"You like that?"
What could I say? The kiss was nice, but was he asking for more? I did not know how to answer the question. I stared blankly into his eyes as he moved his way on top of me. At that point, I knew where he was heading.
"Umm..." I tried to pull away from him. "I think I should go. I just remembered I have to get something done for tomorrow."
His eyebrow raised in question. "You do? Nah, you can stay here a little longer, it's ok. You don't need to leave."
I was increasingly getting more panicked by his responses. I was not sure if the alcohol was playing into his speech or not. "No, I'm going to go...." My voice trailed off as he placed his mouth over mine once again. His hand started roaming down my body, making me very uncomfortable and uneasy of the situation he was placing me in.
My thoughts raced as I asked myself what I should do. I was never in a similar situation before, I never had to try to get away from a guy. I knew he was stronger than I was and I already told him that I wanted to leave. What else could I do?
"You smell nice." He tried to compliment me in order for me to comply with him but his plan was not working. His grip on me was getting tighter and tighter, while my fists clenched together, waiting for everything to be finished.
His fingers tickled my skin. I could smell the beer on his breath. I stared at the ceiling and then at the clock hanging on the wall, watching the hands travel around the face as time passed.
I knew that I needed to leave before things got any worse.
"I really need to go." I lifted myself up from underneath his body and started standing up, only he was not happy with that decision. He pulled me back down onto the futon with so much force that my body bounced back up on the mattress.
"No. I want you to stay here." The look in his eyes was not the same look that I had seen before in him. His eyes were glossed over with some other emotion, a horrible, terrifying emotion that I did not know existed in him. I saw him before as a perfect young gentleman with manners and respect. What I saw in that moment was the exact opposite. He was not a gentleman and he was not treating me with respect. He was treating me as his object, an object he was not going to let go of until he was satisfied. A sinister grin appeared on his face, almost as if he was in a trance and not himself at all.
Tears started to well up in my eyes as my fear heightened, my fists still clenched and unable to move. He noticed the tears forming and kissed my forehead.
"Don't be scared. There's nothing to worry about."
I glanced over at the clock again to see how much time had passed. The seconds felt like minutes and time felt as if it was standing still. Everything moved in slow motion and I started to see myself as an outside observer. I was no longer a part of my body, but merely a girl watching a show. Whatever the boy was doing to the girl, I was not a part of.
I sat back and painfully watched him take advantage as she trembled and silently cried for help. There was nothing she could do. Her voice was the only thing to save her and her voice was not being heard. He seemed to enjoy her pain and failed to notice any tears that dripped down her cheeks. He was not interested in her feelings, only how he was feeling in that moment. He did not care what he was doing, and in a twisted way, he did not know he was being harmful. She continued to stare blankly, frozen with fear. She knew then that it was not his first time hurting someone else. It was too easy for him to take away a part of some one.
As if he was hypnotized, he stopped just as suddenly as he started, and moved himself to the corner of the couch so I could get up. I fixed myself, sopping up the tears with a nearby tissue, and quickly got myself out of his dorm room.
I did not have any memory of myself and the journey I made from his room to my car, but I made it there safely. And somehow, I made it home. I was safe.
6
Silent Suffering
I decided last night that today would be my binge day, just because I wanted to give my body a break after depriving it for so long. Well, I took the whole binging thing to heart and ate eight donuts in ten minutes. That's a disgusting amount of food - a whole fucking box of donuts!! I don't even know why I ate that much, I've never eaten that much before in my life, I wasn't THAT hungry. It was just a goal, I guess. I set my mind to do it, and I did it, just like when I didn't eat for two days. I have no idea why I do some of the things I do. So, after that I felt disgusting, obviously, so I tried to purge it all. I tried for a good while but nothing came up. I was freaking out, "I need to get this out of me...get it out....get it out....*gag*...*spit*....ugh..." There's nothing like staring down at the toilet water with your toothbrush shoved down your throat and being disappointed in NOT being able to throw up. It's pretty twisted, isn't it? I eventually calmed myself down by stepping on the scale. It was the same as this morning so I didn't feel too bad. But I'm not eating any more donuts for a looong time.
I decided not to tell any one about what happened between Randy and me. I felt embarrassed, ashamed, guilty. I should have been able to protect myself better, I should have been more forceful, I should have screamed and yelled and punched him to get away. But I did not and it happened. It seemed like a dream, or more appropriately, a nightmare, but I knew it was real life. Since I separated myself from my body, I kept trying to convince myself that nothing ever happened. But it did. And I needed to live with that for the rest of my life.
Loneliness and depression had been dragging me down. I did not want to eat. I only wanted to sleep, sleep, sleep, and hide away from everything, hide away from the world, hide away from myself. My body was stuck in the fetal position as I drowned in the heavy blankets above me. My life seemed like it was going nowhere and I had no motivation to do anything. I laid in my bed for the majority of my days, staring at the ceiling and contemplating what I could do to end it all.
