All Sales Are Final

I looked in the mirror today and I was surprised by what I found.  I noticed the angle in which  my face appeared flattered the delicate line of my nose, the squareness of my chin was less pronounced now that my cheeks are full and plush, no longer sunken and hallow like that of an emaciated waif.  My soft brown hair, pulled back in a make shift bun had recently highlighted strands of blond falling and resting along the side of my face.  The eyes that were wide open and staring back at me were a deep, but sad shade of blue.   But yet I saw beauty in my reflection.   Despite the gain of 50 lbs and the plumpness of my belly and thighs, I saw my heart in that image, and for the moment, I loved myself.

The irony of seeing this self-image is that it comes at a time when I am surrounded by so much chaos, with debris and shrapnel exploding all around me.  The carnage and hurt that I’ve caused feels like an avalanche, you can’t outrun it, and soon I’ll be buried.  If ever there were a time to feel self hatred towards myself, now would be the time.  So, I was perplexed that when I looked in the mirror,  instead of experiencing a longing to inflict some deep and prolonged pain onto myself, I saw the truth and saw the beauty within my heart.

I stared in that mirror for a long time, trying to feel some hatred towards myself.  But, it was not there.  I am angry with myself.  I am disappointed.  I hate what I’ve done.  But I didn’t hate myself, but rather I simply for gave myself even though I look to my left, and then to my right and see the wake of destruction  in my path.  The expense of this moment of peace, perhaps, far exceeds the value of obtaining it.  But  “all sales are final” there’s no going back, there’s no way to undo the price that I’ve paid for this insight.  But because I have learned how to love I understand that I must carry on this path that I started, honoring the love that I have hurt so badly.  I’ve begun my journey towards redemption, so I must carry on without going back,  because …”all sales are final.”

Seeking Serenity. No Escape and No Going Back

As I think back on my life I get a sickening feeling in my gut as I realize how many precious moments I have squandered, trying to escape from the present, perpetually spinning my wheels and getting no where, instead of seeking acceptance and resolution.   It is embarrassing and humbling to admit that I vehemently clung  to the belief that I could escape from my self hatred, remorse, guilt, and depression in the same way that  a child clings to a favorite blanket, soothing them self with it and screeching as if their life were ending when someone takes away.  I laugh in disgust at myself as I reflect on the times  I would drive by offices in tall buildings that lined the streets of large cities and think to myself “if I had a job where I was important enough to work there, THEN I’d feel happy and good about myself.”  I used to think that if only I were loved tenderly and attentively enough “THEN I’d feel happy and good about myself.”‘   If I had the perfect house and landscaped yard “THEN I’d like myself”  if I took a relaxing vacation, if I had different friends, if I had better hobbies,  if I were a size zero…THEN I’d like myself.  Some how I’ve actually managed to accomplish all of those things but not a single one has made me feel a better person or like myself any more.  If anything, I feel more foolish for having been so ignorant and naive.  All these external “things” that I had constantly sought in the hope of constructing a perfect life, believing if I did then I’d fill the endless void  that exists within me,, were never enough.   I’ve finally realize that I’ve been looking in all the wrong places for all the wrong things.  Actually, I shouldn’t even be looking at all because I need to just accepted that I may always feel horrible about myself.  Even if I don’t feel awful I now understand that every life, even the most perfect one, has  hurt  in it sometimes and life is about coping with that fact.

When life gives you lemons make lemonade right?  Not only did I compulsively try to make lemonade, but by inadvertently forcing moments in a desperate effort to create their perfection, I sweetened the drink so much that I ruined it all the while hanging out a banner for the world to see brandishing “LEMONADE!  LOOK AT ME! LOOK WHAT I’VE DONE!  I’VE MADE LEMONADE! I SHOULDN’T HAVE BUT I DID! AREN’T I GREAT?!   I never stopped to taste it myself, because what did my opinion matter?  If I had I would have realized that it was spoiled.  I never enjoyed a drop of it.  Instead of seeking attention, instead of seeking validation, instead of seeking escape, I simply should have sat back, quietly, and tasted the freshness of the juice I had squeezed.

