Category Archives: memory

There was a book called The Best Lit­tle Girl in the World that she read when she was a teen—an over­weight one at that, about a girl with anorexia ner­vosa who saw her­self as fat and both starved her­self and was bulimic in order to get her body to the weight that her body dysmorphia-affected brain told her was good enough, best.

The doc­tor who wrote it very much got the teen’s need for con­trol over some­thing, the lack of feel­ing of con­trol over any­thing else—and to the not-so-physically small girl read­ing the book at the time, the idea of being thin­ner appealed, and not just because she was called fat every day and had really only one or two friends. The idea of throw­ing up her food to lose weight had never occurred to her before—but now, she knew it would work, because a doc­tor had writ­ten it down in a book.

Books had always been a source of true con­so­la­tion when she was lonely. They did not judge, crit­i­cize or demand atten­tion she didn’t have the energy or emo­tion to give—they accepted tears or the need for some quiet.

So like the book said, throw up she did, but she didn’t stop there. She also started to exercise—run—eat yogurt instead of cake for her breakfast—insist on chef’s salad for din­ner instead of the highly caloric food her heavy-set mother would cook—but she threw up the heavy food (free, U.S.D.A food tick­ets she had to go accept from the teacher in front of the class) she ate for her lunch right after­ward, and she didn’t keep the chef’s salad down all that long, either. Her mother never sus­pected, because wasn’t it good hygiene to brush your teeth after dinner?

And just like the book said, she began to get thin­ner. She could feel the lad­der of ribs under her fin­gers, see the ends of her clav­i­cles jut up in the mir­ror and the ends of her elbows point sharply when she crossed her arms over her chest, her always-small breasts look­ing like barely inflated bal­loons. When she’d lie in her bed at night, her hip­bones would crest over the trough of her belly, the gap of under­wear elas­tic between hip­bone and flesh let­ting fin­gers slide over pubes­cent skin, a body she had no regard for except to make it get thinner.

Peo­ple noted that she lost weight, but you under­stand, see, she’d always been heavy, and she had these healthy new habits that the adults could observe, and she was a straight-A stu­dent, such a smart, quiet, sen­si­ble girl. Just as she was get­ting a bit scared about the heart­burn she was get­ting from throw­ing her food up all of the time, she went to sleep­away camp and was bit by a tick who left a bullseye-type bite—and got really sick, really could no longer keep her food down, some days couldn’t walk, her knees hurt so badly, and by the time all was over and done, she was 145 pounds, 5’6”, pale and if not totally wraith-like, then look­ing like she’d come out of the end of one of those Gothic romances, more Jane Eyre than Sweet Val­ley High.

She was twelve, and it was the fall of eighth grade. She made another girl friend that year when her first (only) best friend dis­cov­ered boys more seriously—and she and this other friend were both book­ish in the same ways. They were happy to read together, sometimes—and our Jane Eyre was thin­ner than her new friend, which, though not kind, was a source of pri­vate sat­is­fac­tion to her.

In high school, she dis­cov­ered sports and the fact that with run­ning, a high school stu­dent can eat pretty much how­ever she wants, and even a nerdy, book­ish one can man­age to score a cou­ple of dates, includ­ing with boys who didn’t know her when she was fat—because with the loss of baby fat, it turned out she was rather good-looking. (The boys who didn’t know her before and there­fore let her be whomever it was she felt like being right then in the moment, were the ones she liked best. It was her first taste of what it meant to have some sense of self, apart from want­ing to be liked or at least not tor­mented by others.)

She has been pan­icked about being fat ever since, and while she cer­tainly has been fat—as much as 230 pounds at her most—she hasn’t ever thrown up her food since. She has learned that much con­trol, if not over her eat­ing. She blew up, then at the advice of a doc­tor and some other, dif­fer­ent books and a new diag­no­sis or two, lost the weight, gained the weight, lost the weight all over again.

She gained the weight once more, didn’t notice because her mood was beyond her con­trol (some­thing she noticed but didn’t, because, well, the med­ica­tions she was tak­ing and mood she was in pre­vented her from hav­ing that bit of con­trol over her­self, despite her best efforts, and oh, how hard she tried, always tried so very hard because she needs to be the best at every­thing that she does, even if it’s just being the best com­pli­ant crazy lit­tle girl in the world) and then– it was years later and she was blink­ing, crawl­ing out of the Cave and into the sun­light on the other side of the mouth, look­ing at her­self as she won­dered how she’d got­ten so fat.

In the pic­tures of her brother’s wed­ding that summer—the one she could barely bring her­self to attend because if she’d shaken off enough of the Illu­sion to crawl out of the Cave, well, she was still on her knees—she looks just like her over­weight mother. Just like—double chin, sad eyes, wat­tled upper arms, can­kles and all.

