Let there be bone

I've been thinking about eating disorders. And I've been thinking about how I used to always want one.

In college, it was the thing...eat whatever you want, slip away from the table, shove your pointer and middle finger down your throat and voila! no more food in the gut.

I had a roommate who was bulimic. Erin was an Irish Catholic Bostonian, with curly red-hair who wore pantsuits to keg parties and had an obsession with Clinique make up. She also had a sweet tooth unlike any I had ever seen, and it was not unusual for her to plow through a bag of mint milanos in 2o minutes flat. Seriously.

I guess I was out of the loop, because it wasn't until months into our living together that I realized she was purging her milanos (and anything else that she deemed "evil") in a small blue bucket hidden underneath her bed. I caught her emptying it around 2 am one Saturday after I'd spent the previous five hours building a 32 foot water bong in the neighbor's attic. I was crispy at the edges and wired from smoking too much Meigs county weed, and I must have come in pretty quietly, because Erin was standing in the bathroom in her underwear and a t-shirt, emptying the bucket into the toilet. When she saw me standing at the bathroom door, she let out a little "oh, um...hang on" and shut the door, but not before I saw her red face and not before I smelled something like, well, what it was. Puke.

We never spoke of it, and Erin freaked out at the end of junior year, convinced herself that we were stealing from her and went back to Boston. But my other roommates and I were on to her, and I held a secret hope that Erin had confided her upchuck methodology to one of my other two roommates so I could find out how to do this bulimia thing right.

Truth be told, I'd already tried, numerous times, to make myself puke. I'd used my hand, the handle of a hair brush, my toothbrush, a plastic ruler coated in saran wrap...nothing seemed to work. I gagged a ton, spit up bile, scratched the hell out of the back of my throat, and generally irritated myself. I even tried laxatives once, but that was not pretty. I am a pretty regular person, bowel movement speaking, and laxatives caused my body to go into full revolt. I cramped for two days, shit every half hour, and firmly believed that I was going to lose an intestine to ex-lax.

No matter what I tried, my body smiply refused to give up the goods. I could just hear my stubborn stomach, could see the smirk on its face: nope, no way, noooo, not gonna give in, not gonna push this greasy mass of rueben back up the esophagus, no way no how. Besides, toothbrushes are for brushing your teeth, dumbass. What a lovely, cooperative body I had.

But this is not something to laugh about, I know. Eating disorders kill people. Bulimia is a horrific, devastating disease. I'm not being flip about any of it...I'm just amazed when I look back and see the lengths I was willing to go to just to look like everyone else. If I was thin, life would be perfect. Guys would like me, girls would envy me, my parents would love me. What a heaping load of generalizations. Ahem.

I'm glad that my stomach staged a sit-in. I'm glad I didn't start down a road that would have led me to certain sadness and incomprehensible pain. I can't say that I don't still wish for the magic bullet, the pill that will melt this fat from my body...there are times I'm damned near hysterical at the unfairness of it all. Some people can eat whatever they want and never gain weight. Some people become skeletons because they fear fat so much that they'd rather die than let it hang from their frame. I'm somewhere in the middle: the overweight woman who yearns to eat anything she wants but can't because genetics (and age & the foodie flu) are working against her...the overweight woman who has this weirdly anorexic mindset that causes her to wonder if she'll ever be able to look in the mirror and see herself clearly. I swear every mirror I look in has been switched out by some cruel circus elf and I'm left looking like my legs have been chopped off at the knees and my chin is really a massive goiter. Oh, my.

Where once there was flesh, let there be bone. Where once there was no mercy, let their be forgiveness, acceptance, something close to love.