As I survey the scene surrounding me I see the carnage from my battle with myself.  I see deep and gaping wounds I have inflicted to those I love,  through friendly fire.   I never intentionally sought to hurt anyone, but now I understand that it happened anyway as a result of  being a weak and vulnerable person.  I get so angry at myself and the way I’ve lived my life.  My weakness and vulnerability were not a conscious choice.  I didn’t want them, I railed against them, I sincerely tried. In my rational moments  I understand that this way of being is the natural consequence of growing up with neglect and abuse.  I don’t think it excuses away the hurt or damage that I caused, I don’t think that it reduces the pain I have caused others, and that makes it all the more difficult to explain or to find a way to forgive myself for not being any different.  It’s like having a stomach bug that contaminates the ones you love  before you even realize you are contagious.  I’ve had my turn to writhe in pain and wretch as the disease works through my system. As I recovery and regain my strength, I see those around me fall weak and ill, their discomfort paramount because of the disease I spread.   I have moments where I believe that I am a contagious disease.  Loving me comes at a high cost, consider yourself forewarned.   If I could simply disappear and have all of the pain and hurt go away, I would.  When I think about the moments in the past when I had considered ending my life, for the same motivations and pain that I feel now, I understand that the only difference between the degree of panic, fear, sadness, guilt, remorse, depression that I feel in this moment and the past is that I no longer hold the delusion that if I simply disappear, the pain of others would stop as well.   I think back to the moments when I was on the verge of death and realize that I actually believed that others did not love me as much they really  do.  I thought that it genuinely didn’t matter if I just were no more. That manner of thought gave me the luxury of believing that nothing I did mattered, that there were no consequences for my actions.  But Newton’s law holds true…every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  I should have paid more attention in physics class.

So, now I sit with pain and guilt with the wisdom that there is no escape.  This is my penance, my punishment, living with myself despite the self-hate.  I can’t go back, I can’t undo the things that have been done.  I get so angry with myself that I can look back on things with such clarity now, but was so blinded before.  I realize that I simply didn’t have the ability to understand before but I still hang my head in shame every time I am asked:  “How could you not know that?”   The why is complicated.  It is so complicated, but in the end I just simply didn’t.

I want to find excuses to make my hurt and guilt lessen. But even if I am granted a pardon from my past, that doesn’t mean that those I hurt will feel any better because of it.  I struggle to cope with this reality.  As my weight continues to balloon, I realize that instead of starving myself, I now eat to comfort and numb my pain.  I can see the pattern most moments,  but when my panic or frustration mounts, without thinking  I consuming empty calories for no other reason than to satisfy a craving, making the ache within me go away for a few brief and fleeting moments.  Unconsciously, it works, but it is a temporary feeling, it never fixes the problems, and definitely doesn’t heal my pain.  I am so angry with myself for not having the ability to tolerate distress.  I can’t help but wonder what is normal and how other people cope with pain and misery.

Just recently I have started to remember things that make me understand that my struggles with food go back longer than I had realized.   Last evening as I was grilling hot dogs for the group of children splashing in our pool, I had a flash bulb memory  of being 6 or 7 and reaching into our refrigerator and grabbing an Oscar Meyer hot dog and eating it raw, repeatedly.  Then I remembered that I  used to eat uncooked pasta, ice, dirt and grass.  I used to suck on pennies and the metal tops that connected the erasers to a pencil.  I liked the taste of metal.  I don’t remember why I chose those things instead of real food but recall that I ate those things throughout my teen age years.  I remember that I liked the way the grit from dirt felt grinding on my teeth, I liked the metallic taste of the coins, the hard crunch of the ice and the way it hurt my mouth.  I liked to eat the grass just because I knew I could even though I shouldn’t.

Until I had children of my own, I never realized how abnormal those things were. That is painful to accept.   But not as painful as accepting the fact that some sort of pain and dysfunction that was not my fault drove those behaviors.  It is hard to say “I was a victim” because it makes me feel vulnerable and weak, as if my failure to admit it some how makes me stronger, safer, and means none of it happened.  But normal children with normal lives don’t chronically eat weird things. Why would I have done it otherwise?  Maybe infants and toddlers do, but they out grow it.  I never did.  Instead it just evolved and grew with my chronological self, while my emotional development was stunted.  I am so ashamed as I sit with the awareness, recognizing that so much of who I’ve been and what I’ve done just is not normal.  The origins of my thoughts and behavior are so clearly rooted in my childhood, but what difference does that awareness make when I’ve simply perpetuated the hurt inflicted upon me?  I understand why Alcoholics Anonymous starts each meeting with the serenity prayer…because it’s what I need to do as well.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

–Reinhold Niebuhr

Anorexia: She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not

Should a forty-ish, 5’4″ mother of twins ever be able to wear a size 0? What if a size 0 is too big and she weighs less than she did when she was 12? That’s a problem.  A year and a half and almost 50 lbs later and I can admit it, but while in its romantic grips I could not. In hindsight I realize had a love affair with anorexia, but it was an abusive relationship, I loved her and thought she loved me back, but she didn’t because she wasn’t capable of it.

