Shrinking Women by Lily Myers

Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass. She says she doesn’t deprive herself, but I’ve learned to find nuance in every movement of her fork, in every crinkle in her brow as she offers me the uneaten pieces on her plate. I’ve realized she only eats dinner when I suggest it. I wonder what she does when I’m not there to do so.

Maybe this is why my house feels bigger each time I return; it’s proportional. As she shrinks the space around her seems increasingly vast. She wanes while my father waxes. His stomach has grown round with wine, late nights, oysters, poetry. A new girlfriend who was overweight as a teenager, but my dad reports that now she’s “crazy about fruit.” It was the same with his parents; as my grandmother became frail and angular her husband swelled to red round cheeks, rotund stomach and I wonder if my lineage is one of women shrinking, making space for the entrance of men into their lives, not knowing how to fill it back up once they leave.

I have been taught accommodation. My brother never thinks before he speaks. I have been taught to filter. “How can anyone have a relationship to food?” he asks, laughing, as I eat the black bean soup I chose for its lack of carbs. I want to say: we come from difference, Jonas. You have been taught to grow out, I have been taught to grow in. You learned from our father how to emit, how to produce, to roll each thought off your tongue with confidence – you used to lose your voice every other week from shouting so much. I learned to absorb. I took lessons from our mother in creating space around myself. I learned to read the knots in her forehead while the guys went out for oysters and I never meant to replicate her, but spend enough time sitting across from someone and you pick up their habits.

That’s why women in my family have been shrinking for decades. We all learned it from each other, the way each generation taught the next how to knit, weaving silence in between the threads which I can still feel as I walk through this ever-growing house, skin itching, picking up all the habits my mother has unwittingly dropped like bits of crumpled paper from her pocket on her countless trips from bedroom to kitchen to bedroom again. Nights I hear her creep down to eat plain yogurt in the dark, a fugitive stealing calories to which she does not feel entitled. Deciding how many bites is too many. How much space she deserves to occupy.

Watching the struggle I either mimic or hate her, and I don’t want to do either anymore but the burden of this house has followed me across the country. I asked five questions in genetics class today and all of them started with the word “sorry”. I don’t know the requirements for the sociology major because I spent the entire meeting deciding whether or not I could have another piece of pizza. A circular obsession I never wanted, but inheritance is accidental, still staring at me with wine-stained lips from across the kitchen table.

TW: descriptions of disordered eating and exercising.

There Once Was a Girl by Katy Waldman
Against the false narratives of anorexia.

The anorexic impulse to lyricize one’s illness is a prescription for estrangement, for controlling and muffling the messy truths about who we are. Despite its promise of expressiveness, it is the enemy of writing. It is certainly the enemy of living. We need to tackle the false narratives clustered around eating disorders in our culture—clichés that vex and complicate treatment, contributing to low recovery rates and a frightening death toll. By looking harder at both the literature and the science of anorexia, we can expose where the plotlines conflict, where the self-deception and self-sabotage sneak in.

Anorexia is one of nature’s bleaker illustrations of “monkey see, monkey do.” […] The charge that anorexia memoirs are “how-to manuals in disguise” is well-established by now: Writers from Emma Woolf (Virginia’s great-niece) to teens on eating disorder–related Internet forums have faced criticism for wreathing their anorexia stories in beckoning particulars: minutes on the treadmill, target weights attained, calories consumed. Thanks to the disease’s competitive nature, these tidbits, ostensibly offered as warnings, can read as inspiring benchmarks or even veiled instructions. Recalling her student-sensei relationship with Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted, “a cornerstone, a beloved, poetic contemporary classic” of eating disorder literature, the writer Kelsey Osgood reports that she “incorporated some of Hornbacher’s tricks into my own weight loss repertoire.”

More fundamentally, though, anorexia is an inveterate liar whose grand theme is your identity. Because the channels through which it flows and acts are so often linguistic, the disorder has inspired a perverse literary tradition, replete with patron saints (Catherine of Siena, herself a twin, who recorded the details of her miraculous asceticism in letters she sent to aspiring female mystics), glamorous elders (Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath), tropes (fairies, snow), and devices (paradox, irony, the unreliable narrator). “Anorexic literature” commits the inherently literary, self-mythologizing qualities of anorexia to paper. From the novels of Charles Dickens to the poetry of Louise Glück, it contains and reproduces something more amoebic, perhaps more dangerous, than dieting tips: a specific persona and sensibility.

