My experience. part 2

II. Fiddle Camp

I was absolutely petrified of going to fiddle camp. It involved so many things that made me anxious: being away from home, being among strangers, losing the rigid control over my environment that had always been vital for me. The details of my experience there are interesting but not relevant to my development of anorexia. What is important about my experience is my response. It has always been in my nature to want to perform well and receive praise. I didn’t get a lot of that at home, where my father doggedly focused on my “faults.” At camp, I decided I had two ways to stand out: I could either look good, or play well. I decided on the first day there that I was such a poor fiddle player that I had might as well throw in the bow. That left looking good, or equivalently, being thin. There was one girl at camp that I fixated on. She didn’t play very well, but I determined that because she was thin, the former was cancelled out. Around her, I felt so fat and horrible. That is when I believe I formally made up my mind to do whatever it took to become as thin as her. So, I devoted the remainder of my time at camp to eat as little as possible. Hungry and hot from the Tennessee summer weather, the final days there are somewhat of a blur. I stopped caring about my musicianship; indeed, I never played again after that trip. It was as if my love for music had been replaced by a foul hunger to whittle down extraneous layers.

When I returned from camp several pounds thinner, my parents were immediately alarmed. I remember my father telling me, in his characteristically unhelpful fashion, that my bony shoulder blades looked bad. My mother was more delicate in her approach, as she always was, but I could see that she was worried. I, on the other hand, was happy, in a distorted kind of way. I had successfully lost weight, and more importantly, I had gotten attention. With the summer drawing to a close, I knew I was ready to don my pleated skirt. The problem was maintaining my restricted diet, which began to make normally pleasant stimuli like music and pets jarring. I was absolutely dedicated to my new cause, but my depression grew as I lost interest in everything I used to love. I had always been withdrawn, but I started to isolate myself severely. This was not so much out of active choice than necessity. My new diet demanded constant attention, and I couldn’t allow myself to do anything to jeopardize it. I couldn’t and wouldn’t explain to others that the reason I couldn’t go out was because of inevitable meal times that could only be attended to in a specific, regimented way. I stopped eating dinner with my parents-- never a pleasant activity, as my father always took the opportunity at meal time to berate me for wrongdoings. I stopped taking music lessons, as that passion had died at fiddle camp. My life came to a halt.