I’ve been doing this so long, I have multiple memories related to the horror of having an eating disorder run and ruin my life.
7th grade – First time purging in the half bathroom of our kitchen. I chose one of the hardest, messiest foods to throw up – spaghetti. I remember being so painfully dizzy afterwards… how red my fingers got and how horrible it was to gag up noodles. The really horrible part, and it seems insane to say, is that thanks to chatter at school and strange cultural messages, bulimia seemed like a cool thing to do. Like I was part of a “cool” underground movement.
10th grade tournament – trying to throw up chicken fingers in a cramped bathroom at a diner in the Midwest after a hard performance. My mom was back at the table waiting for me. This is the first time I experienced guilt about doing something secretive and hiding it from her. I wouldn’t have articulated it this way back then, but I understood I was lying by omission. This is where the wedge gets driven in and the gap begins to widen, separating me and my eating disorder…. from everyone else.
11th grade – after a tournament in Las Vegas my mom and I hung around the slots and drank together. I binged that night on the hotel floor on chocolate and nut chex mix while she was taking a shower. It was such a physically driven, maniacal binge. I was completely out of control and terrified because even as I was scarfing the food, I realized I couldn’t throw it up in privacy. I honestly don’t even remember what happened….I assume I just passed out. The memory that sticks is the awareness of being 100% at the mercy of the binge. There was no stopping it, and I think likely the first time it was not a “choice.” As the disease strengthened in my life, I lost the power to say, “I want to eat forbidden foods now.” There is a great difference in a planned binge and one that just happens. The latter is unnerving.
Freshman winter break- sitting on the kitchen sofa at night eating wheat thins and hearing my dad in the other room say this couldn’t go on….not in a nice caring voice, but a callous, angry voice. Ironically, my journey to anorexia was only just about to start. At this point I was just starving and then bingeing/purging so my weight was stable. The worst was about to come. And it started literally a couple days after this, on the flight back to school. I remember sitting in the airport at ground level waiting for the bus to arrive to then take us to campus. I had traveled with a local girl who was chubby — and she was eating a piece of pizza from Dominos in the airport! I was simultaneously horrified that she was eating even though she was chubby and also insanely jealous that she felt like she could eat despite not having a perfect body. I was so hungry….and I distinctly remember telling my body, “no.” Some flip into hardcore anorexic behavior was switched right there for me. And only a few months later I had lost about 40 pounds because I was starving myself. Living off diet soft drinks, gum, salad, and booze. I was 18 years old, and 20 years later, I am still fighting the same eating disorder voice that shoves rules down my throat that hurt me — that lie to me– that will end up killing me.
Junior year, spring season – I was on an athletic trip one weekend with the team, and obviously sharing a room with a teammate. I had a really large salad for dinner — we went to Ruby Tuesdays, which offers a buffet, and I overdid it. Yes, I binged on salad. I’ve done that a number of times. My plan was to throw up in the hotel lobby bathroom. I used to make excuses about going downstairs to study or get lobby tea but really I was throwing up in the lobby bathroom. But the lobby bathrooms were closed. So I puked in our room’s bathroom, pretending to be in the shower. And then I actually got in the shower but there was more to vomit. I made myself throw up in the shower (done that many times before) but the onslaught of partially digested carrots, croutons, lettuce, chickpeas and cucumbers clogged the tub’s drain this time. But I kept vomiting because I had to vomit, regardless of the consequences. I had to get the food out. The physical feeling of being overfull, the calories… those moments before the purge hurt so grotesquely. After it was over (and sometimes it does become an out of body experience) I was standing calf deep in a tub full of my own salad vomit. Not an easy thing to explain. So I started shoveling. I started shoveling with my hands, scoop by scoop, vomit from the tub into the toilet. I don’t know how long it took but when I finally came out, my teammate was asleep. I remember being so grateful it was teammate A, not teammate B or C, because teammates B and C were anorexic and they’d have smelled the disease having a party with me that night. Teammate A probably thought I needed a long hot shower after a hard tournament. She was healthy. I really resented her those 4 years. She always had a snack on hand, like a bag of almonds or an orange or a yogurt. And she put mayo on sandwiches. Mayo! And food seemed to just be food to her. I barely slept that night, terrified that she’d call me out in the morning about the weird events of the night before, but she didn’t. And by some miracle, despite all the shower-vomit-water I stuffed in it the previous night, the toilet flushed.
