This Is How (6 page)

“The media” is generally blamed for if not outright causing anorexia, then certainly being a contributing factor. And it may well be, but only for those with the genetic switch.

If the media images vanished overnight, there would still be people with anorexia; it’s been reported in the medical literature since the nineteenth century. It’s most likely always existed.

Obviously, superskinny anorexic models are not the only thing that can switch on the gene.

I don’t think the media images matter at all, to anybody.

If they vanished tomorrow, tomorrow night something else would act as the trigger.

While you pursue your recovery and assume control of treatment, I suggest you pay attention if something inside you tells you,
this is fucked.

I spoke to an anorexic teenager girl who is also brilliant and extremely articulate. I was suspicious about one specific treatment, common to most programs: keeping a food diary. That is, writing a detailed record of every food ingested during the day, noting the calories, tabulating the figure.

My instinct told me this was very bad medicine.

This disease magnifies the significance of each calorie. A calorie diary would serve only to show the girl how much she had already consumed. How could she be anything but mortified by the figure—even if a normal eater were to look at her list and be appalled by its sparsity?

I know if I were an anorexic girl and wrote down all the crap I ate during the day and then looked at the total, I would feel so fat and depressed that I would want to immediately diet.

A calorie count on paper would seem like tangible evidence that everything was spiraling wildly out of control.

I asked this young woman how it made her feel, having to keep a calorie journal when she was in the hospital. She said, “It made me decide not to eat another thing.”

She decided. At the heart of the illness resides a desire for control.

I tracked back in my own past to a time when I felt that my whole life was totally insane and out of control. I could feel that feeling as fresh as if it were happening all over again. It’s a feeling that almost resides in the bladder: you
have
to take action
now.

Anorexia most commonly affects young women under twenty-five, an age most young people are still under the influence and guiding hand of home or college.

The medical treatment itself, with its highly structured inpatient setting based around mealtimes, therapy appointments, examinations, calorie counting, and supervision, would make a person without control issues feel rather powerless.

But there’s more to it than control. When I asked my anorexic friend what she felt when she looked at the scale and saw that she’d lost weight, she said it made her happy. When I asked why, she told me because she wanted to be smaller.

Her choice of words was fascinating. Not thinner, smaller. Thinner means, not as thick. Smaller means, not as much you.

Anorexia is, of course, a disease where one wastes literally away. One shrinks until one dies.

One vanishes.

Control, but more. Something else.

Or maybe not something else.

Maybe anorexia—with its extreme obsessive focus, its never-altering lockdown on one thing: losing weight—maybe these exist in reply to what is a neurological processing disorder with respect to boundaries, authority, sense of self.

Anorexia seems to act as a powerful magnifying lens. I don’t know in which or how many ways, but perhaps what a nonanorexic experiences as guidance or advice or somebody else’s opinion is warped for the anorexic. Maybe something as simple as, “But first go upstairs and do your homework” is experienced almost physically—as a powerful and oppressive manipulation of behavior.

In the same way that my sensory processing disorder makes the little tag on the neck of a T-shirt feel like the flap from a
cardboard box—and it must be ripped away instantly, even if such sudden, desperate yanking leaves behind a hole.

With this connection made, I suddenly knew exactly what I would do if I had a daughter and she was anorexic and none of the prescribed medical and psychotherapeutic treatments had worked. And she wasn’t already bedridden and very near death. She’d have to still be mobile for this to work.

I would kick her out of the house.

I would give her a credit card and an ATM card attached to a bank account that held the money I’d saved for her college, along with anything else I had planned on giving her.

I would tell her I loved her. Then I would tell her I was finished raising her. That she would have to take over from now on.

I would explain that I was no longer going to be part of her treatment. I was no longer going to be part of her life. She could be a part of mine, if she wanted and if she made all the effort. But she was free to make no effort at all; I had accepted the loss. I no longer wanted anything from her or for her.

I would say these things even if saying them brought me four inches away from death by heartbreak.

But an exaggerated, magnified—even savagely abrupt—removal of anything that could even remotely be distorted into “guidance” might be the very thing needed to save her.

Maybe someday there will be a pill that lowers the volume in that area of the brain. But there’s no such pill now.

The reason we have penicillin today, after all, is because somebody before us was willing to go ahead and eat the blue mold on the bread, to see if it might make the infection go away.

And it did.

H
OW TO
F
EEL
S
ORRY FOR
Y
OURSELF

S
ELF-PITY IS THE BESTIALITY
of emotions: it absolutely disgusts people. When you’re feeling pity for yourself and somebody says to you, “You think maybe it’s time for the pity party to be over? You should stop feeling sorry for yourself and try to think positive,” it makes you wish you could saw their head off. Or, at the very least, it pisses you off. But there are probably only seven or eight people in the world who would defend this emotion. So you nod, “I know, you’re right.”

Self-pity knows it’s hated. It’s one emotion that lives up to its name: it’s something reserved for the self. Self-pity is a feeling you allow when you’re alone. If you allow it when you’re around other people, they fuss at you and never give you the sympathy you want. So self-pity becomes your private, secret feeling.

