The Weight of The World

My thanks to the family, profiled in the local Sunday paper, willing to take their teenage daughter's fight against anorexia public.

Eating disorders are often the little gremlin on the family's wing, much like alcoholism and mental illness used to be (not that those are treated as openly as they should be, either). Our culture, the world's culture, is still so wrapped up in "never too rich or too thin" that anorexia usually goes too far before being noticed or treated. Two points the article didn't make, however, that should be: eating disorders affect more than teens and more than females; and an eating disorder is often a symptom of depression, not an isolated "disease."

I know. I've been there.

In my mid-thirties, seemingly settled into a successful marriage and a full-time college teaching position, I thought I felt pretty good about my future. We were living in a small, lakeside town and while my drive to the University took almost an hour, the commute was straight up a freeway and my department chair was very accommodating, scheduling my classes so I often didn't have to drive five days a week. My husband was a professor at the small town's local two year school and was seen as the funny, intelligent, and doting "perfect catch." By my latter thirties, much had changed--and much had stayed the same.

What changed was that my job, now nearing the ten year mark, became a slog when a new department chair--straight out of grad school--arrived questioning all the teaching methods I had developed over 15 years and saying my commute was my problem and he expected me there all day, every day, unless "the weather is draconian." (Wisconsin, mind you. Often draconian and I wasn't ending up in a ditch for this runt.) What stayed the same? My marriage--too much the same. We still got along like best pals but. . .only like pals.

As my chronic depression, long in abeyance, roiled up, I decided to "get healthy" as a response. Eat right; exercise more. Which then lead to eating less--and less--and exercising more--and more: no fats in the diet and no carbs either; a six mile run in the morning and a 12 mile walk later in the day. I felt in control--not of my job, of course, or my marriage, but in control of something. The more desperately my husband tried to make me eat, the more often I had colleagues tell me I was looking "quite thin," the more I thought, "yeah, and good, too. Just jealous, all of you, of my control." I was never sick, after all (only later did I learn that the immune system kicks into high gear when you lose too much fat, trying to keep the body alive), and for the first time ever I could cut my hair really short because I didn't have a double chin. In my driver's license photo, I looked like a concentration camp survivor.

But I also knew I wasn't able to think clearly or cleverly anymore. Getting through classes became so mentally tiring, I just had the students do group work, so I didn't have to put together a plan or read their papers. I had bursts of teary anger at the smallest things like not finding "my" parking space open. My already thin head of hair thinned more but I grew fine downy hair on my face and body (it's called "lanuga," another attempt at preservation, replacing fat with fur). What finally made me see how much trouble I was in? Maybe an attempt at intervention by two colleagues I greatly respected, although I assured them I was just a bit overworked; maybe sensing as I weighed myself for the fifth time in a day that 72 lbs. is too light even for someone 5'3"; maybe realizing that I was quite literally--in the correct sense--trying to disappear, growing smaller and smaller to take up less space in a world I felt had no room for me anymore. Suicide by diminution.

It doesn't matter. I found a psychiatrist, who first sent me to have an ECG to see whether I needed to be hospitalized. She called me lucky because my heart was fine but I was even more lucky that this therapist understood right away that what needed treatment was the depression--the anorexia was just an artifact, an obvious direction for control in a world that approves of and encourages sylphs and waifs. Up to the point where the world suddenly says "oh, now you've gone too far. Eat something." And sometimes up to the point the sylphs and waifs can no longer eat. And on to the point they die.

No one seeing me now would imagine I was almost at that point. Getting treatment for my depression started me back. From there, I left my job (and the profession I thought I would be in forever), took a lover (not everyone's idea of a good way to deal with a failing marriage but it worked for me), moved to a new town and got a divorce (in that order). And my lover became my husband and I found out he'd been watching me for a long time, attracted to me from the first he saw me, and later, when I was 72 lb. and walking all over town to burn off every carrot, he would turn to others and say "she didn't used to look like that. She used to look really good."

If you know a person--young or not, male or female--you say something similar about, maybe that person is also trying to disappear, given permission by "you can never be too rich or too thin." Yes, you can be. At least "too thin." If I'm ever rich, I'll get back to you on that.