None of these things makes us feel perfect or even good enough. None of these things fills up the emptiness inside, the one that Anna Quindlen warned us about: “If you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be.” When you turn twenty-five and you look up from the toilet bowl or the keyboard or the steering wheel and you realize that there is nothing where there should be at the center of your life, at the center of your body, at the center of your soul, what do you do? When you realize that the hunger you feel is for something much larger, much more substantial than a paycheck or a flat stomach or a cute boyfriend, where do you look for spiritual sustenance?
12. Spiritual Hunger
Lacking spiritual sustenance, there is genuine hunger and thirst.
—Marion Woodman
At the center of my generation’s struggle with food and fitness is identity, and at the center of identity is spirit. Perfect girls were raised on the striving rationality of the eighties and the dot-com optimism of the nineties. For some of us, the closest thing we experienced to religion was a few Easter Sundays at church and some serious praying before the SATs. We were not conditioned to think of our religious affiliations as crucial on our path to success. Religion, instead, was the stuff of grandparents and world history classes. There was no real place for grand religion in a world growing smaller and smaller. The miracles we witnessed were technological. Efficiency, not piety, became the highest virtue.
Yes, some of us spent Sundays being wowed by big-screen theatrics in megachurches. Yes, some of us grew up reveling in the long summers away at Jewish camps. But even those of us who did grow up with a strong religious diet were often fed it in a fairly benign way. You don’t really have to wait until marriage, just be sure you are in love. I know Daddy isn’t supposed to drive on Saturday morning, but we need milk. Fasting doesn’t mean we can’t have a few snacks.
All of this ambiguity has led to a generation of relatively lost souls. We have studied divinity but never experienced it. We have read about religious wars in faraway lands but are unable to identify with people who would blow themselves up for a god for which there is no hard-and-fast evidence. We have affiliated when it was convenient—having a religious club to attend in the first weeks of college is a great way to get dates.
Some of us, for lack of a “capital G” God, have searched out little gods. We worship technology, celebrities, basketball players, rock stars, supermodels, video games. We try to emulate those who are quick, rich, beautiful—not steady, giving, or honest. We move fast all the time—fast food, fast cars, fast loans, fast promotions, fast diets. Instant gratification, not eternal salvation, is our primary concern.
We are a generation devoid of authentic rituals. The closest thing to a lasting coming-of-age ritual—the bat mitzvah—has turned into a consumption circus. Bling, not brakhot (blessings), is the central theme of the once holy event. Thirteen-year-old girls beg their parents for celebrity performances, outlandish party favors, designer dresses. The MTV reality show hit My Super Sweet 16 demonstrates what happens across America three years later: sickening decadence that only serves to feed the insatiable appetites of already spoiled brats. As one young woman I interviewed explained, “My friend got to choose, either a car or a boob job for her sweet sixteen. She chose the boob job but got the car anyway.”
Perfect girls turn themselves into their own little god projects. We strive to become the perfect human being, not in terms of service or soul but in terms of size. We go to the gym religiously, deny the foods of messy mortals, sculpt our bodies into the only divine we know. As Marion Woodman writes of these lost women, “They create their own rituals, but because they don’t realize what they are doing they may invoke the wrong god, and be subject to that power whether they like it or not.”
These empty substitute rituals, this misguided worship, intellectualization, addiction to moving fast has led my generation to a dark and lonely place. In the inevitable stillness that frightens the hell out of a perfect girl, she must ask herself not What is the size of my stomach? but What is the quality of my soul? What do I believe in? What is my purpose? Is there a black hole where my core should be? Is there anything inside of me that can sustain rejection, disappointment, loneliness? Is there something solid, like resilience, instead of something hollow, like perfection?
Marion Woodman writes of our generation: “They have no sense of everlasting arms to uphold them through the crisis of life.” We are not truly resilient, in part because we have little faith. We are not satisfied, because we are always waiting for evidence of our worth. We are not strong of soul, because we spend so much time obsessing about our bodies. In Nicole Blackman’s beautiful poem “Daughter,” she promises to teach her unborn daughter that within her is an “army” . . . “that can save her life.”
Do you have such a belief?
Substitute Gods
Heather’s* religion was running. Something about flying over the trails was transcendent. She pounded her barely cushioned joints into the dirt until a fog took over her brain. During these long, methodical runs, she felt most right with the world. The usual ache at her center was rocked to sleep by the rhythmic pounding of her feet against the earth.
While running, she was not just an ordinary human being, subject to the monotony of daily diet choices and messy relationships. She was not Heather from a middle-class family in Maryland. She was not typical or ordinary. She hovered above all that, better somehow, more holy. She was special—a star runner on her college cross-country team, an Olympic hopeful, a fast and fierce competitor. When she ran, she shed the flesh of an imperfect world and became something untouchable.