I have this very vivid image of myself as a teenager, sneaking into my parents’ bathroom in the dead of the night to step on their digital scale. I stand there for three seconds and then kneel, prostrating myself on the ground, head to the scale, knees on the cold tile, eyes straining through the darkness to read the result. It’s vivid for me in a way that other aspects of my illness aren’t because I distinctly remember choosing it to be. Right before I knelt, I thought, this is a symbolic moment. The height of my disordered thinking, to literally worship the scale. It was performativity at its finest, and I knew it – it was me “doing anorexia”.

Those performative moments were where I felt safe, where I felt like I had an identity. To eat without guilt made me feel guilty. If I wasn’t constantly thinking about food or exercise or my body, I wasn’t truly sick. If I wasn’t this idealized paragon of asceticism, I wasn’t truly ill. “Anorexia is the mental health equivalent of the red shoes that make you dance until you die. It is a performance—of femininity, of damage, of power—that turns into a prison. The choreography becomes so absorbing that you can no longer access your own will or desires. You may require an external party to confirm for you that you exist.”

I was an active poster on an eating disorder internet forum back then. I made friends with other users. We shared thinspo and low-fat recipes. We celebrated when people reached the DSM-IV criteria for anorexia. We commented on each other’s journal threads with words of comfort along with tips on how to ignore hunger. It was the same thing again and again – am I really sick? am I thin enough? am I performing anorexia correctly? – and with every new user we would confirm, yes, you are sick enough, if you are on here you are ill enough, and you deserve help. But we weren’t the ones who could help.

InGoing Hungry, young adult author Francesca Lia Block equates anorexia with “that perfect blend of angelic and demonic—the faerie. Ethereal, delicate, able to fly.” She recalls her time under the sprite’s spell in an outrageously irresponsible bout of lyricism: “I stared out the windows at the twisting, starving trees, the silvery, sorrowful sky. I wrote strange, surreal poetry. My father stopped at a Dairy Queen, and I ate a vanilla cone. It tasted fearsome and frightening. Like mortality.”

It makes me wish there were a Bad Sex in Fiction award, but for thinspo. And yet—who was one of my favorite authors as a preteen? I remember 1999, when I was 11 years old, my whole being magnetized to Block’s waifish bohemians, her purple-haired witch babies and genie changelings. I remember the spicy explosions of jacaranda, the porch scents of tangerine and cinnamon, all the deferred deliciousness of imaginary pleasure. Block recounts “a kiss about apple pie a la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate, when you haven’t eaten chocolate for a year.” Why didn’t it strike me as weird that she always used food metaphors to describe nonfoods? That her protagonists were unfailingly languid and small-boned and lean? Most of all, I remember the moment in The Hanged Man when the heroine declares: “I will be thin and pure like a glass cup.” A glass cup! It seemed impossibly poetic. This was years before Alice Gregory poked fun at Block in the New Yorker for composing “laughably elliptical passages that read like demented ads for diamonds or bottled water.”

Though their effect is hard to quantify, “a lot of war stories and memoirs out there … glorify the specialness and suffering of anorexia,” says Dr. Angela Guarda, director of the Johns Hopkins Eating Disorders Program. “Anecdotally, patients often acknowledge that these writings romanticize the disorder,” and that “reading them can be triggering and worsen their ED.” While the actual disease is not glamorous at all, Guarda reiterates (do you remember the boring calorie records from Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl? Imagine them as the script for your entire life), “the idea of anorexia often is.” Doctors at Johns Hopkins generally discourage patients from reading most autobiographical accounts of eating disorders, including the not-inconsiderable portion written by authors who “describe themselves as recovered and appear to still be ill.”

But what happened with me and Block felt like a slightly different thing. I wasn’t anorexic (yet), she wasn’t writing an anorexia memoir (explicitly), and I’m not sure how anyone could have known to intervene.

Sadness is “interesting,” notes Leslie Jamison in her magisterial essay on female pain, “and sickness [is] its handmaiden, providing not only cause but also symptoms and metaphors: a wracking cough, a wan pallor, an emaciated body.” Children want desperately to be interesting. Block’s slender, graceful wraiths with their dark secrets appealed to my ambition and sense of drama, not to mention my kiddie narcissism. Here’s one Blockian character indulging in a Petrarchan inventory of her own gaunt figure: “My shoulders, my collarbone, my rib cage, my hip bones like part of an animal skull, my small thighs. In the mirror my face is pale and my eyes look bruised. My hair is pale and thin and the light comes through.” Bones, small, mirror, hair, pale, eyes, thin, light. The single syllables stream by like stars, all of them smooth, bright, reflective, or feminine. The hair’s thinness allows the light in. Projecting myself into that body, I think I loved the implication that someone might pay close enough attention to me to worry about my collarbone.