Fleeting images of horrible suffering danced through my head. I imagined how I could get away with leaving the world with hurting as few people as possible. Driving myself into a wall was not guaranteed, nor was slicing my wrists open with a razor. I thought about the failure and letting everyone down, and possibly needing to explain myself later. I would not know what to say.
I was not brave enough to end my life. I was only brave enough to get even more lost in my obsession of food, weight, and calories. I decided that I would lose even more weight. The pretend world made up in my head was my escape and I wanted to get even more lost in that world so I could not face the real world. The pretend world gave me an excuse to check out of life and to completely ignore the problems before me.
My food intake became even more limited than it had been before. I was determined to hurt myself by depriving myself. A normal, healthy intake for a 19-year-old girl was about 2,000 calories. I was eating only a third of what I should have been eating on most days, if that. I started keeping a food log of everything I was eating, just in case I forgot, even though I was able to remember my caloric intake for days on end. Calorie counts were seared into my brain and I could easily rattle off the number of calories in a given meal at any time, on any day. My brain became a huge lock box of nothing but numbers and facts used to hurt my body.
Hobbies that I had enjoyed before my obsession were not in my life any more. I used to play the guitar every day and since I started controlling my food, I had no desire to even pull the guitar out of its case. I used to enjoy reading for pleasure, yet it was too much work to even pick out a book and flip to the first page. My world was being entirely consumed by this great force. And although I had started the force on my own, it soon became its own power and started controlling me. Instead of me making my own decisions, I felt as though there was another force making the decisions for me. I was losing my ability to decide for myself and I was becoming a puppet of my own creation.
My strings were being pulled by the obsession I started. Had I known the intensity and the power of it all, I might have chosen to take a different route. But by then, it was too late and I could not turn back. I
was stuck in my ever-increasing world of suffering, where pain was normal and happiness was non-existent.
I was trapped but my parents did not catch on to what was changing within me. Since I was isolated before, it seemed the same since nothing had changed from their point of view. What changed was inside my head where only I could see. What little I knew was confusing and a mix of multiple emotions, tangled together. Anger, fear, guilt, were all smashed inside of me somewhere, prying to get out in some way. I had always been taught to deal with my negative emotions myself and to not bring them up to anyone else, so it was what I did. I hid them even from myself and had no training on how to deal with the negativity.
Growing up, I thought that I was required to be happy all of the time. I would smile and laugh, even if I was not happy or amused. My thoughts stayed inside my brain and never dared to leak out in any way. Eventually, those negative emotions had to come out in some form or another.
The way I see it, it was like a soda bottle being shaken. It was fine at first, but the more it was rattled around, the more pressure there was, and the more likely it was to explode. I had come to my exploding point, yet I chose to deal with it in an unhealthy manner.
Since my days consisted of sleeping and moping around the house, it was as if my parents had adopted a zombie for a daughter and sent me off to a far away land. My eyes were soulless and no emotion was emitted from my voice when I spoke. Going through the motions of life was not too hard, but it was not living. Going through the motions was merely existing. I was only existing and had become a shell of my former self before everything started. Instead of occupying my mind with fun activities, I chose to instead think about food.
As I watched commercials on television for fast food restaurants, I would repeatedly tell myself that that food was never going to touch my lips. That food was not fit for my consumption. Except, one day, that voice inside stayed quiet for just enough time for me to be "human" again, and so I went and bought a meal from a local fast food chain. I enjoyed the meal in my bedroom, savoring the flavor, my body thanking me for giving it some fat. And then the voice and the power took over again. I stopped myself from eating that very second and spit on the remaining food so I would not be able to eat any more. The voice told me that I was disgusting and that I was going to gain weight from just those few bites.
I looked down at the french fries and chicken and could not believe what I saw. I just willingly spat on my food. No normal person would ever do that for the same reason I did. I was terrified that the calories and fat instantly attached to my body as I ate the food. As soon as I chewed the substance, I was sure that the fat was already being shoved beneath my skin. I could feel myself growing bigger with every chew I made.
I was no longer myself, but completely a robot controlled by the monster. I never expected my curiosity to escalate so far, making me think that I was losing my sanity. I thought that by omitting certain things from my diet, it would in turn make me happy. The weight would come off, I would be more confident in myself, and my self-esteem would rise, giving me the strength that I never had before. Instead of my plan working out like I had imagined, it completely backfired and was doing the exact opposite of what I wanted.
Every time I stepped on the scale, my weight had decreased. My goal was to lose 10 pounds, until I hit that goal. My goal kept getting lower and lower and no number ever satisfied me. Once I cut out food to where I was only eating about 700 calories, barely enough to survive, I began thinking that those 700 calories were even too much. As far as I went, nothing was ever good enough, and I wanted to keep pushing myself further and further. Only I was not sure if I was physically able to keep pushing myself.
Picking out something to eat was always a difficult task. Sometimes I would stand in front of the kitchen cabinet and blankly stare at the food for what seemed like hours. I did not have the courage to take any food off of the shelf, or I was too busy playing a scenario in my head where I was eating the forbidden food I was staring down. The voice in my head went back and forth in every decision I made, exhausting me mentally by the time I did make up my mind. A lot of the time, I walked away before the verdict was made just so I would not have to listen to fighting going back and forth between the monster and me. I knew what was right and he thought he knew what was right. He won most of the time.
