1 Twenty-ish years before the clinic,
a year or two before the Twin Towers fell.
Night shift at the factory. I considered myself recovered at this point (which means nothing. By age thirty, de Nile wasn’t just some river in Egypt but my most profound modus operandi.) I truly never expected to live to see 30; and when I arrived I had no idea what to do, had made no plans. So there I was at the factory. It was depressing and I ate myself silly, never connecting the dots that my binge eating was no different than anorexia or bulimia – it was just a new, unfamiliar band-aid for the same old wound.
But I did find a friend, there. Around my age, from around my area; we had even hung around some of the same people. For the first time there was someone interested in, at the same time I was willing to talk about, my eating disorder and the month I spent in a hospital ward for treatment. I’d never met anyone so comfortable with, nor so eager for, the most mundane details. That did trigger an instinctual alarm, but even if I’d known to listen, the denial I was in regarding my own eating disorder blinded me to what I was seeing in front of my own eyes: the more I talked, the more she shrank.
I doubted my vision until starvation affected the way she spoke, thought, reacted, communicated, behaved, et cetera, et cetera. By that point her friends were comparing notes trying to tease out the truth to give us direction. For instance: the “ice cream” she claimed (to Friend A) to “pig out on” nightly was (according to Friend B’s look in her freezer) actually zero-fat, zero-sugar, zero-nutrition, synthetically flavored air called “frozen whipped topping.” On the outside, as a “recovered” eating disorder survivor, I took on the role of expert; calming, explaining and guiding our circle of friends. On the inside I wrecked. I felt left out. I felt tricked (why had I listened to people telling me starving didn’t work? obviously they were wrong, for here she was right in front of me, with the sticks for arms and legs that I coveted, instead of my own squishy, bloated limbs.) While i paid lip-service to health and common sense, my heart felt like a failure for letting myself grow layers upon layers of padding.. And I misinterpreted all of my own feelings as competitiveness. What I was able to comprehend was that I could not deal with her anorexia in a healthy way.
I had a coping skill. A real one – not one involving my body or what I put in it. (This part usually seems to surprise people, now, knowing only the devolved state I’ve been currently living in.) I wrote my friend a letter, explaining as kindly and respectfully as I could, my fears for myself and her that led me to give her an ultimatum: get treatment or I cannot be friends with you. Though we were never close, again, she did leave for the nearest eating disorders clinic.
When she returned a few months later, complaining they only ate frozen, microwaved food, I literally did NOT understand. “What do MEAN there’s no stoves?” I asked. There’s no such a thing as a kitchen without a stove. She may as well have said they fed her green eggs and ham. There’s no such thing. So she repeated herself: “There’s no stoves. There are two kitchens and neither one has a stove. It’s all microwaved. There’s, like, dozens of microwaves.” What?! No way! I told our friends not to believe her because no eating disorders treatment center would feed malnourished people that way. Even back then in the late 90s, before nutrition science, with all other sciences, practically exploded with progress, we were starting to catch on that mass-produced, preprocessed, chemically-preserved-to-withstand-Armaggedon food was detrimental to our general health. So her claim that a group of clinical experts deliberately fed one of the most malnourished populations like that could not be true. I said it was probably a couple of special “challenge” meals that angered her.
(I
was
WRONG.
SOOO wrong. Though it was 20 more years before I learned HOW wrong I was.)
When she revealed that her clinic was in the same city as my hospital program it made me so excited that it startled and scared me. (Yes, my feelings frighten me.) (I’m Super Fun like that.) In the 10 years since I’d been a patient, there, Managed Care happened, and my old hospital program had dissolved. I automatically assumed that her clinic was where my treatment team had landed because it’s not a big city and there was no other specialized program in a very large tristate area. BUT. That immediate hopeful flash of excitment didn’t just scare me, it confused me, because I wasn’t sick, though I was sure I was pretty messed up to be excited about an eating disorders treatment center.
But you see, about that part where I called myself a “recovered” eating disorder survivor? Well, that whole time I had been doing exactly what my friend had been doing. starving. It just didn’t look like it because I was so overweight. We were in different stages of the same disease; a year before, she had looked like me; a year later, I looked like her. But according to the DSM IV (the most current diagnostic tool at the time):
a) I was too fat to be anorexic because you had to be at least 15% UNDERweight and I was more than 15% OVERweight
b) I didn’t purge at least twice a week for at least 3 months because there was nothing to purge
I didn’t look sick like my friend when I ate, either, because I had been sick for so long my eating habits were even weirder. Instead of inhaling buckets of cool, whipped, artificially flavored air, I would eat an entire bag of cheese puffs. All night long. For eight hours. And I would exercise all of the calories off before my next shift/bag. (And for which I suddenly developed a craving until I saw this video that made me retitle this post: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/a-brief-history-of-the-cheese-curl-junk-foods-happiest-accident
I was not aware of how sick I was or of why I was so desperate to learn where my friend went. I only knew it was imperative I found out and imperative that no one else found out how imperative it was that I found out. Buuuut, not only did I give my friend an ultimatum to enter treatment, then, when she got back, I didn’t believe her. Yeah. She was angry. Also, since I wasn’t sick, it was imperative I didn’t look or sound sick. So, very, very carefully, I tried very hard to inquire as casually as I could, “where, again, did you go, again?”
“River Centre Clinic.” Says she.
“Never heard of it,” says I, very casually shrugging, and shaking my head, trying very hard to feel as cavalier as I was trying to look and sound.
Never forgot it, either.