the next day.
I was pretty good about sticking to my diet, but because of those occasional binges, I didn’t lose an excessive amount of weight in a short amount of time, which helped me stay under the anorexia radar.
By the summer before my junior year, self-control was no longer winning out. So I found what I thought was the answer to my dieting prayers: Laxative bulimia.
I know, cringe.
We were in Nantucket over the summer and I had been constipated for a couple of days. Anyone who has ever experienced constipation can vouch—that shit (pun intended!) hurts.
There I was, fifteen years old and running down the soccer field. I had terrible cramps and could hardly breathe, but that wasn’t stopping me. No! I was so determined to play well for my team, I kept going in what felt like slow motion. Suddenly, though, I became so overwhelmed with chest and belly pains I couldn’t go on. I’m having a heart attack! Subbing myself out, I sipped water while sprawled on the green grass, awaiting death. To express the pain properly, I can now only use acronyms because there was too much discomfort to form actual words: OMG (oh my God) and FML (fuck my life), to put it mildly.
My parents, seeing my distress, quickly bundled me into the back of my dad’s black Lincoln Navigator. I screamed my lungs out shamelessly as my dad careered toward the hospital.
“I’m pretty sure I am dying,” I moaned, gripping my stomach.
“Where does it hurt?” my dad asked, speeding over potholes, speed bumps—every barrier in his path.
“Where my heart is. It’s a…” I paused, taking a deep breath in, the pain making its way through my chest. “I think it’s a heart attack.”
“You’re not having a heart attack. When was the last time you went to the bathroom?” my mom asked, concerned but rational.
“I am having a heart attack and you are questioning my bowel movements? Ouch.” I pushed my knees against my stomach and clenched hard.
“You’ll be fine, just try to relax.” My mom flipped her hair out of her face. Her freckles were extra prominent, standing out against her sun-kissed skin. She didn’t like how they looked, but I thought they were so cute. I started counting them, a good distraction, trying not to think about the pains—ouch, not working!
Well, we got to the hospital, and, lucky for me, or unlucky for me: (1) it was not a heart attack, (2) my mom was right; it was constipation and dehydration from not drinking enough fluids, and (3) the volunteer EMTs at the hospital went to my high school, and I totally made eye contact with a group of them on the way in. Awesome. I didn’t need a heart attack, because I died of embarrassment the moment we locked eyes. It ended in an enema, with me squealing like a pig. Literally, imagine, “SQUEEEEAAAAAAAAAALLLL!!!” I’ll let you take that scene in. Yep.
So, that summer in Nantucket, my mom bought me ex-lax to prevent the Squeal Heard ’Round the World, Part II. The first time I swallowed two pills and experienced horrible stomach cramping, I was a little scared. But then it seemed like everything that was in my stomach forced its way out, and I felt lighter. What an amazing discovery: I was Christopher Columbus landing in the New World! Eating and clearing my system with just a few pills was a miraculous weight-loss strategy. How did I not know about this? I kept the bottle and used it throughout the entire vacation.
Using laxatives made me feel good. They gave me the same empty feeling that starving myself did, but I was allowed to eat and be temporarily full. It was perfect for the days when I slipped and couldn’t help but binge. Yes, it was painful, but that made the crime fit the punishment. But there was a catch. I just wasn’t aware of it. Yet.
FULL Life, October 2013
I had just left a therapy session with Dr. Blatter and walked into the icy winterscape that was New York City’s Upper West Side. Dr. Blatter is a quiet, medium-sized man, always well dressed in a suit and tie. His office is in a building with a green awning on Columbus Avenue and 73rd.
I had been seeing him for about five years. For most of that time, I had talked about my problems with work, lack of reliable friends, my family, things that pissed me off. I hadn’t been honest about my extracurricular anorexic/not-so-sober activities because I was ashamed to tell him, or maybe afraid he would send me away or hospitalize me, because, yes, I was hurting myself.
I’d started seeing him after spending a long weekend in Vegas for my mom’s fiftieth birthday. Observing my eating patterns, Mom made sly little comments about my eating all weekend. On the last day, she finally erupted.
I’d been pushing my food around and hardly eating anything. I’d thought I was doing a pretty good job at disguising it. Apparently not. Mom’s constant meal commentary should have been a clue.
“Dani, I can’t watch you do this to yourself anymore. You need help!” she’d screamed, which prompted me to run onto the Vegas Strip in hysterics. A dramatic eruption deserves a dramatic reaction. She demanded I see a therapist, and to get her off my back, I agreed.
“You know how paranoid moms are?” I’d explained to Dr. Blatter at that first session. “Especially crazy Jewish moms—it’s their joy, I swear! I used to struggle with my eating, but I am fine.” I knew he would understand how paranoid Jewish moms are, being a religious Jew himself—plus, it underplayed her concern, proving my point. Nice touch, Dani. My hands were crossed on my lap, eyes looking straight into his.
It had taken five years. Five years, countless nights of misery, and a terrifying health scare. But we were finally talking about my real problems, and as I turned the corner and hailed a cab, I knew I was on my way to really being fine. A driver stopped, and I hopped into the back of his cab. Thank goodness, I thought, as my breath had been visible in the frigid air.
“Traffic, that sucks,” I said, observing the back-to-back bumper traffic around us.
“Yes, it’s bad traffic tonight for some reason,” the driver answered and put on the radio to some soft African music. It was pretty catchy, and I let the driver know that. He laughed, smiled, and turned the volume up a little more. I stared out the window and into the stream of traffic. The horns honking, none of it bothered me.
As I often do, I thought about the time I’d lost to my ED, short for “eating disorder,” an abbreviation coined by author and eating disorder survivor Jenni Schaefer in Life Without ED. I was always thinking about what ED took from me because, let’s face it, it took a shitload, especially the last four years of my adult life. When I was mad at my eating disorder, I was mad at myself, but recently, I’d found it helpful to separate the two in order to stop blaming myself. I had been reading The Eating Disorder Sourcebook, and in it, author Carolyn Costin describes two versions of yourself—your eating-disordered self and your healthy self. The idea is that your healthy self will eventually heal your eating-disordered self.
Dr. Blatter and I had just talked about that, and about what I would write if I wrote a letter to my eating-disordered self.
Dear Eating-Disordered Self,
Well, what can I say? You sure put me through the wringer. You isolated me, harmed me, made me extremely depressed, and gave me a lot of health complications. You convinced me that we were codependent. I know I could never ever be as hard on someone else as you were on me. I think that is why I am oftentimes considered too cautious of everything I say and have a bad “sorry” habit. The last thing I would ever want to do is make someone feel as bad as you made me feel. You beat me down, ruined my relationship