I don’t like to talk about it, but then again I don’t like to talk lot of things and when I do it is usually on my terms.  That is just one more thing to add to my self-improvement to do list.  Yesterday a  woman I respect very much said to me “Leigh, your words are always so calculated, so precise, so strategic, no one really knows the real you. Sometimes you need to just say things and realize people are responsible for their own interpretation too.   Believe it or not, people actually like you. How much more affirmation do you need?”  And my reply was “That’s the crazy thing, I know my strengths, I know what I do well, I know what I’ve accomplished in my life but knowing these things still doesn’t make me feel any better about myself.”

The distorted, self-hating world in which I live in goes beyond the stereotypical analogy of  the anorexic evaluating their body in the mirror and perceiving a circus clown reflection as every mirror appears to be a fun house mirror  that expands their  butt, thighs and gut to ass-tronomical proportions.  For me the distortion  extends to every aspect of my life, how I perceive my work, my mothering, my ability to be a friend…everything.  The degree to which I crucify myself, the manner in which  I over analyze, perseverate, and flagellate myself is so extreme, that at times it paralyzes me.  I hate it. I know it is unhealthy, but it is all I’ve ever known so it makes change so difficult.  It isn’t like I can simply stop and just start something different because I have to learn that something different first.  I want to stop but hating and almost always, torturing myself is easier than not.  Nurturing, loving and forgiving myself are a foreign language to me,   I can mumble a few words and know that others are fluent in the language and comprehend it well, but I simply don’t.

My anorexia is especially difficult to talk about because  of the shame and embarrassment connected to it, but also, its power is in its secrecy, so verbalizing thoughts related to it means I will likely be excommunicated from its seductive order.  It is the addiction that got the best of me.  I liked it so much at times, I didn’t want to get better.  I realize how weak and selfish that sounds to anyone who hasn’t suffered a mental illness.  Because restricting, purging, and laxative use behaviors are self-inflicted, they are complicated and difficult for friends and family to understand.  It is hard for others to remember that the pain and self-hatred that drives the disease is not artificially created or imagined by the anorexic person.  We are driven by intense pain and anguish, it is our coping skills and the way we manifest that pain that is the major problem. We’ve learned an effective way to numb ourselves.  I said effective, not healthy.   It is a seductive addiction and your body changes and adapts to it, altering everything about you the same way methamphetamine addiction tricks and decays your body.  It is difficult for the anorexic’s support system to refrain from fixating on the acting out behavior and look at the intrinsic motivation that drives us.  Failure to do so  invariably triggers their sense of fear and helplessness but it spills out as anger and frustrations as they watch the disease silently kill us. I didn’t think that my body was keeping score.  I didn’t think I starved myself long enough or severely enough that it mattered.  Now I reflect back on the way that my hair fell out of my head yet grew so long upon my arms, the way that I would bleed and bruise, and how pale my skin became, how frail and fatigued I seemed.  I was emaciated and looked like a walking corpse, my breasts hung like those of a 90 year old woman and did not know how close I was to becoming a real corpse myself.  I am still in denial about it most of the time but have a few trusted supports that make sure I don’t forget for long as the consequences continue to rear their ugly head, the risk of osteoporosis and the presence of anemia are just the first to come. But the worst of it is carrying the monkey on my shoulder, always looming and trying to seduce me back into its grips.

The thing about anorexia, which you don’t realize when you are in your clutches, is that your body starts to eat itself and your brain starts to have difficulty functioning.  I think back to the way in which I felt constantly on edge, so anxious and irritable and always feeling faint and dizzy. I blamed it on stress or some undiagnosed medical condition,  allergies, but just got used to living with it on a daily basis so I didn’t notice it that much at the time.   Now that I have gained weight and I can feel moments of peace and calm, I realize how poorly I felt.  About 8 months ago I complained to my primary care doctor that if I went more that 4 or 5 hours without eating I would start to feel faint and jittery.  I was afraid I was hypoglycemic.  His reply…”Leigh, that is normal. Everyone who goes that long without eating feels that way.”  I must have looked at him as if he had just told me the world was flat.  How is that possible?  I went entire days without eating more than a morsel or a nibble, in the depths of it most days I consumed fewer than 500 calories and I felt fine? It wasn’t until I got into treatment and had to start tracking calories that I even realized that was how little I ate.  It’s not that I felt fine, it’s that I felt so horrible all the time I never noticed when I felt bad.  Now that I feel good more often than not, it’s pretty evident to me when I need to eat because I get that feelings like I can’t sit still and that I’ll never get things right, my anxiety and  jitteriness kick in as my body signals my brain and says “I need to eat!”.

