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CW: Eating disorders
Last week for a friend’s birthday, I went to an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant, something I’ve strategically avoided my entire life up until now. I thought about avoiding it again, initially telling the friend who’d invited me I was tired (true), before conceding that I would love to join for dinner.
It’s not the sushi itself I wanted to avoid. I love sushi. But part of what feels safe to me about sushi under typical circumstances (not an all-you-can eat setting) is that the quantities are limited. You order a salmon avocado roll and know it’s going to be six, maybe eight, delicious pieces: exact and controlled. At an all-you-can-eat restaurant, these limitations go out the window. That’s precisely why a lot of people enjoy the experience. One friend who sat at the table with me said, “It’s just really fun to have no limits on a type of food that’s usually very limited.”
I want to have that attitude. I want to do what everyone else is doing. I want a truckload of food to arrive at our table and I want to look at it with excitement, see it as a challenge: dinner gamified. Instead, when a sushi boat descended onto our four-top, I felt panicked. Before any of the food could even enter my body, I was filled up by disgust.
This is a mortifying admission. Which is why I find myself at a awkward crossroads at this point in my eating disorder recovery. My symptoms are largely invisible to other people. So I’m left with the choice to either align myself with an identity as a sick person and remind people what I’m trying to navigate, or simply pretend it isn’t happening. Move along—no mental illness to see here!
At dinner I chose the latter. I took my cues from what everyone else was doing. Ate to the point of stuffed discomfort. There is nothing wrong with eating a big meal, nothing wrong with feeling full and choosing to order another round of sashimi anyway.
But the problem with pretending I’m recovered enough to do what everyone else is doing is that it doesn’t stymie what comes later.
I still got home and felt horrified that my body housed all that food. I felt grotesque; waves of body dysmorphia were activated by one single meal. Experiencing this high level of distress, all the CBT and DBT skills I’d learned and practiced went out the window: body trust evaporated; I couldn’t reappraise a thought if I’d wanted to. I was left with the sense that the only way to get rid of my uncomfortable feelings was to use eating disorder behaviors. So I did.
Relapses happen, and I don’t consider this a big one. All-you-can-eat sushi and what it precipitated wasn’t catastrophic, and I can come back from it. Replacing maladaptive coping mechanisms (which have long been my default) with adaptive ones isn’t a clean 1:1 trade, and I’m trying not to fault myself for returning to behaviors that feel safe and comfortable.
But the whole experience highlights the broken thought pattern that led me into this situation: I have a habit of assuming the people I’m with are “normal about food” and that I should key off their behavior to blend in. There are several problems with this initial assumption.
For one thing, no one is “normal about food.” People may not actively have an eating disorder, but it’s pretty hard not to be influenced by diet culture and anti-fat bias at some level. Our world is fucked up about food, and simply by existing in a culture that tells us diets = discipline, exercise = virtue, fat = bad, most of us are a little fucked up about food and bodies. We all have our hangups.
Which brings me to the second crack in my initial assumption. There isn’t a gold standard, or even a goal, for how I should feel and react when a massive boat of sushi arrives in front of me. People will, and do, have wildly different reactions to food and how they feel after they’ve consumed it. I often imagine that one of the goals of recovery is to see that boat of sushi or walk into a buffet and feel excited. That may happen for me at some point, but it also might not. An alternative, more reasonable goal would be to one day watch that sushi boat to arrive without being gripped by anxiety.
Above all, other people’s reactions to food don’t matter to my own recovery. They aren’t meaningful, let alone helpful, benchmarks for how I should act to protect myself and continue to heal. A recovery-oriented mindset necessitates shifting my awareness from what everyone else is doing to what I am doing. It’s this awareness that allows me to catch myself in a broken train of thought or notice the urge to go for a run in order to alleviate emotional discomfort and instead wait for the urge to pass.
When I lose the awareness, that’s when I model my behavior on other people’s. That’s when I allow a gap to form between how recovered I pretend to be and how recovered I actually am.
In January, I listened to an episode of Preet Bharara’s podcast where he had Masha Gessen on the show, and they spoke about the distinctly American “let’s move on” culture, a refusal to reckon with the past. Gessen calls this “the rush to relegate to memory something that is still happening.” They’re talking here on a national and global scale—the American response to international conflict and the Trump presidency and fallout—but I was struck by this phrase because it felt so relatable on the scale of the individual, felt so personal to me.
Eating disorders are unpalatable to other people when they show up as identifiable behaviors. But once they aren’t visible, everyone else moves on, and I desperately want to move on too.
In wishing that I’m fully recovered, I feel an urgency to bury the era of my life that was characterized by sickness. I’m near the end of my four years in Boston, and I’m so tempted to dig a hole and shove my ED in, then drive across the country and pretend it’s all behind me. I want people to forget, and I, myself, want to forget. Cue “the rush to relegate to memory something that is still happening.”
All-you-can-eat sushi was a case in point: it’s too soon to relegate my eating disorder to memory; I’m not fully recovered. In high-stress situations, I still revert to disordered behaviors, and when I ignore this reality, I risk all the work I’ve already put in.
What I really want is for my ED to be irrelevant to my existence, or more acutely, my personhood. I don’t want it to affect how other people see me, or how I see myself—which is why I was so desperate to disguise it at the sushi restaurant, and why I’m hesitant to write about it, even now. I hope (and believe?) that it will become a smaller and smaller part of my life, but expecting that “full recovery” will mean it’s as if my ED never existed is unrealistic, and perhaps dangerous.
An eating disorder is less something I can bury and forget about, less of a malignancy I can excise, and more a soundtrack on loop, audible only, incessantly, to me—silent disco style. It’s gotten quieter, but much as I want it to be silent, and to be silent about it, I still hear it. That’s okay, but it’s also okay to let other people listen. I think that’s why I wrote this essay—to play the soundtrack out loud.
Fortnightly Faves
This essay, “The Feminist Case for Breast Reduction,” by Melissa Febos (author of Girlhood). Piercing and personal (and political).
Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby which I read in two days. I’ve read so little literature featuring trans characters in a meaningful way, and the way each character grapples with womanhood (and parenthood) from so many angles made me think more critically. If you haven’t read it yet, add it to the top of the list.
This amazing longform piece by Jon Mooallem for the New York Times Magazine. I stayed up late reading it first (the photos and videos in the article are very cool) and then listened to Mooallem narrate the story for The Daily’s Sunday Long Read the next morning. I loved it both times.
Six episodes (so far) of Open & Shut, a podcast examining the (often underreported) role of prosecutors in the criminal justice system. It also happens to be reported and produced by my brilliant college classmate Phoebe Petrovic. The final episode drops this Wednesday!
This review of Angela Garbes’ book Essential Labor in which Jia Tolentino dives into motherhood—her own motherhood, and the way we as a culture view mothers (and caregivers). I am in a sensy mood right now but it brought me close to tears.
"diets = discipline, exercise = virtue, fat = bad" is a spot-on diagnosis of our culture. Very well written!
Beautiful introspection. You are undoubtedly helping many in sharing this journey