By the time I lost enough weight that my pants were sliding down my body because they were too big, my body was not happy with the decisions and intense pressure I had put it under. I began having heart palpitations as a result of not treating myself well. My heart fluttered and it felt as though it was jumping out of my chest. I was worried about having a heart attack, which I knew was not an uncommon result of placing the body under so much stress. My invincibility was wearing away and for the first time, I felt human. I felt like maybe I could be hurt and that my actions may possibly do some damage.
The road I was traveling was not the road that I had planned for myself. I began to question my decisions and past actions. I thought that maybe something would need to be changed, only I felt so powerless and weak against the monster inside. It held me tight and was not going to let go anytime soon. I was afraid to fight back but I was also afraid to stand still and let it continue to rule me. I only knew that I could not fight alone. But I also knew that I was terrified to change, terrified to move at all without the advice that was being given to me 24 hours a day by the voice.
One of my darkest moments was staring into the toilet with my toothbrush hanging from my mouth, and being so depressed that I could not purge from my system the disgusting amount of food that I had just eaten. I sat alone on the bathroom floor and cried over my disappointment. I was so terribly alone, despite the voice screaming in my head. No one had any idea about what I was doing to myself or how much I was suffering.
I realized in that moment that maybe something needed to change. I knew that it was not normal for a girl of 19 to be saddened by not vomiting up the calories. Most people usually hate it when they are sick, yet I was trying to make myself sick. I stared into the water and it took me a minute to recognize the face that was staring back at me. I did not look like myself any more. My eyes were sunken and my skin was dry and more pale than usual. The look on my face was of sadness, not of happiness that I had hoped for those months ago when I started my journey. I had never seen myself in that way before and I was shocked. I could not believe that I had not seen it earlier. I was virtually a completely different person. My body was much thinner, my expressions were much more subdued, and my mind was taken over by the monster in my head. I was not myself at all. And as much as I was uncomfortable with myself in my own skin, I did not like the new person I was becoming, either.
I knew that what I was doing to myself was not going to make me happy, but I still tried to convince myself that maybe it was not making me happy yet, but if I waited, it would eventually happen. The weight lost did not matter, only the weight that I still needed to lose. My world had become a world of numbers and distorted images. What I saw in the mirror was not what was in reality. What I thought was making me stronger was only making me weaker. I had stepped through to a land where no one could ever understand, except those who had experienced it themselves. My life was deteriorating before my eyes and there was nothing to live for any longer. My body was shutting down, begging for me to stop the torture. Everything had become so intense and I regretted my decision to ever begin the descent into hell. I was in my living hell.
In order to change things, the first thing I needed to do was to confide in someone about my troubles, no matter how hard it was going to be for me to get the words out. I was never good at speaking my mind and I usually hid what I was feeling. The fear inside of me was so overwhelming that I considered not going through with telling, but I finally pulled out the strength from within me to tell my mom.
7
Facing Reality
I did not eat at all before I left to go out this morning. I didn't eat whe
n my stomach was rumbling while I was reading. I didn't eat until 2:00 when I couldn't stand it anymore. Actually, I could have, but my mom was home and I wanted her to see I was eating. I had two scrambled eggs. It tasted gross, no taste at all, but I ate it. So I took a nap right before dinner, and I'm happy I did because I wasn't awake enough to think "I can't eat." During dinner, ate the corn kernel by kernel and picked at the ham. I ate, like, seven bites of ham steak and a few fork fulls of corn. I’m not very happy with my lack of food today. I keep telling myself "Erin, just eat! Just go get something and put it in your fucking mouth! Chew and swallow!! EAT IT!" But something is always holding me back, like a part of me enjoys the hunger pains. I wish I could just eat and not have to think about it. I'm terrified of things getting worse, I don't want it to get to the point where I need to be hospitalized, yet I'm scared of things getting better, too. Getting better means eating twice the amount I have been eating. One minute I think "Ok, I just gotta eat. I can do it." and the next minute I think "What if this never goes away?" Sometimes I think nothing's wrong, and I even question whether or not I have a problem, but then I go to eat something and there’s a force that just holds me back. I don't know what it is. I've never even gone on any diets before, even though I've never really been happy with my weight, but to be like this is insane. I don't understand it. It actually feels like I'm going crazy, honestly, it's so weird.
Even though I found the strength within myself, it took weeks to gain enough courage to take the plunge and let my mom in on the secret I was hiding. The fear of the monster became overwhelming and I was unable to keep my secrets any longer. I kept my secrets for long enough and it was time to break free. I had never expressed anything so important to her before in my life and I predicted that it would be a very difficult process. Instead of physically telling her, I decided to write a note. With a note, I could pour my thoughts onto the sheet of paper and not worry about missing information. I could not be interrupted and I would not forget anything that I needed to tell.
Restricted: A novel of half-truths Page 5
