I applied to a billion and one positions at a large, local hospital when I was nineteen years old; I received interview call backs for only two of them. The first interview was for a part-time CNA position on a med-surg floor and the second for a full time Emergency Dept. Tech position.
I met with the nurse manager on the med-surg floor first and bombed the interview. I had no hospital experience and truthfully I was only there because I needed a job with benefits for myself and my infant daughter at home. The med-surg nurse manager shook my hand after showing me the way to the Emergency Dept. for my next interview, but I knew I’d never hear from her again. At my second interview I met with the Emergency Department’s temporary nursing director; she was overtly kind to me, soft spoken, and didn’t seem to be in a rush at all. Her questions fell a little off track from the standard questionnaires but the setting was comfortable and her demeanor seemed sincere. After 12 years in healthcare, I now realize the attributes I appreciated about her are likely the reason she was the temporary director of nursing, and a short-lived one at that.
To my surprise, both managers did extend job offers. Despite the ER being the lower paying position out of the two choices, I knew I wouldn’t be giving bed baths or showers daily which was all I needed to hear:
sign me up, baby.
The first time I met Mary Logan, a seasoned RN who’d just come (back) to this same ER, I knew she was someone I wanted to be like.
I was introduced to her in a drive-by fashion as I stood at the main nurse’s station talking to the charge nurse, Jamie. As I ran my mouth, probably neglecting a task I should’ve been doing elsewhere, Mary rounded the corner as if her ass were on fire. Mary’s entire body likely weighs less than one of my thighs and half of that weight probably comes from the hair on her head. One of, if not the most noticeable features about Mary Logan is her curly hair. At that time, she still colored it dark brown nearly black monthly; each individual curl was pronounced and holding enough volume to power up a sound system.
When I say volume I don’t mean in some va-va-voom bullshit way either. Mary’s hair is textured and authentic, in a way I don’t think I’ve naturally seen on another white civilian. That morning Mary wore black scrub pants but curiously one leg had gotten tucked into the top of her compression sock…up by her knee. Jamie called out to Mary while motioning to the pants and Mary looked down, laughed, then shrugged. She didn’t slow her stride for a single second. I doubt Mary tucked one pants leg into her sock as a purposeful style choice but I do know that regardless of how it happened, she didn’t give a fuck about it. She was busy, the sock showing wasn’t important to her, she’d fix it when she could.
Over the years Mary became my colloquial “Work Mom.” I couldn’t tell you how the transition to Work Mom/Real-Life-Friend from coworker happened but thankfully it did. After my divorce, Mary watched Stella, who was barely a toddler at the time, when I had to work overnights. At Mary’s house, Stella finally got off the Pacifier, something I’d been trying to do for over a year but given up on (Mary’s dog “ate” it, so she says.) Mary brought us homemade pans of ready-to-bake enchiladas ensuring both Stella and I would be fed. Once, after trying out a new craft/art style, Mary gifted me a keychain that featured an old portrait, appearing to be of some woman long ago. We laughed after I realized it was her nursing school graduation photo with a sepia filter overlaid. The keychain still hangs on my Honda key ring and although the oils from my fingers have brushed away all but the edges of the original photo, I think of this memory each time I start my car. When I had an allergic reaction in the middle of a shift we were both working, Mary was the first person I beelined for to ask whether I was dying (I survived). Years later I, again, began breaking out in hives across my face and body after eating shrimp cocktail and knowing I needed to go to an urgent care at the minimum, I called Mary first to ask her opinion. When my car battery died, when I fucked up my bathroom wall trying to even out the paint color, when my eye swelled shut from a dental abscess, when I have any sort of self-absorbed question Mary Logan is who I call. I trust Mary Logan wholly and completely for everything, without question.
Even now, in this very moment, if I text or call, she responds expeditiously. We don’t see each other as often as we used to, a sad truth that is my fault and caused by reclusiveness alone.
