Empty

by Susan Burton

For a long time it was easier for me to admit to the anorexia than to the bingeing, which tells you something about both me and the hierarchy of eating disorders.

The stigma of binge-eating disorder starts with its inelegant name. “Anorexia” and “bulimia” are both derived from ancient Greek: loss of appetite; ox-like hunger. “Binge-eating disorder” is copy in a magazine ad showing a sad, kneeling woman surrounded by food wrappers.

I set out to write a book that would intertwine the story of my adolescence with a cultural history of teenage girlhood. But when I wrote the first draft, my eating disorders took over the narrative. They’d once taken over my life and now they were taking over the story I was trying to tell about my life.

When, on the eve of my forty-first birthday, I made the resolution I’d made on every birthday since I was seventeen—to “fix my eating”—I was suddenly startled by the incantation. I was a grown woman still thinking her teenage thoughts. “Fix my eating” didn’t mean “get help” or “recover.” To me it meant “eat perfectly.”

Maybe this is what happens with shame—the buried thing insists that it is the most important. The writer Sarah Manguso captures this feeling in her book 300 Arguments: “You might as well start by confessing your deepest shame. Anything else would just be exposition.” That’s what I felt when I wasn’t writing about the eating disorders—lots of blah blah, lots of backstory, lots of exposition.

And even though technically I could still make it to French, now I know for sure I won’t go, because instead I am going to solve everything. I am going to stay in the library and write in my journal and fix this, once and for all, examine the origins of this issue and make resolutions for however long it takes.

“I just couldn’t deal,” and he whispers, “We didn’t take the quiz,” and then I am overjoyed, not only because I don’t have a zero but because clearly I was meant to use this time to fix everything.

This is all part of the pattern. After each episode I scrawl, berating myself, but after a couple of pages the nutty stream gives way. I distance myself from the experience. I begin to think rationally. I calm and resolve to begin again. I write determinedly positive sentences. But today when I get to the rational-thinking stage, I can’t look brightly ahead. Because—I mean, come on. The reality is that I have spent two whole years making resolutions to quit (“quit,” that is the word I always use) and I am still doing this. And meanwhile I am wasting time, so much time.

TWO WHOLE YEARS. I’M not poking fun at my young self with her distorted sense of time. Two years (and it would be still more) is a significant amount of one’s adolescence, and it saddens me to see this number, not least because here I am, almost thirty years on, still examining the origins of this issue, still trying to fix my eating.

“You’re too thin.” Her assessment gratified me, even though she was wrong: I was more myself with less.

Even as an adult, I am sometimes annoyed at those who emerged from calm homes and find myself clinging to an old attitude: I know things you don’t, that you will never know; this is my thing you will never have.

But what confers power also creates distance: You wouldn’t understand.

Rather than a fantasy about an encounter I would have, it was a fantasy of a different me.

It was not the story the ads were trying to tell. It was the wish I had pressed on them.

The things that meant the most to me were always the things I held tightest but also the things I longed to share. If I did share something meaningful, I would minimize it so that the other person wouldn’t grasp its importance, and then I’d feel a sense of self-betrayal, as well as regret that I’d ruined my chance for connection.

But if your body mattered to you more than your brain told you it should—why deny that? Why not acknowledge that feeling and try to understand why you felt it?

I wondered what that would be like, to move through the world without holding anything in.

I wanted to be me again. I was sure I’d been her that fall I was fifteen. For a long time I remembered this girl as my best version. And even though eventually I recognized this as irrational, and disturbing—partly because some of what I liked about that girl was what she had weighed—it didn’t change the way I felt about being that girl. I remembered it as feeling pretty ideal.

whom seemed to be flourishing while I floundered. I used my high school stories to prove to my roommates, and to myself, that I had once been someone better, someone

else.

The story made me seem lacking in judgment but desired, and reckless, and cool.

I left out anything I considered shameful. I left out the binge eating.

I’m already ruined, so now fuck it: This logic would define the years that followed, and I employed it from that very first night. To feel wrecked, you didn’t need accumulated badness. One mess-up was all it took.

Real feelings, even horrible ones, raised me up above my dull mess. I ate not when I felt things intensely but when I didn’t. I ate when I felt nothing.

By the time she told me this, I was familiar with the particular desperation of being a woman alone at night in a kitchen.

Eating always needed to be figured out first, always had to be fixed before anything else could begin. It was always the thing that got in the way.

While nineteenth-century girls used their diaries to write about their goals for character improvement, girls at the end of the twentieth century wrote almost solely about the ways they wanted to improve their bodies. The shift in focus from “good works” to “good looks” was remarkable, and the new focus on the body “all-consuming.”

The life in which I have often been distant or short with the people who loved me; in which I have often been distracted; in which my quality of attention has been diminished because of something I have not fixed.

In my thirties I read a cultural history of anorexia. It was a serious book by an eminent historian. In the first chapter, she mentioned bulimia and bulimia memoirs, and of them she wrote, “These are among the most disturbing and unhappy documents generated by women in our time.” This comment roused something in me. The historian seemed to be falling into a trap she would describe throughout the book: valorizing anorexia simply by deeming it worthy of her study yet distancing herself from bulimia. In that word, “disturbing,” I detected the same distaste that characterized my peers’ mocking comments about the doors in Commons. What disturbed the historian? The graphic descriptions of purging or the orgiastic recollections of the binge? Or was it just disturbing to think that a woman’s life could be reduced to this? If that was it, my feeling toward the historian softened. It was disturbing that a person’s life could be reduced to this. I knew from experience.

