The Road to Recovery
Written by Gretchen Lenth
Visual by Gillian Lenth
CONTENT WARNING: This piece contains discussions of eating disorders
It was never about food. Not really.
I didn’t learn this lesson about my eating disorder until I was two months deep into quarantine. And eight years past my recovery.
Contrary to what some believe, Anorexia Nervosa is one of many invisible illnesses. Unless it begins to chew away at your waistline. Then your classmates stare with eyes that don’t withhold judgment. Then the little old church ladies bake you pies that grow mold on the kitchen counter. Then the psych ward nurses scare you with statistics, indirectly asking how your heart could still be beating.
I learned the word “emaciated” when I was eleven years old after an older girl made it my name. I’ll never forget the pity in her eyes or her cautious grip on my wrists like she was handling a bundle of twigs.
An older man wearing a Bud-Light dad cap teases my arms as I flip his Blizzard at the Dairy Queen drive-through. I am nineteen years old.
“You ever planning on growing some muscle, missy?”
“I’m stronger than I look,” I respond. It becomes a catchphrase of mine, even if they always call my bluff.
We laugh together and he drives off, but he leaves behind a branch snapped in half. I replay this exchange for weeks. My self-worth is slow to mend whenever a stranger replaces my private vision of my body with a description of their own.
But it was never about my weight. Not in the way people believe.
I hardly recall how I looked back then. Eating disorder awareness campaigns could do better than to promote illustrations of a stick-thin girl staring at a figure five times her size in her glass reflection. It’s become an oversimplified shorthand for a mental illness much more diverse than one girl and her mirror (or even I) can express. Not to mention it erases all aspects of an eating disorder others can’t see. Which erases it down to almost nothing at all.
My mother always speaks of my eating disorder (when seldom she does) in terms of a single photograph. Taken the day my mother drove me to the hospital, this photo shows me at my “worst” from the outside looking in. A faintly smiling ghoul staring at anything but the camera lens, her bones drowned by denim jeans and fur-lined boots.
It’d be crazy to believe appearances were important to me. But I’d be lying if I said the numbers never occupied my mind.
I used to weigh myself with the shoddy scale in the bathroom downstairs no one used. I’d check when my body felt most empty, which soon became all the time.
I learned about water weight through a blog post I shouldn’t have had access to at ten years old. It taught me to only drink water with bowls of cereal.
Now I turn my back and scrunch my eyes on the scale at the doctor’s office. There’s a note on my record that says not to read my weight out loud. I’ll always remember the young nurse who forgot.
I may have cut weight out of my numbers addiction, but there are other measurements to live my life by.
The numbers on the clock. The number of sit-ups and squats. The number of meals in a day.
On-campus dining in the era of COVID provides me a dangerous but familiar power.
Instead of serving themselves in the dining halls whenever they want, students schedule a reservation ahead of time.
For me, this developed into a form of food-driven chastity. I schedule mealtimes hours in advance and hold my stomach ransom until my homework is done.
(I’m writing this and I’m telling myself to finish writing before I can pick up lunch.)
As harmful as these decisions are on my body, they have little to do with what I eat and even less to do with the weight on the scale I can’t even see.
This whole time, my eating disorder was less about eating and more about order.
As a senior in high school, I spoke about anorexia in the past tense. An embarrassing tweenage rite of passage no different than liking Harry Potter or Twilight a little too much.
Sometimes I liked to pretend that little girl wasn’t me at all.
She had sunken eyes and sandpaper skin and spent months restricted to a wheelchair shaped and padded like a grandfather’s recliner.
As a senior in high school, I often felt happy and sometimes felt beautiful. How could we be the same?
Yet I know we are the same because her face and fur-lined boots jump scared me in the slideshow my father prepared as a surprise for my senior graduation party.
I thought I recovered because I couldn’t relate to my eleven-year-old self. I had friends, a car, a job, and hobbies that left me fulfilled.
And then the pandemic hit. I spent half a year taking college classes in the same bedroom I passed out in twice. Once after standing up too quickly, the other after exercising too long.
My childhood bedroom, with its neon green walls and its dingy orange carpet, was also where I hid from the fourth grade for two months. I called in sick each day due to “stomach pains.”
The truancy officer knocked on the door just down the hall.
To reclaim this space, I painted the walls grey and lined the floor with rugs. But I still spent each afternoon alone, talking with people who only knew what I looked like from the shoulders up.
I didn’t drive anywhere because there was nowhere to drive to. I didn’t go to work or see friends because it wasn’t safe. Remaining active became a struggle, and hobbies developed into chores.
Most of these things are still true almost twelve months later. Even now, I can’t control who decides to wear a mask when they go out in public. I can’t control who gets sick around me and I can’t control my self-isolation.
Physically, I don’t look much different today than I did as a senior in high school. I’ve probably gained weight since then, though I’ll never know for certain.
In terms of the control I have over my life, I share striking similarities with the ten-year-old who felt inexplicably disconnected from her classmates and unseen by her family.
But no matter who I was to others, my body remained my own. I’ve always taken comfort in the fact that no one can change it except for me.
An affirmation like this can go one of two ways. Unfortunately, breaking my bones is easier than keeping them preserved.
Emptiness still feels liberating to this day. At least, it does until I stand up too fast.
Sometime last May, I caught myself playing with my hands while watching a pre-recorded lecture on my laptop. I looped my thumb and pinky around the smallest point of my wrist to measure its circumference. I frowned—it felt thicker than before. Then I wondered why I frowned.
This horrified me. But it helped me notice more.
It opened my eyes to the numbers I counted out while eating potato chips. It made me wonder why I couldn’t wear pants without a belt wrapped snuggly against the waist.
It made me wary of the app on my phone that tracks how many steps I take each day.
It helped me understand why my mood plummets whenever friends tell me they aren’t hungry when I am.
Once I picked up on these habits, I wondered whether they ever disappeared to begin with. Maybe they were just waiting for their chance to feign usefulness again. Lying dormant until brand new tragedies required the same old coping mechanisms.
But I like to think I’m wiser this time.
A nurse once told me that having an eating disorder is a lot like being an alcoholic: you never recover.
I’ve almost made it a decade since hearing those words, and I’ve resented them until only recently.
To prove this woman wrong, I stopped going to therapy two years after being discharged from the psych ward. I dropped my medication cold turkey one year later.
By hiding all aspects of mental illness that show on the surface, I could trick myself and others into ignoring the rest. That way, I’d never see another pair of eyes full of pity but empty of understanding. I wouldn’t be handled like broken glass. No one would ever thank God I’m still with them ever again.
If I ignored my mental illness, I was as good as cured. And yet I still feel the blood rush to my head when I run too long on empty. The taste in the back of my throat tastes just as it did the first time my mental illness knocked me unconscious.
Several months after re-acknowledging my eating disorder, I wonder where I would be if I hadn’t made it to this point. If I’d always believed the narrative that eating disorders stem from vanity and a desire to starve yourself out of existence.
When I was eleven years old, I nearly died because those around me couldn’t see my mental illness for what it is.
My eating disorder stems from a lack of control. It was never about food. These are the first two acknowledgments on my road to recovery, even if I never quite make it there.