In another universe, another timeline or lifetime maybe, Mary Logan would have been my real mom. I feel confident that somewhere in the sky there is some sort of Big Bang or Puppet Master whose entire job is to navigate me out of every shitty hole I somehow always dig myself into. And I feel confident that pushing me to accept the ER tech job was carefully planned just so I could meet Mary Logan, among a few other reasons. I am not being histrionic, as I am so known to be, when I say accepting that job saved my life in so many more ways than one.
But that’s not the point of this story, not this time anyway.
Throughout our shared tenure in the LMC ED, and likely long before it, Mary had a beautiful bronze framed mirror positioned in the entryway of her home. The koi pond beside her sidewalk was impressive to me but the mirror inside was my true focus (I’m sure a lot about my core values can be deduced from that sentence alone, so if any therapist is reading this let me know.)
As soon as Mary’s front door opened there stood the mirror, and it was huge. I’m no mathematician but I’d guess it’s at least 8.5’x8.5’ in size, so short of being visually impaired you physically could not miss it if you tried. I was obsessed. Like real daughters probably do, I begged Mary for this mirror. I have tact though, so I didn’t beg for the mirror in real time, I begged respectfully by telling her living, breathing, healthy body to “please, please, please draft up a living will and include me in it to receive the mirror the second you die.”
Like real moms probably do, Mary graciously decided I didn’t need to wait that long. When she downsized and moved a couple years later, that sweet, bronzed baby got rehomed to me and no one had to die in the process. This took place five or six years ago and I still walk past the mirror every day. It’s positioned against the wall directly by my front door, short of being visually impaired you could not miss it if you tried.
After my parents separated, before they officially divorced, I became anxiously attached to my mother. Therapists say its normal, my whole world had flipped upside down, divorce is difficult for everyone, especially five-year-olds. I have only a few partial memories from this period, one of my favorites takes place in the kitchen of my childhood home. Sunlight spills onto the black and white linoleum under my bare feet. My mom is standing near me and she’s holding a broom and so am I. Footloose is playing from a speaker somewhere in the house or maybe from a TV—we’re singing into our brooms like they’re microphones although I can’t imagine I know the words but my mom did and we’re dancing as we sing. Not a speck of dust got swept up I’m positive of that. I hold onto this memory like the gospel because I know it was not performative.
In my lowest moments I think back to the two of us in that kitchen, this memory recall has become some sort of grounding exercise to remind myself my mother’s daughter is not a wicked woman and maybe neither is she.
When I was little, my mom Pam was perfect to me, as mothers so often are in the eyes of their children. I watched her with a hawk’s eye, taking mental notes and trying to emulate everything about her. The way she twirled a piece of hair around her pointer finger as a signal she was tired. The way she smiled with the corners of her mouth and no teeth showing, “it’s in the eyes” she’d say.
I wanted to be just like her.
I loved the way my mom styled her dark brown, nearly black, curly hair—like how I’d see Mary Logan’s many years later. My hair was long and strawberry blonde but I reveled in knowing my curls matched my mom’s, it was the only physical trait we shared which was a fact everyone was quick to remind me of.
I was around seven when my mom came home from a hair appointment beaming as she showed off her new look. Her hair suddenly shoulder length and straight. Pam said she needed something new; her old hair was a mess, unmanageable she said. She wanted something more presentable.
There are two sliding closet doors made of mirrors in the middle of our house, you can’t enter or leave the kitchen nor utilize the only downstairs bathroom without catching a glimpse of yourself as you trek by. In this memory we’re standing side by side in front of these mirrors while Pam fluffs her roots as if it’s the first time she’s ever seen her own hair or her own reflection—in this moment I know my mom feels good about her appearance. Those moments came few and far between, even lesser so as she ages. She asks me if I like her hair, if I think it looks good. My eyes dart back to my body standing beside hers. My curly hair suddenly looks wild, unruly, something I need to manage but can’t, I ask if I can get my hair done too but she scoffs, “I can’t have a single thing for myself, can I?” she leaves the room. The curtains close in on the memory.
I don’t know much about Pam, to be honest. Sure, there are facts about her that I know: she loves purple anything. She likes red velvet cake and smokes cigarettes like it’s her full-time job and she’s clocking overtime. She loves butterflies. She wears a size seven shoe. And she got her first tattoo in her fifties. But I’ve never really had a finger on the pulse of who she is as a person, what she wanted to do with her life, who she planned to be when she was the young girl standing in the kitchen beside her own mother.
