Corrections in Ink: A Memoir

by Keri Blakinger

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. Bulimia is by nature a solitary task—which made it well-suited for a pre-teen with strict parents and few friends. At the same time I dabbled in starvation, skipping meals here and there. But I still ate an array of foods that would become unthinkable in later years: cheese-topped pasta, sugary baked oatmeal, an occasional coconut donut after Saturday morning skating practice. Anorexia would have required a sustained commitment to self-harm that I didn’t have, at least not yet. So I settled on sporadic forays into disordered eating, throwing up on occasion when I’d eaten too much—but otherwise not entirely obsessing. I thought about numbers, but I had not yet begun jotting the calories of everything I ate in the margins of my notebooks, not yet begun sneaking into my parents’ room to use their scale multiple times per day. It was not, at that point, an addiction, and every time I threw up it felt like a choice, a flirtation with darkness or a little-used escape valve I could open just to prove that it existed. It was a secret that was all mine, some insider knowledge that no one else knew. I don’t know the exact day that things changed, when those occasional glimpses at self-destruction became a pit bull I could not control, or when my es...