Self-pity is what compels you to say, “Oh, I can’t this Friday; I have other plans, but thanks for inviting me,” when you have no other plans except for spending the evening alone
reflecting upon the injustices visited upon you.
“That should have been my parking spot, I saw it before that other car. I’m just saying.”

If you ask somebody, “Why does it piss you off when you see somebody feeling sorry for themselves?” I’m not sure you’d get an accurate answer. I don’t think many people have really thought about why self-pity is so offensive.

I’ll tell you why I think it hits a nerve.

Remember when you were six or seven? Or if you can’t remember that far back, maybe you have a child or a niece this age. But I do remember being six and seven, so I can tell you: it was the most maddening thing in the world to be mistaken for five or six years old. If you were six and a half and somebody dared to call you six, you would absolutely correct them: “AND A HALF!”

At that age, you want to distance yourself as much as possible from babyness. Icky little baby days. You are not a baby anymore.

I believe self-pity is an emotion from our earliest days, probably among the first emotions we experienced.

You can see self-pity every day if you live near a playground like I do. Little kids trip or get shoved and they fall over all the time. Usually, they don’t appear to be hurt. They look
surprised
to see that what was just an instant ago beneath their shoes is now pressed up against their nose.

Little kids also know that injuries are an opportunity for extra affection.

So whenever you see a little kid take a spill, they’ll look around to verify a nearby adult presence and then they’ll let it rip.

This Wail of Death causes all the adults in the area to
converge on the kid and one of them scoops the kid up and begins the medicinal kisses.

Self-pity isn’t the most accurate description for this feeling because it describes only half of it:
sad for me, I’m hurt.
What’s missing is the other half:
and you need to do something about it.

This is the infantile half that people find offensive on a primal level. It subconsciously reminds them of when they were six and somebody called them five. In other words, self-pity feels childish to adults. Especially the unspoken but baked-in meaning: and you need to do something about it.

Which is why self-pity is a very dangerous feeling for any adult to harbor.

It’s one thing to recognize your hurt. It’s quite healthy, in fact, to see and appreciate your own emotional injuries. Especially because as adults, there is no tall, shadow-casting grown-up sitting just within earshot, ready to run to our aid the moment something hurts us. We have to be that adult for ourselves.

Where this healthy self-empathy turns into a malignant self-pity is at the arrival of resentment. “Fuck everybody. Nobody gives a shit about me. Fuck them all.”

That is self-pity and it is dangerous because it signals a lack of accountability for one’s mental state and, worse, the outcome of one’s life. Self-pity can last for years. Sometimes, it can last a lifetime.

In preschool, when somebody hurts us, the teacher sees to it that the person who hurt us apologizes.

It is ingrained in us from a very early age that inflicted pain or wrongdoing or unfairness
should
and
will
be corrected.

Note the passive phrasing: “be corrected.” We will not, as children, take control and make sure these amends are delivered in a timely fashion. That is the job of the teacher.

When we learn behavior at a very early age, we forget about ever learning it but the behavior stays with us. Language is a perfect example. Who can remember learning to speak their native tongue? Who can recall their own toilet training?

Yet these learned behaviors have remained with us for our entire lives.

Even if we outgrow them.

In adults, self-pity turns darker and more dangerous as no playground rescue arrives.

The feeling solidifies into victimhood.

Somebody with a victim mentality believes
life
has screwed them over. Somebody with a victim mentality blames everybody else or “them” but takes no responsibility themselves.

This is the quicksand of life. Once you have become a victim, you may very well remain a victim for the rest of your life. Taking no responsibility, no action, and, as a result, seeing no change for the better.

The truth is that nobody is owed an apology for anything. Apologies are lovely when they happen. But they change nothing. They do not reverse actions or correct damage. They are merely nice to hear.

The truth is that life itself is brutally, obscenely unfair. Consider all those other millions of sperm cells that were just as good as the one that resulted in you, and where are they now? Dead, nowhere.

Fairness is not among the laws of the universe. This means, if somebody runs over your foot in a car and they don’t stop, that’s just too bad and it totally sucks and you better bust your ass to get yourself to the hospital right now so they can save the foot.

Avoid self-pity by taking responsibility for everything that
happens to you, even if somebody else is at fault. By taking responsibility, I don’t mean play doormat. I mean, repair yourself. Move forward. Move on. Then, only then, see if you can wrangle some empathy.

Most of us have love in our lives. Most of us love other people and are ourselves loved by others.

But make no mistake: you are alone in the world. You were born alone, even if you were born conjoined. And you die alone, unable to bring a single person with you.

Self-pity means waiting for that man with the glass slipper that perfectly fits your foot to knock on your door. Self-pity is waiting to be bottle-fed your dinner.

The truth
behind
the truth is this: even if you are a victim, you must never be a victim.

Even if you deserve to be one.

Because while you wait for somebody to come along and set things right, life has moved forward without you.

H
OW TO
B
E
C
ONFIDENT