My mom is and was a beautiful woman and whether she believed so or not, she knew men believed it so she used that to her advantage.
“Anytime you go to the grocery store, always take out 20 dollars cash back then stash it away. Don’t ever tell him, keep it for yourself so when you need to leave, you can” she’d say in between drags from her Virginia Slim Long.
Pam got married, again, shortly after my eighth birthday. Steve is her fourth husband; they’re still married today. None of us, meaning her three children or my grandmother, were invited to the wedding. One day it was just us then the next Steve was there and so were his things. As little as I know about Pam, I know even less about Steve, but one thing she always made known: Steve loves her hair when it’s short and straight. And men’s opinions have somehow always carried more weight than anyone else’s.
My body weight has always fluctuated, which is what everyone says when they’re embarrassed to admit their weight is something they don’t have control of. I’ve never had a healthy relationship with food. Or my body. Or my mom.
As far back as elementary school I’ve always been ashamed of how my body looks and the amount of space it takes up. Weight was a common topic in my household, I was always acutely aware of how much my mom and grandmother weighed, the numbers used like trading cards.
I don’t know how old I was when I learned about my mom’s eating disorder. She talked about it like an entity of its own, like it was a ghost and she is afraid of the séance, afraid of what it might want from her. More times than I can count we’d stand in front of a mirror as Pam retold these ghost stories but the older I got, the bigger I grew, sometimes the tone left me feeling uneasy as if I’d been present for a lecture she’d expected me to take notes on.
Pam would pride herself on how beautiful she was known to be in her youth, standing barely 5’2” she never missed an opportunity to remind me of her petite length pants which I couldn’t fit in. Her ice blue eyes that made my green look dull. Her olive skin that tanned easily while my pale olive sometimes looked jaundice instead of sun kissed. I towered over her by the time I was a teenager and soon found myself slightly bent at the knees, head cocked aside, thoracic spine curled like a cat when standing beside her so I could appear smaller.
We stopped eating dinner as a family when I was young and rarely did I see Pam eat during the day. My mom is boisterous, capable of talking to anyone, and for what she lacks in physical size she makes up for by the size of her personality and the way it demands recognition. In general, these are qualities I often admire in others but I’ve learned to find nuance in every movement Pam makes so this behavior from her only confuses and infuriates me. We come from difference, she has learned to grow out and in doing so I have learned to grow in. There would be nights I’d lie in my bed and hear her creep down the stairs to eat sweets in the dark like a fugitive stealing calories to which she did not feel entitled to, so opposite from the confident social butterfly I saw only hours earlier.
We all have secrets lurking in the dark, I suppose, maybe food is meant to be one of them.
Three days before my grandmother’s death I said my goodbyes standing in the same childhood home I’d broom danced alongside Pam decades prior. I walked in the front door, took a sharp turn to the left and almost missed grandmother’s body which had become so angular and frail. An entire lifetime inside of a body almost covered entirely by clothing three sizes too big within a living room nearly hidden behind years of hoard. I stood in front of grandmother and to the left of my mother and I couldn’t help but wonder if this lineage is one of women shrinking making space for everything else instead.
Spending my formative years watching my mom struggle meant I spent most of my time oscillating between mimicking her or hating her. As an adult, the truth is that I don’t want to do either anymore but I can’t deny that the burden of that house has followed me everywhere and I never meant to replicate her but I guess spend enough time standing beside someone and you can’t help but to pick up on their habits.
If I think too much about food suddenly my hunger subsides, as if the mere idea of a meal satiates my need for nourishment. I spent the first two years of my relationship with my ex-husband finding ways to sneak calories when he wasn’t looking. Despite our relationship being long-distance meaning our time was fragmented and divided by the Georgia-South Carolina state line, I couldn’t allow myself to be seen eating more than a small snack (which I had to work up to).