Eating disorders can rewire your brain. I bookmark articles about reward systems and “altered activity” in “corticostriatal processes,” and I take note of people who seem not to have performed a master reset. But I am also attuned to stories of those who have. And this is a significant difference between who I am now and who I was back then. Now I am also drawn to the second half of the book, the part where the narrator gets over it. Now I am hungry for the end.

Writing was all mind, no body.

Meanwhile, it was not even ten-thirty A.M. and here I was, still undecided about changing colleges, still with so many hours of the day to get through, hours in which I would be exhausted and useless. I am scared that I will go crazy.

MY LIFE NO LONGER had structure. I wrecked days with my eating, made them unusable before they even started. I was stuck. My mind corkscrewed. I couldn’t tell what I felt, except for terror at how immobile I was, how trapped.

But the thing was, there was something wrong with my brain, too. Just a different kind of damage. Not the kind where your brain knocks against your head, a mark on the plaster. Mine was different, an electrical fire that starts inside the wall after years of overload and fraying.

LOOKING BACK NOW, I sometimes think of what I missed out on, or did not do or experience, during freshman year. But at the time I did not think of it as “missing.” What I thought about was “waste.” I was wasting time; I was wasting a Yale education. I was wasting money. I was wasting hours, days, years. I was wasting youth, health. I was wasting food by consuming more calories than I needed to function and wasting my body’s own energy on digestion. Waste was not honorable! It was my moral obligation to move beyond this.

There’s also an aesthetic resistance. There is nothing romantic about uncontrolled eating. Other addictions have literary traditions; this one is not known for producing great art. Other addictions whittle; this one makes you thick and plodding. Other addictions are demons, and to overcome them is to triumph; this one is completely pedestrian. Other addictions are not primarily associated with women. Other addictions make you act in a way that is shocking or comic. Nobody ever starts a story with, “I ate a whole cake and you won’t believe the crazy shit I did next.” Do other addictions make better stories?

Their conclusions are clearer: Goodbye forever, alcohol, I will never drink you again. In an eating-disorder story, the protagonist still has to eat. It’s a less satisfying end—though also a more interesting one, precisely because of this challenge. There is no clean break. You relinquish the addiction but not the substance. You have to learn to live with it. Maybe you even learn to take pleasure in what you once believed could destroy you.

I’ve always been drawn to stories of addiction. They compel me, haunt me, pull me in, make me look away. But while they are stories I find myself inside, I also feel they are not entirely mine, and I am uneasy claiming them. I feel as if I exist just outside these stories that seem to explain me. Which ...

Except there was an added element of wanting to talk back to the authors, to amplify or dispute some of their conclusions. Or to let them know when they’d really captured something.

These clinical papers would mention unintentionally funny things like “The Avoidance of Existential Confrontation Scale” on which those who binge-eat “score unusually high.”

It described binge eating in a way that just nailed it, as a “short-term escape from an aversive awareness of self.”

“narrowing [their] attention to the immediate stimulus environment and avoiding broadly meaningful thought.”

But even these insightful researchers seemed flummoxed: “In short, binge eating is a paradoxical, self-defeating pattern of behavior.” —

Under the covers I did not make resolutions or chastise myself for the waste of my life. I only hoped that in the morning I would wake still whole.

YOUR STOMACH REALLY CAN explode. Or it can get so big that it can cut off your circulation or suffocate your intestines. The patients who die from this, or nearly die, live in Hungary, Massachusetts, Japan. They are bulimic or anorexic. They are discovered alone in their apartments, or brought to the ER by their parents, or revealed to be hiding the truth from the doctors only when they go into septic shock.

The medical papers that describe these circumstances use dispassionate language, but—and it could just be what I’m bringing to it—I feel like these case reports are tonally off. Like the doctors are all, “Holy shit! Guys, we have to write about this one.” Other illnesses are no-fault; not this. This is the annals of freak show. This is directing you to figure 1, where you will see a stomach so big it has ballooned to fill an entire torso.

Could I have imagined such a stomach on the morning just two and half years earlier, when my mother and I had stood across from each other in our towels? I’m so thin that my stomach actually goes in. She’s not fat, but she has a little pot belly. My God, my mother’s stomach was nothing, a pincushion. My stomach was the distended belly of something that washes up on the shore, dead.

I started to write again but then stopped, because—what was this strange thought? I felt, for the first time, that I would miss this. This day—oh, I was so sure it would be the last, this day of soft snow and good sentences. The wistful feeling left then and gave way to something sharper, more like fear. What would I do without this? It was the first moment I realized I was getting something from this. That I liked something about this.

I liked the possibility inherent in the act. I liked getting as low as you could and then every day the moment of begin-again. I liked the calm that followed an episode. Something quieted, the need met. Ah, yes, here I am in the place where I make resolutions and start afresh.

But just as much as the loss of calm, I feared the loss of ferocity. I really didn’t want to let go of this thing tha...