I became bulimic by accident. I had failed at self-starvation, first whittling myself into a hungry twig, I became acutely aware of the unsustainability of hunger. My body involuntarily demanded that I eat. A survival reflex turned wrong, I started and couldn’t stop.
It happened, in the words of Hemingway, gradually, then suddenly. Around the same time that I stopped buying bread out of fear that I would eat it.
The fingers of my right hand grew familiar with the back of my throat. I grew familiar with the car route for fast food. Parked multiple times a day, often back to back, in a series of drive-thru lines, I wondered if anyone would have guessed that I had adopted an intentional system for throwing up.
The walls of my shared Southern Californian house were thinner than I thought and no one had to guess. My friends threatened to call my mom. I threatened to make new friends. While I fidgeted around food, my roommates fidgeted around me, but neither side acted and we lived the rest of the year in a quiet stalemate.
There is a certain kind of hunger that causes one to find oneself on a noodle hunt in Chinatown at 2 am on a Tuesday, and there is a certain kind of curiosity that causes one to poke around the laxative aisle at Duane Reade right after.
This is not a stomach grumble, shit it’s lunchtime type of feeling. It’s the illusion of hunger. An insatiable craving resulting in rash, frantic behavior. I would know, because on a pleasantly warm summer’s Tuesday night, I found myself in Chinatown on a noodle hunt at 2 am.
That night, technically morning, I ate my noodles in a restaurant with a B rating and a name I couldn’t pronounce while a lone server stared. I took the rest of my food to go because even my stomach could not expand far enough to accommodate it.
Food hidden – nesting doll style – in a bag in a bag, I headed home. The cab driver couldn’t see that I was carrying my dinner but he could probably smell it. Out of the cab, I unlocked the door to my house, turned on the tap, bent over the toilet and prayed that my roommate would be stuck in traffic coming home for at least another hour. I finished puking and downed the rest of my dinner. I wanted more.
I lived too close to a bakery for someone so devoid of willpower. From her house Sarah Palin could see Russia, and from mine I could see Milk & Cookies. I bet Sarah rarely popped into Russia. I couldn’t say the same about the bakery.
I didn’t always live across the street from the bakery. I traded the unending sunshine of the West Coast for a grayer East and quickly realized that New York was different than California. The people were nicer in New York, and better looking in California. California closed early because the blondes there didn’t eat after midnight, but the food in New York knew no time and tasty deliveries were made throughout the city at all hours.
When I first moved from the West Coast, I missed drinking things that were green. I wished I could find a raw vegan salad that tasted like it was driven from the farm to my table. I wasn’t persistent, though, and instead I found Seamless.
Seamless grew my waistline and shrunk my wallet. It was a twenty-four hour tool that allowed decadent food dreams to become nightmarish realities that ended with a distended stomach and a desperate trip to the bathroom.
Bulimia is a haphazard solution to a stupid problem. A terrible cycle of eat, vomit, repeat that calls for a blatant disregard for health. It is a disordered manifestation of conceit because I could never die!
The motivating factor – weight gain – becomes disproportionately frightening. The fear of love handles. My fingers, an unreliable measurement device closing around my wrist and thigh to confirm that I am not in fact growing in mass from one hour to another in some kind of Alice in Wonderland version of Morgan in real life. And then of course there is the part that I refuse to explore. The part that is probably not about weight at all.
The laxatives I ate on the night of the noodles had a candy coating on them, but if you sucked on them for too long, they began to taste awful. Medicinal M&M’s that turned sour in your mouth. I was used to them and began to swallow without water.
My parents said you’re working out, you look great.
I nodded and smiled with my mouth closed because my teeth hurt.
I’m can tell myself that I’m fine. That I will always be weird with food and weigh myself at the same time of day. I will always wish that someone would fall in love with me so that maybe I could too.
I want someone to look at me with earnest eyes and say, shut up, you’re not fat.
I want to believe them when they do.
These are the types of problems one should take to a shrink, but I am phobic about psychologists.
I don’t feel like explaining my problems, mostly because I don’t feel like thinking about them. When my shrink says how are you doing, I say good, how about you.
She stares back at me blankly, confused, with a cocked head the way a dog looks up at its owner when she makes an unfamiliar sound.
It is as if I just sneezed in response to her question.
Apparently the details of a shrink’s week aren’t supposed to be a part of the paid forty-minute dialogue. She knows, and I know that I am just wasting time.
I feel I have good reason.
The first ten minutes of going to see a shrink are like sleeping with a stranger sober. It’s awkward and you accidentally elbow them in the face. Suddenly, you can’t unbutton your favorite shirt. It never gets good, despite the clumsiness of the situation, it’s not funny enough to laugh.
My experience with shrinks has become fairly standard. It always ends up me, being big and feeling small, watching the clock and making sure the white noise in the hallway doesn’t stop, while I try to tell a forty-year-old woman that last night I killed an entire box of pizza. Singlehandedly. It never works and I am always referred to psychologists who can’t remove the judging, worried look from their eyes even if they’ve managed to let it escape their face.
After is worse than during. There is no time when I feel a greater need to speak to a psychologist than after I’ve already seen one. They sit still and I knead on play dough and try to make a sensible amount of eye contact to prove that I am a normal person. Then I remember that I am twenty-two and kneading play dough, which means that I am not a normal person.
With five minutes left in a session, I am comfortable enough to disclose a few irrelevant secrets.
I tell her that I have murdered Harriet, a plant I had named, by causing unintentional drought, and that the thought of my homicidal, not-so-green-thumb poisoning the rest of my pacifist brown body – which it is attached to – with its malice, is now killing me.
I do not want to be complicit in the killing of Harriet, I plead.
The image of the plant’s lifeless yellow body wilted on my windowsill breaks my train of thought. I wonder, to myself, if my flashback constitutes as PTSD.
I shake my head.
Harriet is a dead cactus.
I am less nurturing than a desert.
I don’t have it in me to throw her away.
I shake my head.
Shelley the Shrink toys with something imaginary on her lap.
There are two minutes left.
The shrink yawns. Her teeth look expensive – I think that maybe they are veneers. Dental porcelain paid for with the copays of sad people who want help, and sad people like me who want to look like they want help, but really just want to waste time. I imagine that Shelley the Shrink uses my copay to pay her own copay at the dentist.
Suddenly it’s over. I drop the play dough. She puts her notebook down, asks for a check and quickly boots me out of her office.
I think you should keep a diary for next time, she says.
I think that for this price I should be able to keep the play dough.
If there wasn’t a weepy-eyed man in the waiting room, I might even ask for more time. He’s always there and I never do.
Instead, I take the long way home, hoping the walk will help put things into perspective.
It only makes me sweat.
On my way, I step into a hot dog shop, remembering years of veganism, headaches and smaller pants. I dodge the menu’s nutritional information with my eyes, knowing full well that my guilt will lead me to Google it later.
Here we go again, I think, as I walk up to place my order. I’m in the mood for something with an anxiety-inducing amount of cheese that I already know I’ll regret.
I want to fulfill my weekly fat intake in one meal, I say to the man at the counter. I’m smiling but not joking.
He has a silver crown on what I imagine is his second molar. He smiles back. You’re in the right place, he says.
It feels bad, but I eat it, cry, and plan not to talk about it with my shrink again next week.