December 26, 2015

I am killing myself, one bite at a time.

That was never the plan. To be honest, there was never a firm plan. There was just food that somehow connected to my emotions and became a tool--first for control and finally for comfort.

Or for hiding. I'm not sure I can tell the difference.

The binge eating started when I was 20.

The anorexia started when I was 15.

But the inability to handle my emotions without either denying myself food or consuming it like I could never be full didn't start in my 20's. It didn't start in my teens.

It started when I was eight.

It started the day my grandfather sent my sister out to walk the dog and told me to stay behind.

The day he first touched me and forced me to touch him.

The day he asked, "Did you like it?" and I was too afraid to say no. Too afraid to tell anyone about the secret that clung to my skin, a filth that I could never scrub away.

I thought he wouldn't do it again.

I thought it would just go away.

I believed him when he said he was only doing it because I'd tempted him.

He didn't stop.

It didn't go away.

It didn't matter if I hid in my bedroom. If I pretended to be asleep. If I ignored him. I was a sponge he was using to mop up the terrible need that filled him until he'd consumed so much of me that years later when the truth came to light and the court ordered him into counseling while my parents packed up our house and moved us to another state, there was nothing left inside of me but a terrible, silent void.

I tried to start over in my new life, but I was a shell working desperately to mimic the way I saw others acting. Everyone around me was moving forward with life as though nothing had happened. As though I hadn't been raped by my grandfather. As though the courts hadn't said they couldn't prosecute him because I couldn't give them specific dates on the calendar for every assault. It was as though my family believed that if we worked hard enough to be positive, all the shattered pieces would just mend themselves. We smiled. We sat in church, scrubbed clean and dressed well. We barely skipped a beat because school must be attended, hymns must be sung, life must go on.

We were caught in a grand pretending that only worked if I swallowed the screams that wanted to tear my throat raw. A fantastic denial that remained intact if I shoved the terror, the rage, and the shame into the dark, silent void inside of me and practiced showing the world the expression they expected to see.

But no matter how well my pretending worked at home, it never worked anywhere else. I was in fifth grade barely answering the teachers because I didn't want anyone to notice that I was in class. I was in seventh grade watching the one friend I'd managed to make leave me in favor of the girl who mocked the clothes I wore or the way I walked or the words I chose to say. I was in eighth grade lying in the fetal position on my bed after school wishing I could go to sleep and never wake up. Wishing I could find the part of me that was broken so that I could rip it out of me.

God, how I wanted to rip it out of me.

I wanted to be free. I wanted to sleep without nightmares. I wanted to hear a creak in the hall at night without adrenaline flooding my body until I shook with the strength of it. I wanted to have boys at school look at me with interest without freezing inside, unable to decide how I was supposed to respond.

Any time I spent on my own gave the monsters in my mind room to play. A horrible parade of images I desperately wanted to forget. A pathetic montage of fantasies in which I entered the same wood paneled bedroom but stabbed my grandfather with a kitchen knife when he told me to unzip my pants or found a gun and returned to his house to shoot him through the heart before he could turn his sickness toward another young girl.

I shook with hatred when I thought of him. I trembled with terror. I swallowed down bile and stared at my body in the mirror. At the places I'd barely noticed until he'd touched me. At the skin and bone and muscle that had somehow betrayed me by triggering pain and horror, a devastation I was still working hard to hide so that the grand pretending could go on uninterrupted.

I was fourteen, watching the faces of my peers to figure out how to mimic joy, sadness, and anger that only ran skin deep and didn't end in hours-long fantasies about killing an old man in a trailer park. I was turning down a date with a cute boy who was respectful and safe. Accepting a date with a boy who was angry, manipulative, and cruel instead.

I was fifteen, lying in the back of a station wagon while that same boy penetrated me for the first time. Gripping the door handle and thinking about something else. Anything else.

Anything that would take me far from the body that was already so steeped in shame that it no longer mattered if I gave it to the boy with the temper and the cruel words.

I was already living a double life, already drowning in the grand pretending. What was one more thing to hide?

I was a straight A student. A cheerleader. A member of the youth group at church. But I was also dating an emotionally abusive boy. I was burying myself in busyness so that I didn't have to stare my demons in the face. I was praying each night for death to take me.

I was trapped in a house where we never spoke of what had happened, juggling my two lives while inside me, the terrible silent void pressed grew and grew until it pressed against my skin from the inside out, a secret I didn't dare give voice to.

It was then that I found one thing amid all the chaos that I could control. Maybe I couldn't find the courage or the words to tell anyone that I was falling apart. Maybe I couldn't stop trying to be the girl others expected me to be. Maybe I couldn't walk away from my abusive relationship.

But I could control what I ate.

I don't remember when that idea latched onto me, but it became the paramount focus of my existence. I stopped eating breakfast. Started eating only half a cup of yogurt for lunch. Skipped dinner and felt proud of myself every night when I'd fall asleep with my stomach rumbling from hunger. A month into this new daily routine, I bought my first package of diet pills and started taking double the recommended dose every day at the drinking fountain between math class and history. I read an article in a magazine about a teen pop star who'd struggled with anorexia and felt jealous because I was sure I would never be disciplined enough to be like her. Never wear that label, which felt so much better than the labels I already wore--slut, whore, broken--because it would be a label I chose to give myself.

I was already skinny, but now there wasn't a spare inch on me. I didn't see fat when I looked in the mirror, though. I saw a body that I hated. A body that had betrayed me.

A body that needed to be destroyed.

And while I couldn't stop the void inside of me from growing, and I couldn't fix my family or my relationship, I could punish my body.

I could deny it calories.

I could be in control.

Of this one thing, I could be in control.