Her mind was changing, and so was her body. One day she noticed that her belly button was a different shape. “That was the moment that I could see that there was actual physical change in my body,” she remembers. She lost weight that she had once been desperate to get rid of, without being so attached to its significance. It seemed to fall away. In “meeting her body where it is,” she had come to understand that she was okay, that her body was okay, that everything was okay. Years of therapy, hundreds of antidepressants, sleeping pills and tranquilizers, and a $150,000 education had not given her that knowledge.
Knowledge is power, but cognitive knowledge is not the only kind that makes us strong and happy. In fact, it appears that cognitive knowledge rarely makes anyone strong and happy on its own. It also doesn’t make people any more interesting or kind.
Becky found in that yoga studio and in the years afterward something she had been searching for throughout college. She had been in such pain, huddled over the toilet, vomiting her guts out, sometimes twice a day. In those moments, it was not her religion textbook or her feminist reader that she most longed for. It was self-acceptance. It was comfort. It was faith in the beauty of her body regardless of its size. These things don’t come from the intellect alone. They come from the soul. You can rationalize until you are blue in the face, but you are never going to believe that you are beautiful unless you believe it in the regions below your brain. I have tried numerous times to “think my way” into a healthy relationship with my body, and it always backfires. A well-intentioned commitment to eating a balanced diet often leads to guilt and criticism. An innocent fitness schedule can become boring, militaristic workouts. These attempts fail if the heart, the senses, and the soul are missing. Spontaneity is crucial to health. Listening to when your body is hungry, and for what, is a mindful act anathema to most young women. In fact, the majority of those I interviewed for this book don’t even know how to identify when they are hungry or when they are full. They have so intellectualized the rights and wrongs of feeding themselves that they can’t feel a damn thing.
Becky learned to listen again, but even more important, she learned to believe. Studying religion is far different from experiencing spirituality, for which the brain must be shut off, the heart turned up. Spirituality requires that perfect girls stop thinking, planning, judging, and start sensing. It requires that we start listening to the quiet but insistent starving daughter within us—the part that cries and wants and hungers so voraciously when ignored or when fed paltry substitutes for what it craves.
It also requires us to embrace the possibility that the most basic of our needs and desires, the most average of everyday life, will have to feed us. Perhaps true spirituality is found not in our grandparents’ tall-steeple religions but in the joy of a walk in the snow on a Sunday afternoon or the warmth of a bowl of split pea soup. Perhaps the very thing we are trying to run from—our ordinariness, the ordinariness of everyday life—is where divinity dwells.
Transcendence
Heather watched other women in the dining hall and secretly felt superior—as if she had evolved above the need to make petty little decisions about what to eat and when. “They are in a different category of people,” she remembers thinking. “Their perceptions are different. They aren’t on level one, where I am.” The negotiation that once went on in her head had been minimized to one easy and clean word: No. No, she would not eat that. No, she would not go out drinking. No, she would not have a relationship with any of her shaggy-haired suitors. No, she would not stop running when everyone else did. No became her hourly, sometimes minute-to-minute, prayer.
Her commitment to the safe and powerful no became even stronger as she watched another woman on her track team and “on her level.” She remembers: “You could see all of her ligaments and muscles, a lot of her bones. Everyone would say, ‘Oh my gosh, she is so disgusting,’ but I just thought that was so attractive. I wanted to be like that.” Heather never approached this woman about their shared romance with the word no, but she watched and took notes. She strove to become even more “evolved,” even more in control. One rainy night on a bus trip home from a big race, her partner in starving leaned over and whispered, “You know, if you ever need to talk, I’m here.” Heather smiled and whispered, “Thanks.”
Heather explains, “We both knew that would never happen. It is a very private thing and a very individual thing. I secretly took pride in being anorexic, and she threatened that. She was the competition, not someone to unite with.” They were each aiming to rise higher above the mess of human existence than the other, become more holy, more pure, more powerful. Unlike bulimics, who sometimes binge and purge together, or share war stories about their worst episodes, many anorectics see their disease as an individual journey toward lightness— as a religious pilgrimage of sorts that no one can possibly understand or experience with them. They strive toward a state of being that they believe is too difficult for the average person to endure.
And they are right. In the process of all that striving, two things shattered for Heather. One was her body. Slowly but undeniably, Heather’s body started to break down. She suffered from stress fractures, from fatigue, from a pulled hamstring. Her injuries made her feel suddenly human—an intolerable state for her at the time. Running was her entire identity, so when her coach recommended she take a couple of days off, it felt like a death sentence. Who was she if she wasn’t maniacally circling the track or pounding through the woods around campus? Who was she if she wasn’t transcending the need to stop or slow down? Her body became her enemy in an even more pronounced way—it was the weakness standing between her delusions of invincibility and her reality.
The other thing that broke loose despite her painful effort to hold it all together was her will. She started slipping, started giving in to her hunger, started acting like the girls she had once secretly loathed in the dining hall. With her body disobeying her pledge for perfection, her mind followed.
