How Writing Saved Me From Myself

The loneliness of disordered eating and the paradox of modern womanhood.

The devotion I once had to the gym is now unfathomable. For a long time, the sweaty, cramped space—everything a different shade of gray—was my sanctuary. My sessions were nothing fancy. No personal trainer. I wouldn’t be caught dead in a class. I worshiped only at the altar of the treadmill.

After battling with anorexia in college, running seemed like a more socially acceptable loophole for maintaining control of my weight while not only seeming normal, but “healthy.” Friends would ask about my mileage with an air of praise and I’d say things like, “it’s my escape,” or “it keeps me sane.” And it did, the way drugs keep any addict at ease. My daily runs were a clear, measurable goal to be proud of, while the usefulness of everything else in my life grew blurry.

Until I started writing in my thirties, I would never admit, not even to myself, that I had an eating disorder (ED). The fact that I scheduled my life around running was just “my thing.” Never mind that without it I felt completely worthless, undeserving of social interaction, leaving the house, or even — and especially — food. The validation I got for my “healthy” habits made me believe it was all perfectly normal.

Last week The Cut published an article about a specialized sect of raw veganism called fruitarians—people who only eat fruit—and one woman who died from malnutrition while broadcasting her “health” routines on the internet.

I have a hard time reading about EDs or food trends in general. To hear quasi-celebs gush over a mouth-watering dinner of grilled cabbage or a life-changing breakfast of celery juice makes my spidey-senses pop. I know what it means to fill your plate with spinach and call it a meal. And a part of me I don’t like drifts towards the fantasy of cabbage-only dinners and green-liquid breakfasts. I’m too aware of the tricks my mind can play on itself, and it’s too tiring to spot them, quiet them, then brush away the shame of still being drawn by the pull of self-delusion all these years later.

From The Cut’s article about one woman’s tragic pursuit of raw veganism.

I was curious, though, about the fruitarian. Something about it seemed so tragic, so extreme. But also so simple, so dangerously appealing. Reading about this woman who ate only fruit, who believed in cleaning out her body, I felt the rush of my restrictions cheering underneath my years of recovery like little pesky Minions. The relief of full control. The fortress of intricate rules. The proof of progress each day, as you feel your body grow weaker yes, but smaller, too, a steady servant to the heft of your willpower. The weakness itself almost its own reward, an excuse to sit when you can barely stand. Proof of the power you have over something, if only the destruction of your own body.

Reading the piece, I’m horrified to admit that I felt envy. Though it should come as no surprise. Eating disorders are notoriously competitive and though I would call myself a recovered anorexic, it is such a horrific, insidious disease that part of me sometimes feels like a failed one.

From my novel, Nothing Serious: The first thing she did whenever she heard someone had an eating disorder was search for their image. She knew it was inappropriate; pathetic, too. Though her rules had been strict in college, she could barely consider herself a competitor anymore. Now she was a spectator, like a sports commentator who was once a star. But she still needed to see what other women with rules looked like, to compare her own discipline to theirs.

People might think of eating disorders as vain, but they ravage the mind as much if not more than the body. I was not envious of the woman’s body, which I could recognize as painfully sick, heartbreaking to look at, that I very much wanted to help. I was envious of the fortress she’d created. She died in the bed of her Bali hotel room, eating her fruit, unable to do anything else. With a certain squint, it gives the tidy illusion of control, while in reality she had lost control entirely to the disease. It is devastating and tragic, and yet a part of me understood how she could get there.

I can only speak for myself, but overwhelm and despair, however subconsciously, sat at the core of my ED. Control, too, of course, but control as an attempt to quell the other stuff, the realization that life unfurls in ways we don’t expect, that we can’t actually be and do everything and do it the best. That we are sometimes helpless and often limited, and those limitations are playing out all around us. And so you cling, you create a world you can control, in which you can feel powerful, where there are concrete steps to progress on the arbitrary axis you set for yourself—a clear “right” and “wrong”—and where the potential for achievement feels thrillingly infinite. Imagine falling from a cliff, stomach dropping, limbs flailing, and finding a branch to grab onto, then another. That’s what the rules of an ED can feel like. Something to keep you up, to offer the illusion of progress when the ground feels like it’s falling out from under you. Never mind that you’re killing yourself in the process.

Modern womanhood is an exercise in paradoxes. We’re expected to be beautiful but not high-maintenance. Firm but not a bitch. Impressive but not threatening. Very early we’re taught to suppress our needs and our hunger in order to impress and delight, and rewarded for doing so. Woman are raised to be high-achievers, but in a patriarchal society, a woman’s greatest achievement is often the destruction of her most honest self. Eating disorders fall squarely into this dance, and the sheer volume of brain power wasted on indulging an ED is heartbreaking. In a way it’s the ultimate symbol of the female paradox in patriarchy — strength in weakness, power in disappearance.

What’s striking about this fruitarian article and what we are seeing everywhere in culture is the denial of what is right in front of us. Women are continuing to decimate their natural selves in new ways as technology improves and we, as a society, are continuing to encourage them. Praising them for their own destruction and more so than ever now that we can all broadcast curated version of ourselves over the internet. Between this and the comparative tendencies inherent in the disease it’s terrifying to consider what’s happening with young women behind their screens.

Because it can feel good—the illusion of doing something “right,” following rules that society openly rewards, in the sea of life that can so often feel overwhelmingly wrong. Routines are concrete and measurable amidst so much grey and uncertainty. Until you’ve lost sight of what right means to you, beyond closing your eyes and following those rules. Until you follow the rules right off a cliff.