Senior spring, when my bulimia and drinking had reached epically unsafe levels. I mention the drinking because most of the binges happened after I was drunk. I’m so unique and clever, I know… I lived in a dorm on a floor full of girls but I had my own bedroom. We all shared a communal bath space, though. I had become extremely skilled at this point with being about to just bend over in “controlled vomiting” while flushing the toilet, so I could manage to throw up silently when it was just a small amount of food, like a sandwich I had eaten with too much coffee or something. But a full blown binge and purge a) is noisy and b) takes a lot of time through multiple rounds. So I started puking into plastic grocery bags in my room. I could fill up 3-4 of them in one night. And then I’d stuff them in the main large trash can on the floor, which was usually emptied every day or so. Well the floor monitor called a meeting one day and said, whoever is throwing up into bags and putting them in the main garage bin, please stop. The janitor says it is out of control. Now I’m living on the floor with 2 of my closest friends who obviously know all about my disordered eating because we were friends freshmen year. But, like everyone else, they think I’m relatively okay now. Sure, I restrict heavily and they tease me about that (which thinking about it now was really hurtful. One was an ex-anorexic herself and she had ballooned quite a bit in recovery so I thought she was perhaps jealous of my willpower and thin body and the other was a healthy girl who just didn’t get it). So I knew they’d speculate it was me. I can’t quite remember the sequence of events but Friend A at some point in the near future reported that there was vomit in the toilet after Random Girl on the Floor left that particular stall. She told the floor monitor who talked to Random Girl and turns out, she was putting bags of vomit into the bin as well. Friend A and B later admitted they were so glad it wasn’t me! The utter embarrassment, shame, terror… embarrassment because what I was doing was absolutely barbaric and disgusting. Shame because who does that?! Terror of being found out. Terror that someone was going to ask me to stop doing it.
My wedding day. Really? Yes, really. I hope at some point I recover enough to love the “happy” girl in those photos who was actually hiding so much pain. She was doing the best she could. At this point I’m in my late 20s and fallen into a habit of throwing up dinner most every night. I now understand that I was overeating at night in a biological response to undereating during the day. I just thought willpower failed me… or sometimes I viewed that night dinner/purge as my reward for making it through the day restricting. Anyways, the food at the wedding was delicious. Of course I wanted to have some. And what bride doesn’t eat a piece of her own wedding cake? I ate very lightly that night but still had to throw up. I HAD TO THROW UP. Going into that lovely bathroom in the reception hall… waiting for privacy…. Holding up the back of my own white wedding dress so it wouldn’t drag on the floor as I dug up my insides…. Praying that I wouldn’t get vomit splash back on my beautiful white lace wedding dress… And pausing in pensive agony, wondering, “what kind of person starts a marriage with a secret addiction?”
Pre-wedding day. My fiancé and I stopped at a bed and breakfast a couple days before the wedding. We must have been sharing a bathroom in the hallway or perhaps we were in the communal living room and I used the bathroom there… But I ran into the issue of a toilet not flushing all the way. I could hold the lever down forever but all that food was not going to disappear from the bowl. Another case of throw up potentially being traced back to me… The terror that my fiancé would connect the dots or find out was too much to bear. I scooped up the remnants of the vomit from the toilet into napkins and then threw those away in the little trash basket… I couldn’t get out of that B&B fast enough.
Reflecting on these memories, I wonder how many hours of my life I have spent worrying about toilets flushing. My husband and I moved a bit in our early marriage so we looked at a lot of apartments… And every single time I step foot in a place that I might live in my first instinct was to go to the bathroom and flush.
Tasting Freedom 