It was easy to disappear into the demanding hours of my job, and then it was easy to disappear from my own life entirely. I was like a ghost. And for a while I got away with it. My friends and family believed me when I said I was too busy with work to do anything else.
Eventually, though, multiple people started to notice my size and comment on it. It started with a concerned text from my mom: “Why do you look so skinny on Instagram?”
I was at work. I remember typing slowly: “I feel like maybe I’ve caught an eating disorder, like a cold,” I sent. Later that night I told the Scorpio, my then-girlfriend, about the exchange, and to my surprise she grew angry, frustrated with my reticence. “You definitely have an eating disorder,” she snapped, and then listed off my symptoms—my lack of energy, bad moods, workout addiction. Then she landed the ultimate blow: “Why do you need to be so skinny?”
I had no answer, just embarrassed silence. It felt like asking me for the answer to the root of anorexia. I slowly started to tell my inner circle what was going on, and this angry, frustrated, questioning reaction kept repeating. People, it seems, get really annoyed about eating disorders: But you’re so skinny. They’re even more annoyed by the process of recovery. Once you’ve labeled the problem, people want you to be able to just fix it.
I had a couple of very supportive friends who had struggled with their own relationship to food, including my friend Lindsey, a woman I’d met through work who lived in LA. As a photographer—someone who professionally focuses on aesthetics—she and I had what felt like an instant understanding of each other. In addition to an incredibly rewarding creative relationship (she became my go-to photographer for Nylon cover shoots), she was one of my only friends who consistently saw through whatever veneer I tried to hide behind, and would call me on it gently.
For the most part, though, I was too embarrassed to tell my peers about it. And except for a few extremely worried phone calls from my parents, my family gradually stopped talking to me about it, too, especially once I reassured them that I was getting the help I needed. The sick part of my brain wondered if I was just never skinny enough for it to truly be a concern.
In hindsight I realize that they felt I had intentionally pushed them away—I’d react with what looked like annoyance when they’d check in on me. I was far from annoyed, though; I was feeling a combination of guilt over burdening them with worry and resentment for said worry. But they were trying to respect the boundaries they thought I was setting. I didn’t know how to ask for help, and because I was so independent and professionally successful, very few people realized I needed it.
In reality I felt totally alone, and I felt like it was all my fault. I had failed in keeping up with the self-love that my generation was supposed to be so famous for. What’s more, I totally understood the frustration and annoyance that was directed my way—I’d felt it toward other people. I had a friend in college who was about six inches shorter than me and at least thirty pounds lighter. One day while we were getting ready to go to class, she stood in front of her mirror and said something to the effect of, “I’m so ashamed of how fat I’ve gotten.”
I was irritated. She was the furthest thing from fat I’d ever seen. So I said, “If you think you’re fat, what do you think of me?”
She was stunned. “I think you’re perfect,” she said.
“I’m twice your size,” I exclaimed. “I literally loom over you.”
She started to cry. “I know I have a problem,” she said. “I think everyone else is so perfect and beautiful, and I just think I’m so ugly.”
At the time I thought I didn’t understand. But then, I was thinking the same exact thing: I felt enormous and disgusting, too. Yet I had started to date girls and many of them were curvier than me; if anything, I found myself attracted to their softness. I remember one girl I was dating complaining to me about a little weight gain around her thighs and my honest response was, “But that just means there’s more of you, and that’s such a good thing!” My own body, though, was a different story—I was keeping myself on a tight leash, convinced that if I gained weight no one would want me. I was completely unaware that this was problematic thinking, because it just felt so true. In hindsight, it was true for my friend as well.
This is all pretty textbook body dysmorphia. Women with eating disorders don’t see themselves accurately, so whereas they can think other women are beautiful at any size, that thinking doesn’t extend to their own reflection. People who don’t have eating disorders seem to have a hard time empathizing with that. It’s hard to wrap your brain around someone having certain requirements for themselves but not for other people.
I’ve always thought the women I love, whether it’s friends, family, or girlfriends, are the most beautiful people in the world. When they criticize their own appearances, it hurts my feelings—if only they could see what I see. It also calls into question this issue of perspective, which I keep coming back to: If you think that about yourself, what do you think of me? To which the answer, again and again, is that different standards apply. I’m trying to avoid cliché here, but I really do think we could all benefit from seeing ourselves the way the people who love us do.
Which brings me back to the aforementioned Scorpio. Midbreakup, she made me promise to tell my therapist that I wasn’t really eating. I agreed to it; I’d been in therapy for years without bringing up my on-again, off-again eating habits. I didn’t want to tell my therapist about it, because I didn’t want to stop—I liked having that kind of control over my body. I also didn’t really think it was that big of a deal. When I finally told her, she was alarmed, and convinced me to see a doctor so we could determine how severe it was based on test results. She sent me to a physician who specialized in eating disorders in adolescent girls.
