an open book

 

 

I am an open book. At least, more of an open book than I’ve ever been. In the past, I tried to create a beautiful cover but kept my pages sealed shut. I didn’t want anyone to know what was really happening inside. I lived by the idea that letting someone flip through my pages would cause them paper cuts, and I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I thought if I kept things to myself, I’d be able to show you what you wanted to see.

These days I’m pages strewn across the floor, words underlined, in bold, highlighted for anyone to see. I’m a large-font, hard-cover novel.

I’ve come to realize that my calling is to be as authentic as I can be. And for me, that means sharing the parts of me that may not look so shiny or glittery or svelte. It means acknowledging my humanness and ditching perfectionistic ideals that are actually rather boring. It means being unapologetic for my wounds. Because as Rumi would say, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”

One of those wounds began when I was around 12 or 13 years old. It is a wound I don’t often talk about, not because I am ashamed, but rather because my memory around it pales in comparison to other parts of my life.

Around the age of 12, I was diagnosed with an eating disorder. Anorexia nervosa. For someone who loves words and the English language, this was NOT a welcome addition to my vocabulary. It sounded so harsh, so ugly, so medicinal. I liked words like indubitable and superfluous and effervescent. Not anorexia nervosa.

According to the DSM-5 TR, a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa includes the following criteria:

1. Restriction of energy intake relative to requirements leading to a significantly low body weight in the context of age, sex, developmental trajectory, and physical health.
2. Intense fear of gaining weight or becoming fat, even though underweight.
3. Disturbance in the way in which one’s body weight or shape is experienced, undue influence of body weight or shape on self-evaluation, or denial of the seriousness of the current low body weight.

I never considered myself overweight. I went through a few years where my cheeks appear a little fuller in pictures, but my family has always been thin and healthy. Growing up, I was always one of the taller girls. Formulating a reason for my eating disorder proves difficult—my ability to peel apart the past gives some insight into what may have been going on at the time, but I don’t know that I can ever really fully understand the subtle nuances that led me to that diagnosis. In other words, I can attempt to provide theories for what led to my eating disorder, but ultimately, I may not ever fully understand the complexity of what caused it; and, truthfully, I’m not sure that it’s all that important.

Causes of anorexia are not well-understood, although studies suggest there may be some genetic pre-disposition and environmental/societal factors that can affect certain people differently than others.

What I remember about my eating disorder is that I created an idea in my head that I was somehow less than because I was larger in frame than my twin sister, Nina.

No one told me this. It was more that I started becoming aware of subtle differences in my sister and me. As a twin, I knew the world only from that perspective—I wasn’t experiencing life on my own, I was seeing it unfold in real-life for my sister. She was a reference, a blueprint, a guidepost to what “should” be happening. As I got older, I started paying more attention to things that set my sister and me apart. I didn’t have to dig deep—people were good at letting me know what they saw. “You look like your mother; your sister takes after your dad!” Or, “this one talks more,” and “that one is pretty shy,” and soon enough, “you’re so much taller than your sister” started to take on more meaning.

I remember clearly at an Indian wedding, maybe a cousin’s, being confronted by a woman who said something along the lines of, “they’re twins? But this one is so much bigger!”

I’m sure there were other things going on in my life at the time, collections of comments I’d gathered and stored in my mind that I used to support this remark, but that wedding stands out as a pivotal turning point when I made a conscious effort to become small.

I can’t tell you why my life took this course, why my brain worked the way it did, but somewhere in my development, I taught myself that I needed to stop growing. I needed to stay small.

In my eating disorder years, I could have told you the exact number of calories and fat grams for every item in our pantry. I spent family dinners calculating math in my head, using precious time with family and friends to stack together the number of calories in my Macaroni Grill salad. I’d easily forego the bread and Shirley Temples I’d enjoyed as a kid. Everything I put into my body mattered. (It’s ironic, now, to think how I went from such a strict gatekeeper of what went into my body to allowing a free flow of alcohol to pour through my veins in later years).

I became obsessed with exercise, too, counting the number of times I went up and down the stairs, ripping out pages from Fitness magazine to collect a binder of workout routines with headlines promising to tone up for summer and shed extra weight in 2 weeks. I vividly remember tracking my belly’s growth (or, in this case, it’s shrinking) against my tub—the way you’d track a child’s height against the doorframe—measuring my worth by how much I displaced the water in my bath. I wanted to see my belly flatten, to track its progress down, to become flush with my hips and legs.

I wanted to disappear.

In some ways, I think my eating disorder started to seep into all aspects of my life. Instead of just disappearing in stature, I started thinking I needed to be small everywhere else, too. I started reigning in that carefree, silly side of me that voiced her imaginations and shimmied in front of any willing audience. I began to conform, to mold, to try to fit in to what I thought others expected of me. I retreated inside my mind, my thoughts catalysts for all sorts of masks I’d put on, drifting farther and farther from the me I knew.

My most honest conversations were held between pen and paper, my journals a safe place to pick apart the different voices in my head. The few moments I let myself go writing, I felt a freedom I couldn’t find anywhere else. I started navigating life in my diaries, opening up in ways I never felt safe to do with another person.

But now. Now I wish I knew then what I know now. That help is accessible, available, affordable. That these stories we tell ourselves are often misguided and that comparison is the thief of joy. That our bodies are our temples, the houses for our souls. Treat them well. Give them grace. Acknowledge the blessings that are so easy to take for granted. Be willing to change your perspective. Be willing to forgive yourself.

There’s so much more to say on this. But for now, this is my step forward into embracing all of me, the years that have shaped me and led me to where I am. The years that have somehow gotten lost in the unfolding, that have been put by the wayside. Here’s my commitment to them: I will not shut the door on you, but I will move forward. I will recognize you as pages in my book that deserve to be told, but that do not define me. I will welcome your story, your lessons, your guidance, and I will always seek to remain an open book.