32. Unreliable narrator

Stick to The Story

Hello hi good morning. Since moving to CA, I have been sleeping a shocking amount and feel deeply ready for a three day weekend. I hope you have the chance to rest as well. If you value the work that goes into these newsletters and have the means, think about becoming a paid subscriber.

CW: eating disorder

In one of my journalism classes, each student was randomly assigned a peer to interview and profile. I was focused on the person I was profiling, but of course, someone also profiled me. I turned in my assignment and came to class the next morning where I received a sheet of paper from a peer containing 400 words about me.

Reading it felt like I’d mistakenly unchecked some privacy setting on the dashboard of my personal life, and everyone seated around the classroom had gained access to things I hadn’t meant for them to know. This might sound surprising from someone who writes personal essays about my own life. But that’s exactly it: I need to be the one controlling the narrative. 

For that reason, I moved to California with a secret—which sounds way sexier than it is. I haven’t told people here about my eating disorder history and ~recovery journey~ because that’s not how I lead introductions, and most of my interactions with people in my new home have been introductions. 

I thought it would be liberating to begin with a blank slate, no one knowing what I consider a very ugly part of myself and my past. I thought I could remake myself, or at least be my best self if no one in my new life knew what I’d pretended to have left behind. But because I’m still actively in recovery and because I have written so much about my experience on the internet, not sharing starts to feel like an omission. 

The unforgiving irony of the eating disorder is that whenever I try to create distance between my identity and the illness, it becomes more present in my life. Recovery requires me to be active, and when I try to forget about the disorder, that’s when it slips back in. When I imagine moving to a new place and reinventing myself, that vision involves making myself smaller, using behaviors to manipulate my body and feign control over my life and how other people perceive me. Social anxiety presents as the thought, Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone met me as a thinner version of myself? 

It’s an embarrassing admission that the behaviors I have worked to move past are the first thing I reach for in a new environment. When I’m feeling lonely, anxious, lost in abundant free time before classes start, I grasp for familiar behaviors. And when no one knows my history, I can get away with all of it. Flirting with old behaviors feels like having an affair, like cheating the system. It feels like winning. But it’s truer to say that in those moments I’m regressing to a past version of myself; I’m not reinventing anyone, just rehearsing tired patterns. 

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A few weeks ago I went to a party with my roommate where I didn’t know a soul. We drove into San Francisco on a Friday, and I walked into a circle of seated strangers. I had to break their formation to get myself a drink, feeling like a full-on intruder. 

As the evening progressed, I surprised myself by having a great time. I could have been someone else if I’d wanted, fooled everyone there, but I felt more present in my body than I often do, and less of a desire to bend myself into social contortions in the hopes of being liked. 

Some time after 11pm, a German Shepherd who lived in the apartment below, scampered up a connected staircase, vomited on the floor and on the woman I was talking to, then turned around and disappeared back into the basement. The situation unfolded in the span of time it took me to lift my beer to my lips. It was as if the dog had been sent upstairs to shut down the party. I imagined the owners ordering the dog: “Get those kids to shut up! We’re ready to sleep!” How brazen to enter a living space that is not yours and vomit on the floor. That could never be me. But the person who feels compelled to clean up dog vomit close to midnight is. I grabbed the roll of paper towels. 

By 12:45 my roommate and I had sobered up and headed toward the car. We’d forgotten the aux cable back at home, or maybe it didn’t work, and sat in silence, the car hurtling over the Bay Bridge. “Look at the moon,” I said, cutting into the insular quiet as my roommate peered at the crescent hanging low and orange in the sky. “It’s the Dreamworks moon,” he said. And it was.

The conversation flowed easier after that. We started talking about rock climbing. He’d been very competitive in high school, a spider up the rock wall. He’d gone to college close to great places to climb, but had fallen out of love with the sport when he saw firsthand what he described as a toxic culture. Now, for the first time in a long time, he was having itches of wanting to climb again.

There was a car pause, a beat in the conversation without eye contact, both of us looking forward through the windshield. Then, “Do you see yourself going back to competitive running again?” 

It was like the universe had torn open this space for me to share. I hadn’t planned to tell him, but my story just fell out of me. I said that maybe I’d like to run at that level again, but I’d also found my own sport’s culture toxic, that I’d managed to compete for 12 years with an undiagnosed eating disorder. I said that for me, it wasn’t possible to run with any sort of intensity and also heal, at least right now.

We didn’t linger. He didn’t ask me more questions. He added one thought about climbing and I said something about running, and then I sat in the relief of having told someone. We peeled off the freeway and drove north through Oakland, finally pulling into our driveway and stepping out into the fragrant, heady air. 

Out of the car, I was unsteady. The whole night felt like a big deal and not a big deal. I felt like myself (cleaning up dog barf, divulging my mental illness, charming people at a party, believing in recovery, passing up a cigarette and accepting a toke instead) and not like myself (staying out late, feeling cool, willingly going to a party where I knew no one, remembering that I live in California. I live in California. I live in California.). 

I have these ideas about who I am and who I want to be, and when I come across a contradiction, my impulse is to leave it out of the story. It’s a strategy that allows me to tidy up my own messiness, allows me to pass up opportunities to share something about myself because I hadn’t planned to. The fear is that if I’m not controlling the story, bits and pieces of me will float around, uncontextualized, unjustified, and I won’t know how people will interpret them. “Stick to The Story,” I tell myself. 

Sharing off the cuff in the car was like a loose, live wire had escaped from my sheath of electrical tape. It was a charged, buzzing admission that I’m an unreliable, contradictory narrator. That my story was never as clean and bundled as I imagined it to be. That telling one person is as liberating as telling everyone. 

We climbed the carpeted stairs into our apartment. I turned to go up to my attic room, and my roommate paused in the doorframe of the kitchen. “Goodnight,” he said as I turned back to face him, “And good night.” 

And it was.

Fortnightly Faves

1. Mother Country Radicals, a Crooked Media podcast produced and hosted by by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the son of two infamous Weather Underground members. Absolutely captivating, and a lot of 70s history I didn’t know or understand. I listened to all eight episodes last week.

2. This oped on the implications of Harry Styles’s queer presentation while refusing to label himself publicly. I try not to be in the business of speculating about anyone’s sexuality or gender identity, but I do agree that the stakes are higher with a celebrity like Styles. It’s well written and made me think.

3. Gorgeous essay, “Death in the Age of Facebook” by Sandy Pool for The Walrus.

4. This essay (that is not about Instagram!) from Holly Whitaker of the Recovering newsletter.

5. Secret Breakfast ice cream (bourbon base with cornflake cookies) from Humphry Slocombe.

6. Julia Jacklin’s new album, many times over. One of many favorites: