On Becoming Bulletproof
When I started medical school I was 73 pounds and damn proud of it. Starvation takes over your mind. The body has some built in mechanism where once you pass your lowest weight threshold you’ll try to do everything you can to survive there. I try not to bore myself with the details of my journey thorough thin and thick and really, I don’t think I can remember the details. It turns out that your brain also disappears with the rest of your body, so I can’t remember a lot from the past few years. I do remember some things: Running myself to exhaustion in -15 degree weather. Ending up in the ER a week before college graduation, getting pumped full of fluids while two of my best friends sat with me in the dark. Curling up with my grandmother in the couch-converted-into-a-bed where she spent her days until she died, our body frames comfortably fitting between the cushions with room to spare. We were disappearing together, and then it was just me.
It stayed that way through the first two years of med school. I tried to go out, make friends, see people…but it’s hard when people realize that you don’t want to eat. Through some fluke the girls that I’d gotten to know in class also happened to be “foodies” and I was scared to death. They sat around and talked about recipes and restaurants and ‘healthy eating’ and it all made me want to vomit so I tried not to see them much. I studied instead, a huge change from my previous life in undergrad. No more random 3AM drop-ins to see friends, skipping class, thursday night happy hours, etc. Nope, I took medical school seriously because I’d started taking EVERYTHING seriously. I thought my body was perfect, and everything else should be perfect too: my grades, my new condo, my life. I started reading home décor magazines and making scrapbooks. I tried to make my mom happy (an impossible task). I ate salads and obsessed over my hair and got upset if someone interrupted my routine. Everything was transient, nothing really mattered beyond school and whether or not I’d met my calorie goal. Maybe the body has a way of protecting the mind from starvation, because I felt euphoric every day. I would sometimes go see my ‘eating disorder doctor’ between classes and he’d tell me my heart was dying and I’d tell him I knew and then I’d leave, thankful that I hadn’t broken 80 on the scale. Every now and then I would freak out, eat too much and have to get ‘back on track.’ Sometimes I would run away to see a good friend in Chicago and take comfort in her stability while she sat with me and fed me pancakes. All in all it was a shit way to live, but I didn’t really know it or care.
Anorexia isn’t like breast cancer or a car accident. No one says “You poor sick thing, let me stay by you in your time of need!”. Instead everyone looks at you like its your fault and then leaves. The last year of college my friends banded together and elected one of my closest friends to talk to me. “They just can’t handle you,” she told me one night, “They want me to say something to you but I don’t know what to say.” I stared at her. This is the girl who I’d stayed up with while she freaked out about getting into medical school, she was the one I stood up for when she tore herself apart for being “stupid”, she was the one I was sure I’d know till we were old and grey. To her credit she tried to keep in touch but she had her own life to lead while I tried to destroy myself so it was a very unbalenced relationship. Either way, the rest of my friends pursed their lips and moved on, telling each other “well, she just has to help herself before any one of us can help her.” My own theory is that anorexia makes people uncomfortable because, somewhere deep down, they’re morbidly in awe at the level of self-control it takes to achieve such low body weights. I wasn’t scaring anyone with my mortality; I was scaring them with my determination. I wouldn’t go as far as calling it ‘jealousy’, but something akin to that. I could feel my friends retreating, watching me like they were watching a glass doll make her way through a windstorm (i.e with squinted eyes and clenched teeth). And I didn’t even notice because anorexia is a very self-absorbing diseases, but now I realize that after three years of medical school there isn’t a single person in this town that I could call up to get sushi or see a movie. I intimidated them with my bony frame, reminding them of their hidden desire to be a medical nightmare.
It’s a curse being big and fat again because I feel like I’ve been in a coma and have just now come out of it. It’s like the past almost-four years didn’t happen and I’m suddenly the same girl I was at 21, all bubbly and excited and ready to take on medical school and the rest of the world. But everyone’s gone and married or in some other career and I’m wondering where the hell I was the past few years. I spend hours on FaceBook trying to piece together people’s lives that they’ve been living while I was busy dying; trying to remember what it feels like. I have to teach myself how to be a person again and somehow find a way to re-enter normalacy. Before all of this I was hilarious, brazen, strong. I stunned people with my self-confidence. All of this sitting alone stuff is…new to me. I don’t like it.
But I’m not alone. I have a wonderful bestest-friend-in-the-whole-wide-world who is like my other half. He never left, probably because he one day wants to marry me and father my children (and after all that! I can’t beleive it either). There are a few friends in Chicago who I can always call and go to when I feel like cutting myself open and some scattered friends througout the rest of the country. The people I still talk to are the ones that stayed, the ones who treated me like the person I used to be even though I was nowhere near it. They’re the ones that came to see my in the hospital and cried when I reached my goal weight. It’s a handful, but they’re out there.
Somehow I’ve managed to find people in school here that I talk to and get along with and, recently, go drinking with. It’s like grass after a snow: it keeps growing. No one “knows” about the anorexia but it’s not like they can’t guess. A 30 pound weight gain is hard to miss. I don’t doubt that things will get better because, unbeleivably, I’m not bitter or jaded or cynical. Yeah, I was really sick, did things I’m horribly ashamed of, watched my friends give up on me and somehow I’ve come back. I don’t blame anyone, not even myself for the past few years. And now? I’m returning after my time away and looking around with wonder and awe. Little things…colored leaves, a good song on the radio, weekend trips to Chicago…. I could have missed it. I could have chosen to lose faith in people and withdraw and decide to just fuck everything and everyone. I could have left it all, but instead I’ve started taking up space again.
Ooooh I got a long way to go and will probably spend the next year getting myself together. I have massive stress fractures in my legs, I haven’t had a period for almost 4 years, I have no concept of when to eat and when not to, I hate my body, and the list goes on. But today a classmate emailed me to see a movie, and I had dinner with my dad for probably the fifth time since this all started and I wasn’t scared. I have to beleive it’s coming together. I’m picking up my armor, cracked and warped from years of abuse and dusting it off. I’m putting the pieces together and shining all the parts so that this time, after I straighten out all the kinks, I will blind people in the right angles of sun light. I will be fucking bulletproof and move on and over and OUT of this forever.
