all grown up, the world is smaller and more manageable because you’ve carved your shape into it, so you need only to live in that shape. But when you’re stuck in that awkward space between childhood and adulthood, it’s like being a fly in a windstorm, trying to navigate a limitless sky while gusts of wind blow at you from every direction. I was still trying to get my shit together, far too curious to commit to anything, let alone an identity. I was simply hungry for so many things I could not yet define.
Beginning to Play with My Food
It was around this time that I started to become really curious about my body. Although I wasn’t overweight to begin with (maybe five pounds at most), I saw dieting as an opportunity to escape myself, to distract myself, and to gain some handle of control over the fast-approaching demands of adulthood. I just wanted to feel like I was moving toward something measurable and meaningful without having to actually deal with real life. It was innocent at first. I started replacing cookies and chips with fruit, Melba toast, and other things that tasted like cardboard, which seemed like a commendable thing to do. I bought a couple of diet books from a local thrift store, both from the 1980s, and did my best to consume zero percent fat whenever possible.
The summer I graduated high school, I enrolled in a summer film program at NYU and lived in a dorm room by myself for a month and a half in the West Village of New York City. I had never taken a subway before, I had no idea how to get around, and I felt this enormous sense of possibility combined with loneliness and paralysis. More than anything, I remember not knowing how to feed myself. Nobody’s watching, I kept thinking to myself. Nobody’s watching me at all. That meant I could do, say, or consume whatever I wanted, and there would be no real repercussions aside from those I decided to impose upon myself. Iced coffee for breakfast? Pop tarts for lunch? Sure, if I wanted to. This feeling of being totally on my own was something I had never experienced before in my life, and I had no clue how to fill the void.
It’s a cliché I’m trying to avoid, to color eating disorders as diseases born out of superficiality that erupt in the minds of girls with low self-esteem who read too many issues of CosmoGirl magazine, but I do recall being struck by a particular billboard one evening on my walk back from shooting reels around the city. It was a billboard image of the actress Shannyn Sossamon, who was scrawny and edgy with a protruding collarbone and black eye make up that gave her “raccoon eyes,” and I remember thinking, That. I want to be that. The distinction I need to articulate is that for me, it was not the idea of being scrawny that I romanticized necessarily, but rather the idea of being broken. Scrawny was just part of what it meant to be broken. Deciding to skip dinner, I wondered how long I might be able to go without eating anything at all. And with that, the void lessened. With that, the void became me.
College, the Existential Quest
In September of 2005, I went away to Purchase College in Westchester, New York, a school known for being artsy, liberal, and open-minded, and felt I had found my tribe at last. Hipsters, freaks, and queers scattered around campus in their band T-shirts and skinny jeans, smoking cigarettes like they were famous. They carried cameras and portfolios, and at least half of them had some combination of brightly colored hair, tattoos, and facial piercings. I remember reading in one online review about Purchase that it was the “college for dodgeball targets.” But if that was the case, then dodgeball targets were my favorite kind of people. Finally, I was surrounded by artists, writers, actors, and dancers—people with substance and eccentricities I could relate to and admire. And for the first time in my life, people my age actually took an interest in my thoughts and ideas. A good handful even found me intriguing. Even my professors were progressive, unique individuals who embraced the school’s motto, “Think wide open.”
One particularly definitive memory I have of Purchase happened my first week as a freshman. It was the hottest September I had ever encountered, and I remember tossing, turning, and sweating on the springy top bunk mattress of my dorm room, relieved only by the most compact of compact fans. Then, one night, after days of the humidity building and building so that the campus felt like it was swelling like a mother ready to give birth, the sky cracked open and it began pouring rain like it had never rained before. The sense of new beginnings was in the air, prompting every freshman to leap up and run outside, barefoot, naked—anything went. They laughed and danced and did cartwheels in the grass as if they had just arrived on this planet, as if they had never experienced rain before in their lives. I stood watching, my chest pounding a kind of euphoric melody, and debated what to do with my body. I felt, for a split second, like I could jump around, dance, and do cartwheels if I wanted to. I could finally let go. But the possibility only flickered in me like a trying, reluctant flame. And the most I could bring myself to do was stand there, completely paralyzed, terrified of looking like a fool.
For the first couple of months of my first semester, I continued to feel enamored by the new people and ideas that surrounded me. I was so enamored in fact that I decided to break up with my first serious girlfriend, who was still living back home on Long Island. I was in love with Meghan right up until the day I ended our relationship (in fact, far, far beyond that day). Yet, there was an appetite in my soul that was somehow bigger than that love. I had been committed to Meghan for nearly two years. She represented all the comforts of home and embodied many of the traits I wanted in a partner, but in my heart, I knew I had to explore myself and this exciting new chapter of my life without limitation. I was searching for something that was even deeper than the intimacy I could share with a romantic partner.
It was around this time that I began a mad love affair with philosophy, particularly existentialism. Existentialism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is a branch of philosophy which is characterized by the analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual, who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad. I got carried away with questions that would unravel my entire reality: Do I have free will or is everything predetermined? What do I actually believe in, and in what ways are all of my beliefs the result of conditioning? Is there such a thing as an absolute truth, or is my entire reality a projection of my biased perceptions? When am I my authentic self and when am I performing? What is real?
I formed friendships with people who asked the same questions, and our favorite thing to do was to sit somewhere on the grass under the stars, smoking cigarettes and breaking down the entirety of our existence until there was nothing left to ponder.
One night in the campus courtyard, my friend Jen pointed at the sky and said, “Look at the moon.”
“Yes, wow, it’s so big and yellow,” I replied.
“No, it isn’t big or yellow,” Jen said. “It just is.”
“What do you mean, ‘it just is?’”
“It just is,” Jen replied. “You’ll get it someday.”
As I later understood, what Jen was trying to communicate to me that night is that there’s a truth in things we can feel when we’re able to look at things, especially things in nature, without judgment. Nothing can be truly understood. And yet, there’s a special kind of peace that comes with surrendering to the mystery and wonder of creation. There’s freedom in the kind of mindful awareness that doesn’t try to own or control or identify various aspects of existence. To truly experience the moon, or anything for that matter, we must simply allow things to be what they are.
I’m afraid, however, that before I was able to truly grasp this concept, I misinterpreted it. I decided that if the moon wasn’t big or yellow, then I wasn’t anything either. I was personality-less, identity-less, sexuality-less. I was just a body that could not be labeled or defined. I tried on different personas for a time, seeing
