Corrections in Ink: A Memoir

by Keri Blakinger

I am over-organized as ever, even on the brink of disaster.

I am tightly wound, a taut rubber band of perfectionism and self-destruction. And I am about to make things worse.

Before that, I dabbled with cutting, but instead settled on starving myself. I was obsessive and anxious. Overachieving and talkative. Driven, but not stable.

They say that eating disorders are about control, but it is not that straightforward. They are also about self-destruction that feels just like success. I wanted to waste away, slowly and tragically—and in the meantime, I wanted to win.

I didn’t dive in all at once; it started as an occasional thing, like a social smoker who only lights up at the bar. Except there was nothing social and no warm fuzzy feeling after, just a fleeting dizziness and an empty sense of victory.

Normies who have never been down this road may assume that people with eating disorders simply are not hungry, or that they forget to eat. That is extremely, utterly fucking false. The less I ate, the more I thought about it.

At the time, I believed him without question. It was as if the charm he glowed with in real life oozed off the paper and into my heart.

I pulled a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Peanut Butter Cup ice cream out of the freezer and started eating it with a spoon, straight out of the container. It felt strange, like I had just accidentally turned off gravity.

And while I was not still actively trying to kill myself, I was not exactly trying to live, either. I was just drifting, like debris floating down a gorge stream.

When I think back on those times now, it feels as if I am wading into a black lake,

I finished speaking and closed my eyes, as if willful blindness would shield me from his response.

Even through the scratchy jailhouse connection, I could hear the heroin in his voice, that deep narcotic droop edging around his words.

I am a lifelong neurotic list-maker. After I got arrested, I kept a daily to-do list in a homemade planner, documenting everything I needed to get done even when it seemed there was nothing worth doing. Run in circles. Read one hundred pages. Call my lawyer. Write that teacher from fifteen years ago. I ticked them all off, again and again.

“I think if you can somehow figure out how to become a happier person, every day—not just the days in prison—passes more quickly. That’s the only trick. It’s like some of the tools you need to survive time in here are the tools you needed to survive life out there. And if you had them, you probably wouldn’t be here in the first place. But now that you’re here, it’s just harder to find them.”

On the inside, it had been easier to ignore that the world had moved on. I’d been a fuck-up in the company of fellow fuck-ups—and together we could almost forget how much we’d derailed our own lives. But now that I was in the real world, I was surrounded by people who were not fuck-ups, people who spent their days doing more substantial things than simply letting time pass. They held down jobs, got degrees, bought houses, wrote books, lived their lives.

Even as a kid, academic achievement seemed almost tantamount to moral value.

When I first picked up heroin over a decade earlier, there had been a hole in my life, the spot where skating had been. But now, I had found ways to fill it. There was no room for heroin anymore.