What Recovery Means

Donna was bad, to begin with.

Okay, not ontologically. "You're not a shitty human being," as my friend Kelsey likes to remind my stubborn, obdurate self. "You're a beautiful child of the living God who happens to make some shitty choices."

Bearing that in mind, it is true that I've fallen off the wagon deplorably in the last few days. I've purged a good bit, and I'm struggling to get back on my feet. Went to confession again today (that's twice in four days, and still my progress looks totally negligible from where I sit. Urgh.)

All that being said, I wrote the following earlier today, primarily for my own edification, but perhaps it may offer some insight into the intense psychological minefield I'm navigating here.

It's probably the grittiest, realest, most honest bit of self-exposition I've ever penned, so don't be grossed out, weirded out, freaked out, or anything else'd out, please.

RECOVERY MEANS…

...finally being able to see those 10-15 minutes in the middle of every movie I watch in theaters that I generally miss because I’m in the bathroom purging the popcorn.

...not missing 10-15 minutes out of every conversation I have with loved ones in a restaurant, and not having to watch their hurt eyes as I traipse off to the bathroom, giving incontrovertible evidence to the fact that this Thing is more important to me than they are.

...not spending the first 10-15 minutes of every social gathering locating the bathroom and gauging whether I’m allowed to eat or not that night based upon its size, occupancy, proximity, sound-proofness, and degree of seclusion.

...having an ass and being okay with it.

...no more chronic throbbing dehydration-hangovers all day, every day.

...saying goodbye forever to bulimia’s trademark swollen chipmunk-cheek glands.

...no more perpetually chipped teeth caused by tooth enamel eroded by years of exposure to stomach acid.

...not plucking 20 grey hairs a day due to going frighteningly prematurely white from severe malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies.

...no more waking up feeling like I just got run over by a Mack truck -- and having memories of eating everything in sight and puking my guts out at three o’clock in the morning the night before come flooding back.

...no more hypokalemia, hospitalizations, and burning, stinging, agonizing IV drips. [Everything you know about human suffering is purely academic until you’ve been on the receiving end of intravenous potassium.]

...no more muscles in a perpetual state of seized-up charley-horse cramp from potassium deficiency.

...being able to meet new people without immediately assessing their size in comparison to mine, guesstimating their weight, and summarily excising them from my life if I judge them to be too much thinner than I am.

...being able to take a shot of Jose Cuervo, chug Mountain Dew, or drink a glass of water, without painstakingly calculating how much water weight is going to show up on the scale as a result -- and immediately running off to the bathroom to go purge.

... being able to walk into a party and notice the people before I notice the food.

... having a body that functions well enough to walk, run, and play Ultimate Frisbee, and being able to do those things without proximate danger of going into cardiac arrest.

...not living in constant fear of cardiac arrest (or esophagal rupture, or kidney failure, etc.), period.

...not subjecting my loved ones to said constant fear of my going into cardiac arrest (or esophagal rupture, or kidney failure, etc.).

... not being chronically green and translucent from walking around in a perpetual state of near-fatal dehydration, with chafing-off skin, jumbled, incoherent thoughts, dreams of water, parched mouth, and split, flaking lips.

... not crawling up the stairs and lying on my bedroom floor for whole days unable to get up, because I'm too hypokalemic to move my limbs and too dehydrated to have any feeling in them, anyway.

...being able to look at myself in the mirror without flinching or crying.

... no more screaming tearful obscenities at the reflection in the mirror and lying on the floor sobbing.

...not having an unrelenting stream of self-deprecatory thoughts swilling around in my mind interrupting and sidetracking all my substantial, profound ones.

...being able to squeeze my belly fat and laugh it off instead of crying.

...being able to go swimsuit shopping without going into an existential crisis over it and refusing to get out of bed for two days.

...no more frantically, clandestinely plunging toilets clogged from purging, hoping like hell no one will catch you at it.

...no more frantically, clandestinely scrubbing vomit-spattered toilets, walls, and floors, wondering how the hell you ever came to stoop this low, and thinking what a shitty excuse for a life this is.

...no more of those tiny little excruciatingly painful fingernail-rips at the back of my throat from hasty fingers shoved down it.

...being able to look at a spoon, ballpoint pen, or toothbrush without cringing and seeing it as a purging utensil.

...being able to look myself in the eye.

...being able to look others in the eye.

...never again seeing that hurt, reproachful, knowing Look from people who love me when they’re watching me binge -- and are powerless to stop it.

...being able to carry on a conversation with God that doesn’t open with tearfully castigating him for the body He gave me.

...being able to walk into a room after someone’s gone grocery shopping without seeing a glowing phosphorescent sign, visible only to me, saying EAT ME. ALL OF ME. NOW.