At first it began under the guise of prerace carbo loads—a common practice among runners. “I started going to the dining hall alone the night before a meet,” she remembers, “and eating a ton of food. But then I would end up feeling really ashamed. I would think, I’m disgusting. I am this huge pig. That’s when I started purging too.” No longer able to fit the world into tiny, manageable boxes, Heather was forced to reckon with her own humanness again.
“Reading back in my journal,” she tells me, “I see this very obvious division in myself, even in the handwriting. When I was in perfectionist mode, I wrote long lists of goals in this tiny little print. Then the next day, when I’d failed to meet those goals, the entry would be this big scrawling handwriting: ‘I hate myself. I’m disgusting.’ It was like this whole different person.” Heather’s journal reads like a chronicle of the perfect girl-starving daughter dichotomy. Its neat and clean plans for eating less, running more, studying, excelling at ways to fix her un-acceptably messy life (perfect girl) were etched next to long, loopy lists of foods she had succumbed to (starving daughter). She was, quite simply, torn in two.
Eating disorders are enticing to perfect girls because they are a kind of release from the monotony and frustration of daily life. Eating disorders, and eating-disordered behaviors, are like shortcuts—an anorectic doesn’t have to struggle with the daily choices of what to eat and when, she merely doesn’t. The bulimic gets to mute her loneliness or sadness or anxiety in a pile of the sweets and carbs she thinks she desires, then purge her system of it before it gets absorbed (this is actually an illusion of transcendence . . . many bulimics remain at a normal body weight or actually gain weight, because their bodies get hip to the routine and start sucking up whatever calories they can find before the food gets purged). Overexercisers fly high above the mundane world on endorphins, truly transcendent for a short time.
Perfect girls aren’t attracted to the “stuff” of everyday life. We watched our moms juggle the stuff—the plumber, the laundry, the dinner,
the hole in the stockings—and collapse at the end of the day. We weren’t raised to be domestic, to respect balance, or to think of ourselves as cogs in a giant societal machine. We have a collective delusion that we will create lives less messy than our parents’.
Eating disorders fit into this delusion and provide a way to rise above diets and mundane concepts about weight gain. We will be thin and brilliant and funny, all with no fuss. We will be “effortlessly perfect.”
But effortless perfection is an exhausting, futile pursuit that requires a tremendous amount of self-denial and emotional control. There is a mentality, among young women who strive to be perfect but among runners in particular, that there is something weak about listening to the body. You must dig down and muster the strength to overcome your pain or fatigue. You must not listen to the signs or signals from your feeble body. You must, in essence, overcome your humanness.
Central to the oppressive effort to be perfect is the notion that the body is tainted, that its urges are primitive and embarrassing. Anorectics want to transcend this “dirty” system by becoming pure, weightless, unfettered by earthly desires. This idea of transcending the dirtiness of the body has ancient roots. In Holy Anorexia, Rudolph Bell explores how those in religious orders during medieval times starved themselves as evidence of their devotion to Jesus Christ. Those who triumphed over their earthly needs—food, comfort, sensuality— were lauded as holy martyrs. Their ultimate reward was death.
Modern anorectics may not be starving for the sake of Christ, but they certainly buy into the ancient idea of hunger as weakness. Though they take this notion to the extreme, in truth they are not far off from the attitude the rest of society often takes toward the body and its pesky needs. Work and success, not balance or sensitivity, are our ultimate virtues. Growing up in the superwoman eighties and the dot-com nineties, younger women believed that success was achievable if we were dedicated and self-sacrificing enough. The message today has not changed much. Reality TV gives us fine examples of women transcending weakness to beat everyone else—Survivor, The Apprentice, America’s Next Top Model.
Successful women are not supposed to be weighted down with the average tasks of everyday life; they are supposed to be able to pay someone else to do them and get on with being fabulous. Complaining about sticking to workout plans or struggling with restrictive diets is the stuff of the dowdy, the unsuccessful, and the powerless. The women whom my generation looks up to seem to fly above the messiness of life, their bodies like well-crafted statements of who they are. But any woman who appears to be effortlessly perfect is spending hours a day sweating and grunting in a gym, or undergoing messy cosmetic surgery.
When “real” women try to get to perfection by transcending the messiness of life, they get in trouble. They get sick. They get sad. They get, as Heather did, split in two. They spend so much energy denying their sensible hungers and cravings that their inner starving daughters start asserting themselves in big, aggressive ways. Instead of escaping the mundanities of earthly existence, they become ravaged by them. What was once an easy process—Do I want that sandwich? No. Do I want that burger? No. Do I want that salad? Half—becomes a much more complex and painful conversation.
No Less Than a Holy War
Like many young born-again Christian women in America, my twenty-one-year-old cousin Anna was raised on God and country. The church she grew up in was nestled in the beautiful mountains of Colorado, just outside her town, population ninety-two. She lived in a trailer until she was thirteen years old and my uncle Allan got the money to build a house. He’s a fireman. My aunt keeps the books at the local inn.