The day before I went, I wondered if I should eat more so that she wouldn’t think I had a problem, or if I should eat less so that she would take me seriously. I went alone, not wanting to burden anyone with what felt like a self-imposed disaster. I was definitely the oldest person in the waiting room, besides the moms accompanying their teenage daughters. When I filled out the intake forms, there was an entire page for my parents’ information. I asked the receptionist if she really needed my mother’s phone number, and she studied my face for a minute before saying I could skip it.
The doctor diagnosed me with anorexia quickly. I was mortified but also relieved; I was exhausted from being hungry all the time, and now there was a professional telling me I needed to eat more, or else. There was also something so soothing about having someone tell me what I had to do—I had been making my whole life up as I went, including how I took care of myself, and she lifted the burden. There were, in fact, rules to follow in order to stay alive; I actually couldn’t just go without eating indefinitely.
Years of therapy have clarified for me the connection between my relationship to food and my coping mechanisms, or rather my lack thereof. Being skinny was a weapon, a strategy, a safety net. Trying to lose weight was a convenient way to distract myself from what was really going on.
It was also, and maybe most importantly, a secret so easy to deny because there was so much evidence to the contrary: my work, for one. Being gay came in a close second. Queer people are so inclusive, so all about supporting all kinds of bodies—right? Socially, I was part of a world where fatness had been reclaimed. Queer fat femmes and butches were lavished with as much positive attention as everyone else. They were celebrated. And I celebrated them, too. I just didn’t think my own body could be included.
And I knew that once it wasn’t a secret, I would be obligated to get it under control, and at first I really didn’t want to: Why would I try to gain weight when I’d worked so hard to lose it? As I was told, though, that was the eating disorder talking.
After a round of blood tests on that first visit, the doctor called me and said that I needed to gain ten pounds to be at the minimum weight for my height, in order to not do permanent damage to my
body. All my results were low; my estradiol was so minimal that I was barely getting my period, and my vitamins D and B12 were alarming. She also explained that based on how low my T3, or triiodothyronine, levels were, it would take a full two years for my brain to fully recover. T3, she told me, comes from good fats and lines your brain; it makes your synapses connect. Low T3 is a symptom of starvation. It’s why it’s hard to think when you’re hungry. This was the first piece of scare-tactic information that truly got to me. Everything else—the dips in my energy, the potential for disease down the road—I could deal with. I was also struggling with depression, and my existential angst responded So what? when presented with mortality.
But I drew the line at a decline in mental capacity. That, to me, was not acceptable. Two years for my brain to bounce back sounded like an eternity. The doctor told me the good news was I’d be able to recover fully as long as I started eating again. Eventually, I did, slowly at first, working with a nutritionist to get back up to three meals a day, then adding snacks, then making sure that every meal was well-rounded and satisfying. They had me incorporate a protein shake into every meal, in little boxed cartons by a brand called Orgain that I ordered online in bulk. The doctor advised that I keep it in a desk drawer because she said it would be recognizable to other people who had eating disorders and that I might want to protect my privacy. A couple of years later, I spotted someone else’s Orgain in the work fridge, and my brain raced to figure out who it might belong to.
The doctor didn’t take health insurance, and my plan didn’t cover my diagnosis in the acceptable out-of-network expenses, so my first visit was $800, my follow-up was $400, and my third visit was another $800; the nutritionist was $150/week, as was my therapist. I couldn’t afford both regular doctor visits and the weekly therapist and nutritionist, which was extra motivation to follow the plan they created for me: I hated the thought that my hard-earned salary was all going to treatment. It felt like failure. So I stopped seeing the eating disorder doctor after three visits and stuck with the therapist and nutritionist. I had to relearn how to put meals together, which was humiliating but also incredibly helpful. I surrendered completely to professional care, understanding that my own ideas about health and food were no longer trustworthy.
After outsourcing all my various issues to professionals around Manhattan, I managed to finally feel like I wasn’t living from crisis to crisis; I could approach food as something I needed to feel good, not the other way around. And it was from this place that I finally began to admit the hypocrisy that lurked in the shadows of my professional success. It felt almost laughable, if it hadn’t gotten so hard, thinking about the standards I held myself to while making content to destroy the very idea of those standards in the first place.
Once I gained the weight and kept it, I started sleeping through the night. Wallace and I had started to talk about moving in together. At work I was filled with so many ideas I could barely contain myself. I was talking over my colleagues in meetings, making lists; I couldn’t speak or type fast enough to get all my thoughts out as quickly as they came. I started writing again, and writing, and writing.
