obvious. There was something thrilling but scary in this ability to be able to disappear in plain sight. I had somehow managed to become invisible. I could stand in front of an audience and slowly but surely kill myself and nobody saw. The fact that not a soul would stand up and yell "stop" merely added to my sense of unworthiness.
Over the years I have spoken to people who are self injurers and they report the same phenomena. The constant cuts, the burns, the black eyes never even garnered a question. They never had to have a handy excuse because nobody even thought to ask what happened. I started to think of the monks who set themselves ablaze in the early 1960's to protest the injustice of the Vietnam War. What would it take to get somebody to care enough to make me stop? Sitting down in the middle of the street, setting the can of petrol beside me, pouring it out, the match? At what point, if ever, would somebody say enough?
Mind you, at this point it's not like there were all that many people left to notice. I had made it my goal to distance myself from people. I had never been an overtly social person; I had always felt somewhat reticent in a crowd. It is ironic that I had initially used the diet as a way to make me more comfortable in group situations and to make me more appealing to others. For a while it worked really well. I had more confidence and people were drawn to me. I managed to meet a whole assortment of new and interesting people and I found myself engaging in behavior in which I would not have felt at ease previously. I was having fun. But, I guess it's like any other addiction. When you talk to people who drink or use coke to make social situations more palatable it's initially like they've discovered the missing link or Holy Grail. Somewhere along the way it changes and that same person suddenly finds themselves alone in a room with hidden bottles or cutting a line every five minutes just to maintain sanity. Having anybody around would mean the full depths of the behavior would be revealed.
Anorexia is different in another way too because one is always so tired. It's hard to maintain a conversation even; the exhaustion is that severe. It's hard to engage in anything when one is always hungry and fixated on food. I have a black out over many events of that time, much as an alcoholic would. What I do remember is what I ate. The bran muffins that I consumed in the cafeteria that had to take one entire hour to eat. I will recall with clarity the salad bar and the pickles that I ate in class to somehow override an all consuming famine. Don't ask me the name of the course or the people in it or even the names of the people who were my friends at the time. The disease robbed me even of my memories. All memories except for food.
If it were only that I lost contact with people because of feeling tired I would not have to also suffer an ongoing guilt. This illness has the end result of not making you a very nice person. One becomes suspicious that all events which revolve around food are some conspiracy hatched to make you eat. Realistically, what good events do not involve food? Strike that off the list. Concern is perceived as part of the master plan to make you fat. You begin to see yourself as some goose who is going to be force fed for the nefarious purpose of destroying you. After all, better dead than fat, so any attempt at having you gain weight is like a death plot. It becomes easier to sever all ties.
Anorexia is not the glamorous and thin model. It is me, working my summer job and being so hungry that the chicken in the garbage can that somebody else ate is driving me crazy. So crazy that I hunt it out and consume it. It is taking a box of those little pink laxatives because you finally ate and then staying awake the entire night and then the next day too exercising. It is seeing your mother cry from worry.
Guilt. It sticks with me like an ankle monitoring device. You cannot tell the dead that you are sorry. For, how are they to know that my rejection of them was because at 83 pounds I felt fat and unworthy? That it had nothing to do with them? All they knew was that I suddenly left their lives. There's that great line by Tennessee Williams which states that "time is the greatest distance between two places." I can never get it back. The weight, yes. But not the time, or the people and the lives destroyed.