The new job—on her feet all day, forty hours a week, melted twenty pounds pretty quickly, much to her sat­is­fac­tion. How nice to feel like she could lug boxes of bags, arm­loads of tills, with­out get­ting winded. To feel capa­ble, strong, in con­trol. It brought a smile to her face, not to men­tion new clothes to her closet.

A new med­ica­tion, though—the old one aban­doned, since the funk it had put her in had really only been snapped out of when she’d (don’t repeat this at home) stopped tak­ing it on her own—well, when it said anorexia was a side effect on the side of the bot­tle, the label writ­ers sure weren’t kid­ding. She hadn’t antic­i­pated the extent, though. A lit­tle weight loss, she had expected—but now she stands—strides over the store and can’t stop mov­ing because it’s a busy job and some days she crawls right into bed when she comes home—and her pants lit­er­ally fall off her pointy hip­bones with­out the aid of a belt while all the while she’s got no appetite and has to remind her­self to eat as one more task to accom­plish dur­ing the day, even though she always feels bet­ter after she does. But with no blood sugar reminders, not even a headache or mere sali­va­tion, no out­ward con­trols, the med­i­cine is that strange and bizarre, some­times she forgets.

After twenty years of think­ing of her­self as one of the fat girls, wor­ry­ing about eat­ing enough to keep up with the calo­ries she burns dur­ing the day—she’d thought she was being so good, get­ting up, going to work, tak­ing her meds, play­ing nicely with oth­ers, but appar­ently not.

The lad­der of vis­i­ble ribs under her fingers—the jut of clav­i­cle at the edge of her shoul­ders, the way the ends of her humerus stick out of her elbows—it’s not funny at all how she looks in the mir­ror, because she’s got no con­trol, none, no con­trol over any of it at all any­more. She’s got stretch marks on her thighs now that she didn’t have as a teen—her skin’s less elas­tic now, and her deflated balloon-breasts, her once rotund belly, though not quite so big as her mom’s– they look sad and abandoned.

Kind of like her, because damned if she knows what’s (who’s) going to be left of her when all this weight loss is done. If it’s done. Maybe she’ll just keep get­ting thin­ner and thin­ner like in that Stephen King story, except she can’t recall any gypsy woman she ran down with her car, any great sin she’s com­mit­ted except to be one of the many flawed humans who thought and felt a lit­tle too much about some things and not nearly enough about others.

Oth­ers, though, have com­mented favorably—or jeal­ously, snark­ily, con­cernedly, or in sev­eral other moods, depen­dent on source—upon her weight loss, and while she knows most mean well, it’s not a dis­cus­sion she wants to get into. So she says thank you in most cases—or says that she’s fine or work­ing with doc­tors in others—the first is a lie, since she’s well aware that los­ing seventy-five (now almost eighty this week with the flu that she’s got) pounds by any cause, much less one beyond her con­trol, is noth­ing to be blasé or giddy about, but she tries not to com­plain too much aloud because being skinny? Noth­ing any­one wants to hear as a sub­ject of com­plaint, even when the com­plaint is more meta and some­thing she’s still strug­gling to define.

It’s just that—as she loses her meat, she feels like she loses her me.

Every time she goes to try on clothes in a store to replace the ones hang­ing and bag­ging from her, she never gets far. Size 14, 12, 10? She doesn’t know any­more, can’t trust what she sees in the mir­ror because it doesn’t seem real. It’s a dif­fer­ent kind of dys­mor­phia, a dif­fer­ent dis­con­nect, but it’s there all the same. The lights are too harsh, and she doesn’t like to look in the mir­ror, not even just at her face until the clothes are all on, because her face looks tired and thin and she’s sure peo­ple must see the same things she thrashes toward with her ther­a­pist week in and week out. So she hangs on to the clothes hang­ing on her, and at last begins to under­stand why—in reverse, though the rea­sons are surely the same—why her over­weight, depressed mother never bought any new clothes, money rea­sons aside, when they were children.

When you don’t like what you see in the mirror—don’t know who or what the reflec­tion is, much less who or what it’s going to be next week (size 10 still, or will another two pounds lost make her that same grade eight, post tick-bite size 8?), why would you wrap it in some­thing that might again have to be replaced?

At least the (baggy, ill-fitting) clothes are famil­iar, even if every­thing else is too new. And whether she liked her old fat self (at all), she at least had some idea who she was.

The girl in the mirror’s a stranger, and Lewis Car­roll was never one of the authors in whom she found consolation.