I wasn’t interested in writing about what it’s like to have anorexia, though. I didn’t think it was very compelling, and I knew from experience that people struggling with eating disorders tend to twist that kind of writing into how-to guides. I was, however, fascinated by how pervasive it continued to be, even as women’s media made leaps and bounds toward being more body positive. It was as though the culture had been fractured with various, intersecting, often conflicting ethoses: From the secret body-image issues of the people creating body-positive content to the frail-framed figures of the latest crop of teenage celebrities, to the powerful activism-focused realm of Generation Zers on Instagram who exposed their bodies to promote a message of self-love—and then their counterparts, the lifestyle bloggers who were either starving in the name of wellness or overusing self-editing apps. On Instagram there were vulnerable confessions from normatively beautiful people who hated their bodies and were claiming hardship, right next to declarations of self-love from plus-size people who were likely actually discriminated against because of their size. Celebrities above a size 4 who went out in public in crop tops were called “brave,” as though that was not totally condescending. It became so chaotic. The messages women received, the people creating those messages, and the people featured within the messages were so often at odds with one another and with themselves.
I heard countless women in the industry who didn’t fit into the thin/white/straight/cisgender paradigm say that they didn’t want anyone else to feel as left out of media as they had. What they were not saying was that they wanted to create a sense of inclusiveness that they themselves could benefit from. It was always for people like them, for the next generation. It got even more complicated when I looked at the return on investment of inclusivity. Brands were benefiting financially from improving the range of women they represented, but they were not really doing the work to acknowledge the problems that they created in the first place.
In 2018, I attended an International Women’s Day panel that featured a famous plus-size model who had recently been on a billboard in her underwear. It was a stunning victory for representation, but when asked about it onstage, she said something along the lines of, “It was embarrassing.” I was confused. How could someone who was becoming the face of a movement be embarrassed to have her body on display? She was supposed to be bravely leading the charge. Instead she talked about feeling humiliated by her rolls and having to give herself a pep talk before seeing it. And it later came out that the clothing brand, although it used plus-size models in its campaign, did not actually offer sizes that fit them. I began to question everything I’d been told about how to feel about my body, wondering, Is the body-positive movement just another extension of traditional women’s work—something we do for other people but not ourselves? And why the fuck don’t we?
It’s not hard to imagine why women might hate their bodies when our place in the world is so often determined by them, and when so few people actually occupy that highly glorified yet rarely lived place of ultra-thin/straight/white/cisgender privilege. Despite being the majority, plus-size women are discriminated against and often publicly shamed for their appearance, which affects everything from access to effective healthcare to employment to travel to shopping. But thin women, in my experience, balk at admitting to being a privileged category, especially thin white women. I wonder if it’s because they’re punishing themselves so much to maintain that skinniness that the suffering feels louder than any societal benefit they encounter. But that’s a pretty naive way to experience the world, indicative of a privilege so ingrained you hardly realize it’s there. It also seems entirely possible that the panic to remain thin stems from a fear of losing that privilege—a maybe subconscious admittance.
It’s been over a decade since I watched my gorgeous friend look in the mirror and tell her tiny reflection it was fat. It’s troubling to picture editors who chose to glorify images of extremely thin white women in the pages of their magazines; their definition of beauty was so limited and subsequently so harmful to their readers. They made beauty an exclusive class, and we are still dealing with the repercussions, even those of us who try to incorporate body positivity into our understanding of the world. I constantly find myself in conversations with women who—like me—alternate between two extremes: thinking other women are perfect just as they are, and quietly loathing themselves.
Once, at lunch with a colleague, while she was talking to me about her wedding diet, I got distracted by her face: I hadn’t really realized that she was as pretty as a Glossier model, with glowy, poreless skin, thick eyebrows, and dark-blonde lashes so elaborate they looked fake. Needing to know her secrets, I interrupted her. “Sorry,” I said, “do you have any makeup on?”
She blushed. “Just bronzer,” and then told me that she can’t wear mascara because her eyelash
es are too long. Too long! For mascara! I said, “Oh my god. If I looked like you, I would never put a single drop of anything on my face.” She looked shocked. She had, after all, been in the middle of telling me about how everyone told her she’d lose weight planning her wedding, but she hadn’t yet and so was on a Serious Diet. “But that’s what I think about you,” she replied.
I rolled my eyes. “I have, like, forty pounds of concealer on,” I told her, and quickly brought the subject back to her wedding while we waited for the journalist who was coming to interview me about my progressive views on feminism and beauty. (The irony of having this conversation before that one was not lost on me.)
Julia, my fraternal twin sister, recently said, “We all have a different mirror.” It was prescient: We’d been sitting around with Wallace, complaining about how beer makes us bloated, which was probably very rude as Wallace was drinking one. “I just don’t know where you put it,” I said, gesturing to her long, flat tummy. One beer and my stomach puffs up in protest, but Wallace’s body is always the same size. She said, “It goes to the back of my legs,” and Julia and I could barely contain our skepticism: Wallace’s legs, like the rest of her, are slender and long. Julia’s mirror comment made us all laugh.
“It’s so true,” I said, gleeful to bond over dysmorphia. “When I look in the mirror, I see the Michelin Man!”
Everybody (Else) Is Perfect Page 9
