Empty

by Susan Burton

For years, even after my eating was more normalized, I held myself apart. I will not commit to you. Though I am here, my real life is elsewhere.

This was not how a relationship between twentysomethings was supposed to work. I was like a child or an old woman, someone tantrumy or crotchety, someone clinging to systems, someone who pushes everyone away. Before this, sex had been a source of pleasure for us. But now I was indifferent. Sex was not something I needed anymore. Nothing thrilled me.

Eating had been at the center of my existence since I was fifteen. Now I was twenty-four. In a Lois Duncan sci-fi novel I’d read as a young girl, the protagonist fell into a years-long coma and when she returned she had to catch up. I felt like I’d been in a coma, not to the culture but to myself. I’d disrupted the process of becoming.

Years would pass before I realized that the eating disorders hadn’t delayed me; they’d defined me, and they continued to limit me, because I was still too ashamed to talk to anyone about them.

One morning I was telling her the metaphor I had for the eating stuff, which was something from sound editing: The eating stuff was a track that ran in my brain under all the other tracks. Sometimes it would get so loud it would drown out all the other tracks; sometimes I could lower the volume, but I was never able to remove the track from the session. Deleting the track was the wrong idea, J. said; lowering the volume was good, but the main thing was to boost the other tracks. Boost the other tracks. Develop other strengths and ways to cope; raise the signal on all I’d neglected. This had seriously not occurred to me.

But it wasn’t subtraction that I needed; it was addition.

Eating disorders are so profoundly a coping mechanism for failures in human relationships that to get

over one it’s essential to strengthen the capacity to relate to another, which is a lot of what happens in therapy. Underneath my desire to tell was a desire to connect. Maybe the most important thing writing did was get me to start talking.

Empty—for years I still loved it. I found hollowness extremely satisfying. Like a straw, something you could blow through. That was some of the most relief I could get in life, was being empty. That was a way I knew I could be open to sensation, when I was diminished, slim. And when I was: It was a gliding feeling. I could do a bridge; I could do a backbend. I could straddle you. I could leave for the airport and just get on a flight. There was no problem with anything. There was no reason not to get dressed.

And I understood that seeing such a specialist wouldn’t necessarily make it so, but I also worried it would, kind of? The stories we tell about ourselves—whether for forty-five minutes at a stretch or over hundreds of pages—shape our self-inventions.

What I have come to realize is that if an eating disorder is at the core of my identity, it’s because I’ve allowed it to roost there. And that the purpose of therapy isn’t to ratify this identity but to redefine it.

But if you wait until you understand everything, you never say anything at all.

Those sensations I always craved, light, relieved, unburdened: These are associated with the telling of secrets. But I am finding more sustenance in other sensations: transparency, alertness, generosity, and an interest in what else might be possible.

I wanted to finish what I’d started up on 7M. But now that I have finished this book, I see that I have not ended the story so much as claimed it.