Anna is gorgeous. She has almost frighteningly large eyes with thick, deep black lashes. Her hair is straight and shiny brown, her lips full and pink. She went to the prom with the prom king when she was just a first-year in high school. If anyone had escaped a poor self-image, I always assumed, it would have been Anna.
And then I asked. Anna was visiting me one March, and we were walking around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when our conversation started to shift to eating disorders and nutrition. Anna had taken a nutrition class the previous semester, and we talked about all of the obsessive girls who filled the class, tilting their heads to one side and feigning innocence while asking questions like “What would happen if someone ate half of the daily calorie recommendation?”
We both laughed at these desperate girls. We talked about our love of sports and our hearty mothers (sisters), who had raised us to run and jump and flirt to our hearts’ content. Finally we got around to talking honestly about our own negative feelings about our bodies. I told her about my experience in college—how I always felt on the edge of an eating disorder. She looked at me with those wide eyes, wet with relief, and admitted that she felt that way most of the time.
Not my Anna! I was screaming inside my head. She isn’t rich like all those girls I went to school with, the ones with the disappearing mothers and the absent fathers! She grew up sledding and hiking and praying. She grew up sheltered from fashion trends and personal trainers.
But it was true. A working-class background, a small town, a religious upbringing . . . none of it could protect her from the slow creep of food and fitness preoccupation. In fact, when I asked Anna to describe what it was like on days she felt particularly in danger of falling over that edge, she answered, “It is a constant battle in my head. My academic training tells me what’s good for me and what I should be eating, but then the insecure devil in my head takes over and is like, ‘You’re fat, you shouldn’t be eating that.’ The thing that keeps me from giving in is the other voice, the God voice. I pray, ‘God, let me see me through your eyes and not the world’s.’”
She paused then, looked up as if communicating with her savior, and said, “I think that’s the constant walk with God that you have to do. You’re never going to be the perfect Christian, but you have to learn to trust Him. You have to learn not to lean on your own understanding of the world, but His.”
Women’s struggle with their bodies is a holy war going on inside their own minds. The devil, whether the one found in the Bible or the one in the diet industry, is there, and he is telling you that you are bad, that you deserve nothing, that you have already screwed it all up. Your intellect is there, trying to be rational about calories, carbs, and cardio, chastising you for being so emotional, so needy. The little-girl you, or the middle-school you, or the first-day-at-college you might be there too—hungry, scared, alone. Your mother is also there—maybe judging, maybe criticizing, maybe trying to protect you. And if you are lucky, and have a God to call upon, or a guardian angel, or a kind, dead grandmother, maybe he or she is there too—trying to be heard above the shouting match among the rest of the voices. No wonder we are in so much pain.
I first understood the extent of this battle in the brain because of Anna, but I heard it echoed in hundreds of girls’ stories in the course of researching this book. Another woman, who preferred to stay anonymous, explains: “My issues with eating and when to work out and all that is basically spiritual warfare. I have all these lies in my head, and it takes my faith in God to rebuke them.” Another woman, who does not identify with a specific religion, explains: “I know, in my heart of hearts, that I was created by some energy that thinks I am okay the way I am, but I have so many other voices in my head—evil, destructive ones—that make me think otherwise.”
We are not just negotiating the mass markets’ claims about food, diet, fitness, beauty, sex, and success, we are negotiating the mixed messages inside our own minds, refereeing our own complex psychologies. Like puppets on invisible strings, we are played by our own thoughts. Perfect girls may make passing comments about feeling gross because we drank or ate too much the night before, but we rarely, if ever, expose this battle in our brains. This cacophony of voices is kept hidden, buried beneath layers of political correctness and pride—a meticulously, if unconsciously, protected image of who we want the world to understand
us to be. We are hardly conscious of these voices ourselves. We experience the emotional aftermath of their shouting—the guilt, shame, confusion, frustration, loneliness—but we rarely tune in to the content of the messages, rarely interrogate them for validity, rarely even trace them to their sources.
Does this sound familiar?
You walk past your bedroom mirror and catch a glimpse of your ass in sweatpants. Gross! Am I really that fat? Have I been walking around all this time with that big, fat ass, not even realizing how huge it is? That is unforgivable. I am such a mess. I need to get my life under control. Today I’m not going to eat even breakfast—set the tone from the start. I should go make some coffee.
Maybe your go-girl feminist tries to sneak in: Oh, come on. It’s not that bad. I’m just one of those girls who has a big ass. Some guys like big asses. I should just eat healthier. I’m probably not getting enough protein. I should have a shake for breakfast.
And the little girl, the lonely searcher, the starving daughter: I just want to be pretty. Why is that so frickin’ hard to achieve? I don’t have to be a supermodel. I just want to be attractive. I just want to look in the mirror and feel good about what I see. Is that impossible? It feels impossible. I am so tired of this. I feel like just staying home from school. I feel like sitting in front of the TV all day and eating bowls of cereal. I’m so sick of everything.
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body Page 34
