My own experience

Hello all,

I have decided to share with you some of what my experience was like when I was sick. Maybe you will see yourself in some of what I experienced; or maybe just knowing that I went through the same thing is comforting. I intend to post it in segments, and I will start at the beginning:

I. The malnourished seeds of discontent

It is silly to say that anorexia is about food. Yes, in its early stages it is about food and a desire for positive feedback, but that stage lasts for only a fraction of the span of the disorder. Dietary restriction merely breathes life to a deadly, inchoate disorder that was always there. I know that this is what happened to me.

It began in high school; a nasty, cutthroat breeding ground for psychopathologies and inner crises. I attended a tightly clique-run school, where everyone had already known each other for years. It breaks my heart to remember just how young and full I was… full of life, full of food. Just a month before beginning ninth grade, I won a songwriting contest. At home among adults and my music, it did not occur to me that I would be rejected by my peers. More importantly for this story, it did occur to me that rules could be broken for some, but never for me.

It may sound trite to emphasize the dire significance of our uniform, but that matronly Land’s End attire changed everything. I remember trying it on a few days before school began, recoiling at the loose, ill-fitted folds on an awkward adolescent body. Our choices of colors for the polo shirts were unappetizing hues, like puce green and washed-out maroon. The plaid or pleated skirt had to be two finger widths above the knee. It fit tightly around the waste, ballooned over my thin hips, and ended at a disproportionate length on my petite frame. My only consolation, of course, was that all of the girls would be in my same, unflattering position….

High school is not fair, and merits and punishments are not doled out equally. I never anticipated that, being an immensely and equality and justice-inclined young girl. However, this is what I soon learned: the most unpleasant, pathologically narcissistic girls at that school could get away with having skirts uncomfortably short. They had their pleated skirts professionally hemmed to be an entire palm above the knee. Everyone saw it; the administration, I am sure, must have known what was going on. Dress code here was so strict, in fact, that the boys were often sent to detention for wearing the “wrong” socks. But those girls, nasty as they were, could get away murder. I did not try to break the rules right way, always having been conscientious and rule-abiding to the point of obsession. But I took note.

My skirt transformation began slowly. I began to do what some of the less brazen girls did—I rolled the waistband. But the waistband was so bulky that eventually, I got tired of having to perfectly hide my tucked-in polo shirt over the incriminating waistband. It wasn’t until late in my junior year that I got my skirt tailored. Fearing impunity, I did not raise it much—not nearly as much as the popular girls. I believe it was at this point that I became enchanted with recreating my image from barely-noticed to at least admired. This was the summer before my senior year.

I spent that summer fixed on one goal only—losing weight. It did not happen all at once; I’d cut out foods that I thought were superfluous anyway, like desserts. The Atkin’s craze was raging at this time, so I started throwing out carbohydrate items. This left me in a bit of a pickle, because I had never liked meat and cheese and eggs (really the only allowable items on this diet) very much. But I religiously made myself omelets, ate hamburger…all of this did not result in much weight loss, but the foundation was being built, irrevocably.

Towards the end of the summer I was forced to go to Mark O’Connor’s fiddle camp. I say “forced” because though at one time I had very much wanted to go, my weight loss fixation demanded so much emotional and physical energy that my music was becoming extraneous. I did not want to spend a week away that I could devote to exercise and eating routines. I also did want to have to “feel bad” about my competency as a musician. That is, I did not want to be placed among professionals that were naturally better than me, only to have one more thing about which to feel inferior. But my father forced me to go. He had spent $700; he thought it was silly for me not to go; I was ungrateful. God, how I wish I had not gone.