Was my collarbone interesting, though? Did it “unfurl like a bird’s wing”?

As a child, I loved reading through the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series. I particularly liked reading Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, perhaps because I fantasized that my upcoming teenage years would be as dramatic and important as the stories told in the book. There was one story in there called “Gabby, You’re Sooo Skinny”, and it was the popular narrative of a straight-A, “very together” teenager dieting and then spiraling into anorexia, only to have an incident shock her into reality and onto the “long road of recovery” with help from loving friends and family. Later, as a straight-A, seemingly “very together” teenager myself, I wondered if that was the only way to get people to notice that I was actually not very together at all – if it was only physical sickness and manifestations of illness that could garner attention.

That’s not to say that anorexia and other eating disorders are simply a cry for attention. They are and they aren’t, and the reason I love this article so much is because it expresses the contradictions, the complexities, and the influences of culture and femininity and tropes about anorexia itself. “A fantasy of anorexia: total expressivity. See the anorexic’s sadness, legible on her anatomy, her inner life and emotions immediately present to anyone who looks at her. In a reverse transubstantiation, flesh becomes word, becomes character. Only the most authentic artist could possibly live her art like that.” It’s a tangled mess of romanticizing anorexia as expression, as self-control, and something to be admired.

Sometimes I start eating, and I can’t stop.

This part is hard to write, but it is also part of the narrative. As I dipped in and out of recovery after college, my disorder started to morph, losing any illusory claim it could have made on wan, heroic reserve or glamorous pallor or what have you. I stored up my denials. Then I binged on whole boxes of cereal, cartons of cookie dough ice cream, vats of raisins stirred into Nutella or hot fudge. The beginnings of these episodes were glorious—radiant increments of permission in a fascistically regulated life, Bosch gardens in which all the naked people were made of marzipan. But the middles and ends were crushing. The conviction, postbinge, that you are the most disgusting, worthless, execrable creature on Earth is total, as consuming a psychic pain as I have ever experienced. I’d walk to work wondering why people weren’t throwing things at me. If a colleague was kind, I’d feel so ashamed and undeserving my eyes would tear up. Time after time, the emotional fallout from bingeing proved so excruciating I would vow to never, never, do it again. And then—surprise!—I would.

This twist in the anorexia story often goes untold, because it doesn’t harmonize with the martyr-romance of the eating disorder. But overeating is a common response to the physiological and psychological stresses of starvation: More than one-half of anorexics will flirt with bulimia or binge-eating disorder on their path to recovery. “Restricting makes food more rewarding,” says Carrie Arnold, author of Decoding Anorexia: How Breakthroughs in Science Offer Hope for Eating Disorders. “After billions of years of evolution, our brains and bodies really don’t want to starve.” The chronically hungry contend with a primal drive not only to ease their immediate pangs but to counteract profound nutritional deficits. As Arnold explains, “a flashing neon sign in the eating disordered brain is saying GORGE NONSTOP.” For the most part, people with anorexia prove adept at ignoring it—until they don’t.

After a bout of anorexia, I swung into binge-eating. But binge-eating is agonizing. There is no romantic notion of self-control – it’s the complete and total opposite. I had realized I needed to stop letting calories and weight control my life, but it wasn’t as simple as just starting to eat again. Once I began to eat, I couldn’t stop. Terrified, I started trying to restrict again. I wouldn’t eat anything during the day. Then, at night, ravenous, I would sneak into the kitchen, this time not hoping that my parents wouldn’t hear the beep of the digital scale but the squeak of the pantry door. I would mindlessly devour food in front of the TV in the living room and when my stomach was so full it would start to hurt, I would punish myself by eating even more.

Recovery is complicated.

Lapping seductively at the joints of the craft was the cold, dark water I knew. It said that E’s behavior was not really crazy at all. That one should sup not on salmon and green beans but on scintillating conversation and small exquisite sips of Perrier. Dive in, beckoned the water. Be beautiful again.

Remember ladies and gentlemen this generation loves performative activism without actually doing anything themselves or for others.

punkrockprincex:

sometimes i want to look hardcore and sometimes i want to look like a precious forest child and sometimes i want to look like a celestial being made of starlight and constellations 

Performativity at work! 

sirilaf:

my favorite thing about people changing their appearance is the resistance they meet from people who expect them to look a certain way

nerd2quared:

“Performing one’s gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all. That this reassurance is so easily displaced by anxiety, that culture so readily punishes or marginalizes those who fail to perform the illusion of gender essentialism should be sign enough that on some level there is social knowledge that the truth or falsity of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense ontologically necessitated.”

— Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” (528)