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December 21 - December 31, 2024
work could be a culturally approved-of beard for my dismal personal life.
I wished passively for death, but I didn’t stockpile pills or join the Hemlock Society’s mailing list. I didn’t research how to get a gun or fashion a noose out of my belts. I didn’t have a plan, a method, or a date. But I felt an unease, constant as a toothache. It didn’t feel normal, passively wishing that death would snatch me up. Something about the way I was living made me want to stop living.
To open up, I needed a therapist who could hear the echoes of pain in my silences and see the shirttail of truth under my denials.
Not until I got into recovery did I understand that my bulimia was a way to control the unending swells of anxiety, loneliness, anger, and grief that I had no idea how to release.
“What’s the story in your head about how you became you?” Dr. Rosen asked. “Every family has a fuckup.”
therapy, like writing, relied on detail and specificity.
“The starving person isn’t hungry until she takes her first bite,”
“It’s a metaphor. When you let the group in—take that first bite—only then will you feel how alone you’ve been.”
“If you’re serious about getting into intimate relationships—becoming a real person, as you said—you need to feel every feeling you’ve been stifling since you were a kid. The loneliness, the anxiety, the anger, the terror.”
I didn’t know where those buried parts of me went or why I couldn’t hold on to them.
I released a secret, not caring who in my family might abandon me, because I finally understood that keeping the secret was an act of abandoning myself.
“Feelings have two syllables or less: ashamed, angry, lonely, hurt, sad, afraid—” Dr. Rosen explained feelings like Fred Rogers talking to a preschooler. Apparently, once you veer beyond two syllables, you are intellectualizing, effectively darting away from the simple truth of your feelings.
“How are we supposed to feel safe?” “What makes you think confidentiality makes you safe?”
keeping secrets for other people is more toxic than other people knowing your business. Holding on to secrets is a way to hold shame that doesn’t belong to you.”
The familiar prayer was meant to help addicts get in touch with a power greater than themselves without invoking any particular religious tradition: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
I believed that slim, lithe girls like my sister and the Jennifers and Melissas in ballet class were happier because of their smaller bodies. They were certainly better loved.
White sugar was the devil’s poison to many people in recovery—it
How in the world could I call myself “in recovery” around food when I did this to myself every night? How would anyone love someone who ate like me? I’d been doing this for years. How would it ever stop?
“You don’t need a cure. You need a witness.”
I wept for how lonely I felt and how deeply afraid I was that my life would never truly change or, worse, that true change would ask more of me than I could give. And had the session not ended at nine, I’m certain I could have cried my way to the lunch hour.
If there was a name for me and my condition, that meant I wasn’t the only one.
Stopping a negative behavior is radically different than getting support for starting a pleasurable one. You are more resistant to pleasure.
Was I going to drown in despair or was I willing to ask for what I needed?
“When was the last time you told someone that you weren’t ready for what they were asking you to do?”
I did it because I wanted to be a good girlfriend and good girlfriends say yes.
clench. I wanted to be a good friend. Good friends say yes.
though. I wanted to be a good employee, and good employees say yes.
“If you can’t say no in relationships, then you can’t be intimate,” Dr. Rosen said. “Say that again.” I held still so that each word would seep inside me, past my skin and muscle, and settle in my bones. “If you can’t say no, there can be no intimacy.” People said no to me all the time, and I still loved them.
It thrilled me, made me want to bawl, and it scared me to death.
Beneath my parents’ request thrummed a subtext: Don’t think about it, or you’ll get upset. Don’t get upset, or you’ll fall behind on the important work of being a normal teenage girl. Don’t talk about it, or you’ll upset yourself. Don’t talk about it, or you’ll upset me. I wanted to be a dutiful daughter, so I buried it the best I could.
I’d long ago accepted that I’d carry Hawaii—those screams and the terrified clenching of every muscle when I thought of the ocean—for the rest of my life. It was the price of having survived. What would it look like to heal?
As I headed into my second year of group, my relationship with Carlos was one of the brightest features of my steadily brightening life.
“If you aren’t willing to fight, how can you can be intimate?”
When it came to anger, I swallowed, pretended, ignored, withdrew. I knew nothing about fighting.
Celebrate anger? That was rarer than fighting. I have no memory of yelling at my parents for any reason. Not even as a teenager. We weren’t yellers. We were silent treatment people; we did huffy sighs and quiet seething. When my parents forbade me from attending Troy Tabucci’s New Year’s party sophomore year because they suspected there would be underaged drinking, I holed up in my room, making mixtapes of sad songs. When they told me that I had to go to college in Texas, I threw away the dog-eared Dartmouth brochure I’d been poring over for weeks. I used fake smiles, “I’m fines,” and gigantic
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Dr. Rosen’s eyes grew huge. “It’s beautiful!” “It’s gross—” “Says who?” “The self-pity, for one thing—” “I disagree—it’s honest, authentic, and real. It’s yours. And you shared it with me. Thank you.” He rubbed his palm over his heart. “Welcome to your anger, Mamaleh. This is going to help you.”
Resistance—to change, to pleasure, to a shorter commute—was what held us back from what we really wanted.
Like a dream where you’re in your house, but it’s not really your house because the door is the wrong color and there are two stories instead of one. At the level of energy and particles, something was totally off.
I didn’t expect him to coddle me, but I also didn’t expect him to sit on his throne and laugh at me.
I’d turned out perfectionistic, frigid, and borderline asexual, but how could he think I belonged here?
That kind of studied avoidance could only mean one thing: she was angry at me.
one part of intimacy is learning to express anger.
another part of intimacy is learning to tolerate other people’s anger.
If you can learn to tolerate that fear and let go of trying to fix her anger, you will be ready for an intimate relationship.”
“I can be mad at you and still love you, you know.”
What I wanted was a chance to be close to someone. It didn’t have to be sex, not tonight.
the sexual progress of the relationship outpaced his emotional readiness.
Why hadn’t I picked a female therapist? I didn’t believe that my male therapist could fathom my relationship to my breasts. Sure he was in recovery for an eating disorder, but he’d never been shopping with his grandmother in Waxahachie, Texas, and overheard the saleslady say that his breasts made him look much “fuller” than he was. He’d never had a ballet teacher advise him to go on an egg diet—three eggs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and nothing else—when his breast buds appeared. He’d never walked by Hooters in downtown Houston and endured drunk men leering at his chest. Even if he had
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He’d spent the day playing video games. I pushed down the bubble of contempt that my boyfriend, a grown-ass man within spitting distance of his fortieth birthday, spent his day trying to win the Amulet of Yendor. I’d run four miles, gone to a 12-step meeting, and studied for a criminal procedure exam for four hours.
All I’d ever done with anger was swallow it or throw it up. Now it was pouring out, messy and loud.
