By Rebecca Krause
Not long ago, I had lunch with a couple of friends from high school. They whispered to each other about our friend B, who was currently in the same hospital I had been in when I was 15, also for anorexia. They wanted her to get better. One friend turned to me hesitantly and asked, “How did you get better?”
I couldn’t give them an answer, because how could I begin to tell them that for me, there was no single cure, no sudden and wide-eyed retrieval of health and normalcy? Recovery is different for everyone, and mine wasn’t by the books. It was messy and frightening and atypical, which is why there is no official documented end to the disease. I never recovered from anorexia. Instead, I traded it in for binge eating, a new addiction that later evolved into a full-blown case of bulimia.
While cocktails of SSRI drugs and mood stabilizers now help me sustain my recovery, they didn’t always give me the willpower to refuse what grew into a constant and irrepressible hunger. In the beginning, my appetite was so wild and desperate that everything else was a distracted blur. It was like I’d suddenly realized how hungry I had been all those years I suffered from anorexia and there was nothing I could do to make it go away.
At that point, willpower was irrelevant. Instead, I pushed people away and hid with my symptoms on the kitchen floor, in my car outside the nail salon, in public bathrooms, in dark dorm room closets while my roommates were sleeping, and in other places and ways that now seem unimaginable. But at the time, it was weirdly comforting. As a former competitive swimmer, I’ve always related my eating disorders to the white noise that roared in my ears underwater, muffling the shapes and sounds of the real world.
It wasn’t until I realized how much my eating disorder was damaging my relationships with my friends, roommates, and boyfriend that I went back to therapy for the first time in five years. But this time, I was making a choice. My parents or my doctor or the law weren’t forcing me to go, like they had in the past. I finally realized that I was the only person responsible for my health, and that if I didn’t take care of myself, no one else would.
During that first session, I was emotionally fragile and psychologically splintered — a completely different person than I am now. My face was a constellation of burst capillaries and my teeth were an acid-eaten nightmare. My therapist, who I’m sure was just trying to help, assured me that I looked “great” and that my weight was “perfect.” Although 20 pounds later, I know that my happy weight isn’t defined by a specific number or size, but by overall physical health and emotional contentment. Letting go of my obsession with numbers was initially terrifying. My therapist suggested that I could start by channeling my ugliest feelings into a healthier outlet, like yoga or tai chi, playing ping pong in Chinatown, meditating, volunteering, or by being that elusive “good to myself.”
Eventually, her suggestions began to work, though I hardly knew it at the time, because my progress was like a rickety roller coaster that didn’t always run in one direction. On good days, the eating disordered behaviors were more or less in remission, like a cancer, and on not so good days, they still waxed and waned like the cycles of the moon. But through it all, I realized that underneath the eating disorder, there was still a deserving human being, living and breathing and clawing messily toward the surface. So I forgave myself for the bad days and continued filling the good ones with interesting, imperfect people of substance.
“I’m so glad to finally know someone else who’s so . . . un-dainty and un-feminine!” a new friend once cried inside the English department at NYU. Wired to the gills on red-eye coffees, we spouted literary criticism over one another in class, banging our desks excitedly.
I continued filling those good days with angsty post-modern poetry and “health at every size” blogs, by training for a skydiving license, and cutting off all of my hair just because people always said it was my best feature. In short, I liberated myself from things even greater than my eating disorders. I started purging my feelings into a notebook and bingeing on trashy TV instead of food.
Eventually, my body realized that these new behaviors felt a heck of a lot better than the old ones. As a result, the spaces between the bad days started breathing and expanding, and all of those insatiable bouts of hunger slowly panned out into nothing. A year later, I caught myself smiling for no particular reason and realized I wasn’t thinking about numbers or food, or being empty or full, because there were more important things governing my life now.
It’s often difficult for me to see how far I’ve come. But now that I’m consciously looking back, I realize that after what seemed like a wild and immeasurable amount of time in recovery, I’ve finally broken the surface of my eating disorders, and things up here are surprisingly clear and much quieter than I remembered them.
Today, I’m a big, loud explosion of a girl, stomping around the city in my scuffed-up cowboy boots, banging into rooms, and taking up more space than some people think I deserve. But, I think, that’s their issue. I can’t really see what’s under me anymore, because from here, the past is the past, strangely blurry and distorted, and I almost forget what it’s like to be submerged in it. People tell me they’re sorry I had to go through what I did, but as twisted as it may sound, I’m not. The recovery process not only changed my relationship with food, but with other people, imperfection, life in general, and most importantly, with myself.
Rebecca Krause
Rebecca Krause
Brooklyn, NY
Rebecca was born and raised in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. While she now resides in Brooklyn, she still enjoys birch beer, cowboy boots, and country music. After a five-year stint in book and magazine publishing, she’s recently begun working on a Master’s degree in social work. She is a mentor, board member, and Vice President of Referrals for Reaching Out Against Eating Disorders (ROAED), an organization featured in “When Eating is the Enemy” and “Eating and Self-Esteem.” Rebecca and her ROAED partner-in-crime, Sarah Newhall, will be contributing monthly articles to Hopscotch. Stay tuned!
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