But it was the very last sentence of The Cut piece that made me start this essay:

“Siira doesn’t blame the fruitarians for Karolina’s death — she had been sick long before she ever arrived in Bali. But she does wonder why Karolina died alone, without the sun-dappled soul fam she had traveled nearly 7,000 miles to find.”

I know nothing about the particulars of fruitarians, but the idea of a “fam” in this context, or any kind of genuine community in the context of disordered eating, feels oxymoronic. When I imagine a group of raw vegans, I imagine everyone clinging to their routines, a togetherness fueling more calculations, stricter rules, fiercer comparisons. Everyone in their own corner, moving through their own elaborate web of ritual. That this woman died completely alone is both tragic and unsurprising.

Eating disorders are a ruthlessly isolating disease. They inherently keep you at arms length from other people. Not because you look ill or have unbearable eating habits (most become experts at hiding these). But because you become two selves: the self you present to the world, and your private, disordered self. And you will do anything to protect the sanctity of that private self.

During the height of my orthorexia, I was eager to be in a serious relationship, going on upwards of four dates a week. But I was always balancing, calculating, a hum buzzing beneath the surface of the self I was presenting. If I ate a burger and fries on a date, care-free and easy, I knew exactly what the next forty-eight hours of eating and exercise would look like in order to make up for it. In this way, my time with others was a constant posturing. My time alone, with my routines, was when I exhaled.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that writing saved me from myself. At thirty-five, I had a medical procedure that prohibited me from running for almost two months. It was the first time since I was a teenager that I could not exercise for an extended period of time. In fact, I did not exercise at all. It was like having a doctor’s note to get out of school. Someone had given me permission to break my rules, and, importantly, it came at a time when I was finally ready to embrace that permission.

Without the mind-bending shame that had haunted me on the rare occasion I didn’t go to the gym, I sat on my couch each night, safe in the knowledge that I had no other option. At first it was hard, miserable, even, but soon it was glorious. Because I had somehow short-circuited the thing in my brain that made me obsess over my routines, I allowed myself to eat things I never would have eaten. I ordered takeout, lots of it. And I wrote—for hours. I had started to explore creative writing a few years earlier, but wasn’t finding the time or drive to do it regularly. Until I stopped running. And wildly—finally—I had the time and energy to take it seriously.

Two months later, when I was allowed to run again, I could not fathom going to the gym. The thought of the treadmill felt like returning to war, my body freezing with dread considering it. I had imagined that if I stopped running—I honestly don’t know what I imagined, my brain couldn’t process beyond it, like I would morph into a blob of uselessness then combust on the spot with an overwhelming sense of self-hatred. But I did not combust. I was very much still there. On the couch. Essays pouring out of me I hadn’t known I was capable of. My body resting in a way I’d forgotten was possible. I wasn’t cured from my eating disorder in a matter of months, not at all, but it allowed me to step into the process of recovery—terrifying at first, until it began to feel like freedom.

Writing, like EDs, also requires extreme solitude. Not everyone can handle this part, but I often wonder if the solitude is the very reason I’m drawn to writing in the first place. After those first few months, my new found commitment to writing gave me an excuse to be alone, immobile on my couch—exactly like that feeling of a doctor’s note. I don’t love that I needed an excuse to rest, but I did, and that excuse became my novel. Except with writing, I was growing closer to myself, attempting to unite the outer and inner versions with steady reflection, not carving myself further into two separate halves. And through the attempt at self-acceptance that came with writing, of slowing down and waking up rather than racing through arbitrary, self-defeating goals, I actually did find my own version of a “fam.”

Though I still need huge swaths of time alone, I’ve since built the kind of community with writing that would have been unfathomable when I was shrouded in ED rituals. The friends I’ve made through writing know all my disturbing layers, there is little room for performance, only the attempt to pinpoint some version of the truth, no matter how absurd and shameful, and wrangle it into words.

From that writing retreat eight years ago at the gorgeous Spruceton Inn.

On one of my very first writing retreats, a small group of women who are now my dear friends went for a nature walk in the idyllic woods we were surrounded by. I declined to join, needing to do my daily run instead, knowing if I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the day, that I would be too self-hating to concentrate on anything else. This was typical back then: declining awesome, enriching activities of all kinds to preserve the sanctity of the disorder. I came back from my run tired, and not happy exactly but at least feeling as if I deserved to be a person in the world after checking the box of my run. My friends came back from their walk elated and closer than ever, sharing stunning photos of the woods, all agreeing it was magical, that I should have come.

“The eating disorder wins again,” I joked to my friend

Chloé Caldwell

, who was leading the retreat and who still jokes about it to this day. I happened to be workshopping an essay about my history with anorexia. There was no hiding from these women and we all laughed at my use of past tense in the piece. I had made progress but not enough.

That was eight years ago. Now, there is no way I would skip a walk with friends to check the box of a run. Now, I would ask myself what I wanted to do more, and the noise would be quiet enough that I could hear the answer without needing the compulsion of my routines to prove my worth. I’m not sure the noise ever fully goes away. And I’m pretty sure it will always be a work in progress. But the eating disorder will not win the end. I won’t let it.

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News!

In a fun, full-circle moment, last week I was accepted into

Spruceton Inn

’s artist residency! As mentioned above, Spruceton Inn was where I took one of my first writing retreats eight years ago, and I’ve been admiring their artist residents ever since. It’s a dream come true to now be one of them. I’ll be using the time to work on my next novel, which I have a full draft of, but needs some flushing out. More on that next novel, and the process of writing and editing it soon! xx