If running was Heather’s religion, then food was her gravest sin. She began starving herself in high school, very deliberately whittling away her daily intake of food until family dinners were the only times she would indulge in meals. The small snacks she did allow herself— nonfat yogurt in the morning and a glass of orange juice, a piece of fruit or some veggies for lunch, a juice box and a few pretzels after track—became ritualistic. She examined every grain of salt sticking to the pretzel she was about to put in her mouth and scraped every speck of yogurt out of the container.
Some of her friends told her track coach how little she was eating, and he pulled her aside after practice one day. His wife, also a runner, had suffered from anorexia and eventually been hospitalized. As a scare tactic, he told Heather about his wife’s struggles. Heather remembers, “I could tell how he was trying to show how bad it was, but in my mind it was like, Wow, I want to be like that. The extremity of her devotion was something to aspire to in my mind.” The coach’s wife had ripped out her feeding tube while in the hospital. Heather thought of her, secretly, as a role model.
The coach also spoke to Heather’s parents, but her mother insisted that Heather ate dinner every night and seemed just to be truly dedicated to her sport. Heather’s mother walked through life with a permagrin. “Put on a happy face. Everything is fine all the time. Be the kind of person that gets along with everyone and doesn’t ever cause a scene” were the lessons that Heather’s mother most adamantly communicated to her growing up.
Her father, though overshadowed by Heather’s domineering mother, did manage to bring up her disease once. Heather remembers that one random Sunday night, as they put away the dinner dishes, he simply blurted out, “Do you think you have an eating disorder?”
“Yup,” she replied, without looking over at him.
“I am a dry alcoholic,”† he responded.
They never spoke about it again.
Many perfect girls, like Heather, pursue weight loss with a religious fervor. They become ritualistic about their eating habits, describe food as forbidden or sinful, grow extremely dogmatic in their views on nutrition or fitness, and in the process develop a view of themselves as almost sai
ntlike figures—pounds away from messy human existence. Starving or running becomes their religion. They become their own demigods. The bona fide higher power is anorexia itself.
This is nowhere more evident than in the phenomenon of “pro-ana” websites popping up all over the Internet. As Mark Morford, a San Francisco Gate columnist, put it: “Girls have anthropomorphized anorexia.” Women, mostly teenagers, have created sites that glamorize and worship anorexia, exchanging tips on how to cut back on food without anyone noticing, creating communities of disappearing women who support one another in the pursuit of skin and bones. There are also “pro-mia” websites, similarly devoted to praising bulimia. A tip found on one reads, “Don’t eat/drink anything that is a red color. When vomiting, in some cases bleeding may occur and you won’t know if it’s serious, or just what you ate/drank.” These teens have found their “thinspiration,” as many of them call it, in cyberspace. They pray to Ana and Mia, their designated goddesses of thin.
The women who frequent these sites claim that they have not a disease but a chosen lifestyle. After all, some claim, they are only reflecting what is already in the culture. They feature photographs of celebrities and fashion models curving over lecterns at award shows or posing for pictures in skimpy bikinis that show off their ribs. One website, designed to question the mainstream media’s shock at the pro-ana and pro-bulimia movement, reads: “Our culture is pro anorexia in every sense, long before these websites emerged. At least they are being honest about what they promote.”
Beyond the official “pro-ana” and “pro-mia” sites, many young women fill message boards or individual blogs (on LiveJournal or other free hosting sites) with tips for how to eat as few calories as possible or how to get out of hospitalization. Some of these girls post pictures of themselves wasting away, followed by captions describing how much more weight they want to lose. On the community boards, I found the following posting by a user named hipbones on January 13, 2006:
I am starting a five day fast tomorrow. I just got my hoodia pills† back. So I’ll take two a day and some whenever I get hungry. I am going to be fucking skinny.
And on the same day, a user named ana_blush writes:
I have only signed up for this account this week, but before that i was writing things on paper, what does that do? I’m just glad to be sharing things with people who i know wont frown upon it. no matter what it is you’re doing you have support here.
why the hell cant the real world be more like this?
These girls, many of them as young as eleven and twelve, are searching out more than girlfriends to dish with. They are searching out a place that is less unpredictable, more supportive, more pure than the world around them. All of the elements of religion are present: the god, the worship, the dedication, the ritual, the community, the sin, and the salvation. Just as Heather was looking for an identity that felt special— the star runner, the paragon of willpower and dedication—these girls are hungry for some kind of recognition, some community in a world that seems so big and uncontrollable it simply swallows them up.
The desire to be thin is, at base, a desire to be recognized, a desire to be loved, a desire to be accepted. These are all things that the average religion promises. When women don’t have that fundamental sense of belonging, of being seen and appreciated, they often decide that the culprits are their waistlines. Instead of seeking to understand and fulfill their needs through a spiritual practice or philosophy, they look to the most immediate quick fix. As they struggle over pounds, they become distracted from the deeper reality. The food, not the pain or the neglect or the discrimination, becomes the ultimate enemy. And in turn, their bodies are the battleground.
