Some Drama

About a month ago, at an appointment to donate platelets, on a laptop that was so old the screen was faded like a Hitchcock film, I saw my weight. The innocent Red Cross employee had kindly smiled when I asked to step on the scale backwards. She’d assured me she wouldn’t say the number out loud. She didn’t know that when she turned the screen toward me, directing me to double check my address and phone number, she’d actually shown me all of my vitals. My weight was the only thing I saw among the other numbers. I couldn’t consider the hemoglobin, blood pressure, or heart rate. My eyes knew my truth: all that mattered was the weight.

In the nearly fifteen years of my slog of a recovery process, this has happened before. It’s not uncommon—based on my own experience and engaging with folks on ED recovery social media—for weight and the scale to be an issue in medical settings. I’ve had nurses laugh at me when I request to step on the scale backwards, giggling like I should be embarrassed. I am. I’ve had staff politely oblige and proceed to print off my visit report with my weight stamped in bold numbers on the front page. I’ve heard and read worse tales from others.

The feeling is always the same. I’m six years old, eight years old, eleven years old. The hatred for my body is loud and the noise is coming from inside. I take up the entire room because every inch my body doesn’t fill with flesh is filled with snickers and judgment and disappointment. I wonder if I should try to explain it all to the lady, that everyone told me that my body was too big, so I changed it, then everyone told me I was sick, and now I don’t know how to have a body, and I’m sorry for all of it. The weight is suddenly not just part of me, it’s on me. My shoulders, desperate to signal my anxiety, fight against the heaviness to reach up to my ears. I labor for breath around the immense pressure building in my chest. My bones feel like icicles, sure to crack under the weight. My skin flushes red with shame. I run through all of the meals that I’ve had today, yesterday, last weekend, and I grow increasingly appalled with myself. Any part of my mind that might be able to rationalize that this weight, this number isn’t new to my body, just to my brain, has buried itself deep into the crevices of my mind. All I hear are piercing accusations of my suddenly indefensible existence.

The numbers become transfused into my line of vision. They're on the sweet girl's forehead as she swabs my inner elbow with disinfectant. They’re repeated over and over on the little screen that’s going to tell me how much longer I have to sit with a needle in each arm. They’re in every icon as I search up, down, left, and right on Netflix for something to watch for the next two hours. I care less now about finding something to distract from the way my blood freezes my body as it floods back in without its platelets and more about finding something to erase the numbers from my memory.

But I’ll never forget those numbers. I remember every weight I’ve seen on the scale since I was eighteen. I remember when I reached the goal that I’d written in my diary since middle school. I remember when I reached less and less and less than that. I remember when I asked an old therapist if I should start to get comfortable with weighing myself, and she said maybe, so I asked my doctor to share my weight and left the office sure that I’d have to go home and throw all of my clothes away.

If this sounds dramatic, it’s because it feels dramatic. It’s incredibly dramatic to believe that my life depends on the weight of my body. It also isn’t all that remarkable. In a society that believes women’s bodies are commodities to be sold, legislated over, touched and groped and ogled at will, it is not remarkable that I obsess about the number on the scale. In a time when televisions are littered with ads for weight loss injections and doctors are tasked with diagnosing children with the “disease” of “obesity” and prescribing surgeries, it is not remarkable that I or any other human alive might feel immense pressure to assert control over her body. It feels dangerous to live any other way.

The numbers mean nothing. Not really. I know that. Part of me knows that. I also lived most of my life believing that the only way for me to survive and be safe in this world was if I maintained a specifically low weight. For most of my life, that number meant everything. I managed the doubt and hatred and inadequacy I felt for myself by managing my weight. I subdued heartbreak and maintained a sense of purpose by working hard to keep a thin body. It hasn’t been just a set of numbers to me, it’s been the symbol of my success as a woman. More recently, it’s been a symbol of my devastating failure.

When I went into therapy two days after the incident, I was surprised to find that my therapist was so calm. She wasn’t dramatic. She sat plainly, listening, nodding, just as she did every other day. I waited for her to scold the Red Cross associate or ask me to reflect on what the weight really represented to me or to unpack the anger I felt toward society and toward myself for caring about the weight, but she didn’t. She spoke directly to my eating disorder, and she thanked her for raising her concerns about my weight. She gently told her we didn’t need her services this time, that we were trying something new. She invited me to do the same toward myself. I cried and cried and cried.

To validate the burden of my weight is revolutionary to me. Acknowledging that the fear of a number isn’t stupid or irrational or dramatic but simply all I’ve ever known feels like the deepest breath. I’ve treated my eating disorder as a disease for so long, like a rotten root hidden in me, and I’ve searched and searched for its tentacles trying to poison it from within. My focus has always been to analyze and understand it so well that I could get rid of it forever. I’ve been angry for so long for feeling out of control of the thoughts in my brain and for having something in me that is toxically obsessed with giving into bullshit societal standards. I have often felt like giving up entirely. In an instant, my therapist invited me to see that my eating disorder was just doing her best, too. At a different time in my life, I did feel unsafe in my body. My eating disorder was just trying to help. To release the anger and the judgment of myself for being so dramatic about my weight and the quest for the ultimate cause and an ultimate solution feels wildly counterintuitive. It also feels like the pressure valve has been released in my chest. My shoulders aren’t reaching for anything.

Despite the revelation I’d had, I left my therapist’s office and a lot of that heaviness came right back. I skipped some meals, tried to hide the vegetables that replaced my rice when I made rice and beans for Christian and I, and doubled up on my exercise for a few days. When I came back the following week and confessed, my therapist was just as graceful. I was ready for the intervention, for the meal plan, for worried eyes, for drama. She nodded, she listened, and then she thanked my eating disorder for trying to help, but politely asked if we could make some space for other parts of me to speak up. She asked me to do the same. It made me feel uncomfortable and weird to talk to myself. And then it made me feel, again, like I could breathe.

Christian asked me when I came home from the Red Cross appointment bawling how I had dealt with finding out my weight in the past. I told him I restricted. I dove back into the warm, comfortable waters. With a slightly new perspective that is a little less critical, a little less dramatic, I feel uniquely capable of peeking down into the water, dipping in a few toes, and then stepping back to see what else is out here. It feels uncomfortable. Not just talking to myself sometimes, but to not jump back in. It feels like I’ve been in warm, comfortable water for years and now I’m standing at the edge, in the frigid air, without a towel. Sometimes it feels like physical pain. Sometimes it feels like a fresh breeze.

I still see my weight today, but the view is a little foggier. The numbers are there. I’m reminded when I look in the mirror or add olive oil to my dutch oven or pick out my outfit for the day that my weight is more than part of me has ever felt comfortable with. But there’s a new sensation that attempts to look away, a new version of me that’s opening herself up to the world. And she feels so much empathy for the discomfort. I can feel my body relaxing into something it’s never felt before—ease. Sometimes that ease feels like torture. Sometimes it feels like the flutter of anticipation waiting in line for cinnamon sugar donuts from Mindy’s. Sometimes it feels like I need to just let my eating disorder have the mic for a minute and let me know she’s fucking pissed and worried about me. Sometimes it’s trusting my gut and forgoing the salads I had planned for dinner in lieu of a frozen pizza because I’m on a real roll with writing. It’s eating every last bite of the crispy cheese that burnt on the crust and…that’s it. It feels a little dramatic. But it’s also so devastatingly ordinary.