And yet I loved it.  I loved that it allowed me to torture myself in plain sight yet people did not notice (or so I thought).  I loved that I felt hungry all day and that the constant ache in my stomach was my penance for being such a horrid person.  I loved that I could enjoy the taste of something sweet, something that tasted so wonderful and then deny myself its pleasure.  I loved that no one could force me to eat if I did not want and that it made me feel like I had some emotional control.  I loved that it could slowly kill me.  I was so out of control and deluded by its power and didn’t even know it.

I’ve lost count of the times that I washed my xanax down with laxatives.  The xanax taking the immediate edge off the intolerable emotions while the laxatives were the delayed onset approach.  Once swallowed unless I chose to purge it back up, I could only sit and wait until they made my stomach cramp and my insides churn.  The physical pain and spasms of my colon cleansing itself just felt so appeasingly symbolic of the emotional torture I felt that  it was the perfect  way to punish myself for being a fraud and failure.

If you noticed I’ve not referenced the sacred ritual of using a scale and viewing my weight in the manner that a child asks a question and shakes a magical eight ball, or the way in which I used the size of my clothes to calculate my worth as if the absolute 0 was the finite answer to a complex algebra equation that solved every mystery in life.  I was a good anorexic.  I knew the rules and followed them well and developed all the necessary skills to perpetuate the disease.    I knew that if I weighed myself first thing in the morning that it would be my low weight for the day.  I knew exactly how to stand, tiptoed on the scale, balancing on one foot, exactly in the middle, leaning forward just a bit, so that I could get the lowest weight.  I religiously weighed myself 3-4 times a day, naked doing my best impression of a stork.  You know there is something wrong with you when you get excited when you take a crap to see how much weight you’ve lost.  I knew which stores sizes ran large and which ones ran small and took a disturbed pleasure in the indignation that I could feign when someone told me I was too skinny because, after all, would you walk up to a person and tell them they are too fat, of course not? Oh ,poor me…me… me . . me…

Dying to be perfect…isn’t that how people describe it?  And from the outside it is easy to accuse the anorexic of being vain, selfish, and shallow.  But yet I loved my family, my friends and my spouse.  I volunteered and gave of myself…when I could and when I couldn’t, I simply hurt and wallowed in misery.  My hair was always perfect, my make up pristine, my close pressed and name brand, my shoes…well, I loved my shoes because my physique and weight made it nearly impossible to find clothes that fit me in stores,  I’d have to place catalog orders most the time.  But my foot was a perfect size 8.  Absolutely average and always in stock.  I found such joy and pleasure in buying shoes…so I bought a lot.  Yet, the self-starvation was never really driven by the need to appear like a super model,although I did enjoy the distorted perception that I looked like one.  The deprivation was simply a reflection of the self-hatred, anger, and internal pain.  When you think of any coping skill, whether it becomes healthy or dysfunctional, if your distress runs deep enough, your coping skills reach a level of satiation where they no longer work unless you increase their intensity.   You start to starve yourself a little and it’s a one way street…down hill and the only way to cope is to lose more and more weight.

I have moments where I mourn the loss of anorexia the way a person mourns a death.  I know that sounds disturbed, but I still idealize and romanticize about our love affair.  I  had a name for her and we often had long conversations communicated through my journal as our banter back and forth occurred through the hand written pages.  I would read the lies the she would tell and I would argue back, trying to convince myself that she was wrong…but often the words she weaved were like a magic elixir, intoxicating and bitter-sweet.   Even though I argued it was often a feeble attempt and  I often took her bait.  She loved me but she hurt me…so she loved me not…’tis the love affair one has when courting death.

Today As my pant size encroaches on double digits (I gasp as I publicly admit that) I stare pensively upon a portrait of me and my family when I was my lowest weight, before I sought treatment and acknowledged the degree to which I needed help.  Like a drug addict craves cocaine when they think about it, I crave the chaos and destruction that the illness brought.  I look at myself in the mirror and see all the rolls and softness that were never there before.  Most days I find it hard to believe that I am beautiful, so I gaze upon that picture, looking at that woman, Hollywood model thin and some times I long to look like her, but the thing that always stops me is that I know the price of it is just too high.  Today I understand the pain and fear my self-destruction caused to others who love me.  I know that I can’t look like her and feel the way I do today.  Perhaps I still struggle and get lots of things wrong, but I have hope and belief that life is not so bad and I know and accept that can’t go back to being anorexic again.