We find substitute gods—Ana, Mia, ourselves, supermodels, celebrities—because the authentic kind are hard to conceptualize. Our bodies are immediate, the reality of our wide hips or our round stomachs with us every minute of the day. We face the prospect of eating three times a day—that is three times a day when we put ourselves up to the challenge of being “virtuous” or “sinful,” three times a day when our worship of thinness is reinforced. How can that possibly compete with the biannual drop-ins at church, or even the once-a-week visits to temple?
Few in my generation were raised with the notion that seeking an individual spirituality is integral to success—at least not explicitly so. Many of us were raised by ex-Catholics, Buddhist converts, and reform Jews traumatized by their own dogmatic upbringings and determined not to push their children in any religious direction. But without a push of any kind, some of us missed the touch. We gravitated toward ideas, not faith. And as anyone who has been knocked down by sadness or sickness or exhaustion knows, ideas don’t make a great cushion.
Taking the Leap
One of the biggest challenges young women face is the jump across the abyss that separates our intellectual understanding from our daily reality. We know in theory that balance and wellness are the goal, but in our day-to-day lives, balance seems boring and wellness geriatric. Jumping across this abyss requires some maturity. It also requires faith that you can get to the other side and that, once you are there, you will still resemble yourself.
Faith is not something smart girls come by easily. We are taught to be analytical. Young women, especially those on rigorous academic tracks, spend a lot of time training to stay in their heads instead of their hearts, an essential skill for moving forward in the world and expressing themselves. But perhaps we spend so much time stuffing our brains with information that our other psychological muscles—like the muscle to hope, the muscle just to be, the muscle to experience sensuality—grow weak. You can’t understand that your body is okay the way it is. You have to just know it, to pay attention to what it tells you through the ache in your belly or the tiredness in your feet.
As a high-achieving senior at a private eastern college, Becky took a class titled Reading the Anorexic Body. She had chosen it because of her own battle with bulimia. Becky also studied Buddhism that semester—learning about the Buddha’s long journey to nirvana, his eightfold way, the depressing and integral concept that “life is suffering.” She wrote different types of meditations on three-by-five index cards and memorized them for the test, but she didn’t actually try them out.
When she graduated, she moved to San Francisco to teach preschool. One cloudy Saturday she stumbled into a yoga class and geared up for an hour of torture, but the instructor opened by asking them all to get in a restful position. She started chanting and lighting incense and encouraged them to feel the light and energy of a greater force, to fill the room with their own offering of loving-kindness. It was a culture shock after the rigidity and rationality characteristic of Becky’s upbringing. She says, “I had grown up on the East Coast. I had a lot of East Coast intensity to me.” She was unaccustomed, she realized, to listening without judgment. She was more used to analyzing, critiquing, and arguing.
Becky no longer binged and purged with regularity, but she still critiqued the size of her stomach daily. She still sought out the latest diets to fix her unacceptable physique. She was recovering from the disappointment of the weight she had gained back after scrapping the South Beach Diet.
But sitting in that light-filled yoga studio, smelling the pungent aroma of patchouli, listening to the sounds of strangers offering their voices—however untrained—to one united hum, she couldn’t help noticing that her consciousness sank from her brain down into her body for the first time in years. The instructor said, “Meet your body where it is.” Becky got goose bumps. She actually felt the strain of her shoulder blades pulling back in downward dog. She noticed how heavy her head was when she leaned over for forward bend. She experienced the movement of each one of her precious vertebrae as she straightened back to standing.
That one statement affected her enormously: “I thought of it constantly—‘meet your body where it is.’ It was in such opposition to the mentality of squeezing every ounce of fat out of your body, use it and abuse it. ‘
Meet your body where it is’ became my mantra in terms of really being aware and mindful and listening. It changed things for me, it really did.”
Throughout the next few years, Becky resurrected her ability to live inside her body without constantly judging and evaluating it. She said her mantra to herself on the walk to work, while shopping in the organic grocery store, when she woke up, and when she went to sleep. “Not only did yoga physically change my body,” Becky explains, glowing, “but I started to think about eating in a different way. I started thinking about how I was fueling my body.” She gave up dairy, because she realized that her body was rejecting it—her skin cleared up and her chronic congestion finally ended. She fed her body when it was hungry. She didn’t feed it when it was sleepy or emotionally overwrought. She started taking yoga constantly, thriving off her renewed relationship with her body, in that moment, right there and then.
Her Buddhist class was finally making sense. All the concepts she had put on flash cards became part of her daily practice. Buddhist mindfulness, the practice of staying truly aware in the moment rather than thinking of past or present, was changing her entire experience of the world—Now I am brushing my teeth. How does the brush feel against my gums? What does the toothpaste taste like? How many muscles are coordinated in spitting it out? She was finally understanding harmful attachment—the concept that clinging to a desire can be poisonous to your well-being. When she faced a plate of cookies and heard the starving-daughter voice inside her mind shout, “I just can’t help it! I have to have it,” she took a step back and drew a deep breath, as she taught her preschool students to do. Usually there was a powerful message underneath if she listened hard enough. Usually it was not cookies she desired but rest or laughter or recognition.
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body Page 33