...letting a boy put his arms around my waist without its triggering a prolonged, anguished, self-repeating interior monologue as I endlessly wonder if he’s noticing my disgusting, horrific rolls of stomach fat -- and if he’s repulsed by me.

... accepting it when a boy tells me I'm beautiful without entertaining the nagging question: Is he stupid, delusional, mocking me, or humoring me?

... actually wearing a coat in the wintertime and letting go of my fear of its making me look fat and bulky.

... ditto with carrying a cell phone in my back pocket and angsting over whether it makes my butt look big.

...letting myself leave the house with smudged eyeliner and mismatched socks and coming to some sort of peace with the fact that even if I am slightly less than perfect, the universe will probably not grind to a screeching halt.

...no more getting on the scale before I go anywhere to determine whether or not I’m too fat to be allowed to leave the house and interact with people that day.

... no more missing out on events because I was too fat to be allowed to leave the house and interact with people that day.

... a head that doesn't ache, hands that don't shake, a tummy that doesn't hurt.

...not missing the “First Dance” at all of my loved ones’ weddings because I’m off in the bathroom sobbing, mascara streaming everywhere, purging the catered meal.

...being able to stand up for myself, and not feeling obligated to say yes to everyone else all the time for fear they’ll stop loving me if I tell them what I really think.

...looking in the mirror and seeing a beautiful girl for the first time in my life.

...sitting down and working with full attention on a project without poking at my stomach trying to gauge whether I’ve gotten any fatter in the last ten minutes, or being sidetracked assessing the circumference of my thighs.

...buying clothes because I like them, not because I think they best obfuscate my tummy bulge.

...not feeling obligated to capture the undivided attention of every male within a 500-foot radius in a frantic and desperate effort to prove something to myself.

... accepting that it's okay to be a whole, multivalent, multifaceted, flawed, beautiful woman -- and not just an object of desire.

...finally learning something about myself, besides gravity’s pull on me at any given moment.

...not having to avoid social functions with endless food available but no accessible bathroom (cookouts, campfires, etc.).

... not hurting friends by skipping out on events where I know there will be food.

...being able to look a man in the eye for the first time in my life and truthfully tell him that, given the choice, I would rather be with him than weigh 90 pounds.

...finally deciding what I want to be when I grow up -- besides thin.

... not dying young.

...quitting this monomaniacal open-fire on my health that is potentially shooting my reproductive system to hell, so as to actually be able to get married and have kids someday.

...not living in perpetual terror of having daughters for fear they might grow up like me.

...no more cocktail party anecdotes beginning with “This one time, at rehab…”

...not letting down those I love anymore.

...finally becoming a women more concerned about the size of her heart than the size of her jeans.

...learning to cope with stress in ways that aren’t self-punitive or self-destructive.

...being able to sit on someone special’s lap without wondering if they’re being crushed under your weight and are simply too nice to say so.

...no more taking a sledgehammer to your vocal chords by purging, and being able to sing again as a consequence.

...realizing once and for all that perfection is not a prerequisite for lovability.

...being able to walk into a restaurant without being paralyzed with fear and nearly breaking down in heaving sobs over the menu.

...not obsessively Facebook-stalking old acquaintances trying to assess whether they’re still thinner than you.

...just eating the damn donut already.

...no more trippy hallucinatory phantasmagoric dreams about bingeing.

...no more fantasizing about food during waking hours.

...being able to gain and lose five pounds (maybe even 10, or 15) without losing my peace, sanity, or emotional equilibrium.

...being able to conceptualize pregnancy in terms other than “gaining a shit-ton of weight”, and maybe beginning to understand something of the mystery of motherhood.

...not waking up every single morning engaging in a lengthy and anguished dialogue with myself about whether life is really worth living at 105 pounds, or 110 pounds, or 120, or 130, or whether I'd be better off dead.

...not having to deal with people perpetually either forcing food on me or hiding food from me.

...being able to sit down for a nice dinner with friends and understand that they did not devise making it for me and inviting me over as a unique form of Chinese water torture, but because they loved me and wanted to spend time with me.

...having more time on my hands than I know what to do with. If one gives (what is sadly a conservative estimate) of three hours a day spent bingeing and/or purging, I have spent the equivalent of one full day out of every week for roughly the last eight years stuffing my face and/or with my head in the toilet. Not a pretty picture. That works out to 52 days a year. In other words, I’ve lost nearly two months out of every year -- over a FULL YEAR OF MY LIFE -- that I will never get back. And that’s not even taking into consideration the time spent weighing myself, obsessing about food, etc., which would exponentially inflate the amount of sheer lost time.

...being real, substantial, abundant, alive, instead of a wan fey tortured spectre with haunted eyes, going through the motions of living with one foot on the scale and an uneasy backwards glance at the mirror.

“I have enough stories,” says Sandra Bullock in 28 Days. “What I would like is a life.”