The only place I felt safe to be hungry but more importantly the only place I felt safe enough to be fed was within the four doors of my car while alone and often in an empty parking lot. Entire meals would be eaten in this fashion and after I ate I’d discard the bag and the receipt into the dumpster of a random apartment complex or the overflowing trashcan at the gas station I’d go out of my way to stop at on my way home. In my brain, the cardboard container my medium French fry came in was equivalent to being part of a crime scene and I was desperate to scrub away any evidence.
After divorcing my husband, Michael, I lost fifty or sixtty pounds in approximately five or six months. I’d been working in the ER for two years at this point so I’d established close friendships with most of my coworkers. As the weight melted away, the congratulations flew in like confetti shooting out of a cannon.
“You look great, what are you doing?” people would stop me in the hall to tell me.
I’d say, “I am sick” and they’d say “No, you look amazing. How’d you do it?” How could I not fall in love with this sickness?
I had to leave work multiple times due to feeling faint or too tired to complete my tasks; on multiple occasions I had to clock out just to sign in as a patient. During one shift Tiffany, a nurse working in the same zone as me, entered the exam room of a recently discharged patient to find me on the floor after fainting. Her voice was concerned and worried but I was young and self-absorbed and brushed off her valid concerns.
After this incident, when a low serum-potassium level was deemed the main culprit of my symptoms leading to fainting spells, people backed off a little bit—likely just thankful I wasn’t doing drugs while at work (which is what I think most people believed after I was found on the floor). Suzy, the unit secretary approached me one morning just to ask what I was doing to lose weight. I said, “starve myself” with half a laugh so Suzy half laughs back as she says “Oh, you’re so young you can still get away with that! I remember those days, keep with it while you can!”
The best way to lie is by telling the truth but making everyone believe you’re telling a joke. Suzy didn’t even pretend to make me believe she was joking during this conversation.
“Keep with it while you can!” I thought about Suzy’s words for months after we spoke, years after if I’m honest. She retired from her position shortly after the conversation but her comment still stayed there with me.
The easiest and only way I could shush those horrible hunger cues was by doing what I did best: getting fucked up. Substance abuse and eating disorders share a bedroom and we can even mistake hunger cues as cravings.
I started drinking, kept drinking when I shouldn’t have, and couldn’t stop drinking when I wanted to because everything felt so painful, so awful, and so excruciating to experience. It might have started out as fun but it became a survival mechanism. Drinking easily fulfilled my deep, integral need to be in control while simultaneously begging for anything to take away the never-ending voice inside my head. It would have been terrible for someone to know how much I was struggling. I didn’t want them to have to bear the burden of knowing that, so I made them comfortable by being funny instead. I’d think “this is why people want me around, it’s the only thing I’m good for,” because without it I was just another high-functioning, depressed, traumatized, or mentally ill person who didn’t know what to do.
In real time, (November 19, 2025), I consider myself to have been in recovery from drugs and alcohol for three weeks shy of seven years. I can walk past liquor without sweating but I still can’t finish a bag of chips from the vending machine without hating myself halfway through. And for once, I don’t want to write about this. I’m embarrassed of all the mad things I’ve done and still do to feel happiness or self-contentment.
Currently, I work nightshift at a hospital four towns over so I usually don’t get home until 08:15 in the morning. Sometimes I walk into an empty house, school is in session, day shift jobs exist no matter how much I try to convince myself they don’t— I walk inside and I’m all alone. I’m alone so I take my disgusting hospital coated clothes off at the front door. I stand in front of the bronze framed mirror I’ve so lovingly had for years while I pick apart each inch of my body. I turn to the right, then the left, then facing forward. I repeat this pattern multiple times focusing on a new portion with each rotation.
After, I go upstairs, take a shower but only after repeating the body check in the bathroom mirror with the bathroom lighting, then get in bed. I do not eat breakfast or dinner or whatever the fucking meal is called at 0900 in the morning after working through the night. I am not hungry. I don’t remember the last time I was and I’m too afraid to think about it because what if I remember and the hunger doesn’t go away. What if the hunger doesn’t go away and I’m finally forced to give in; forced to acknowledge its gnawing voice inside of my head.
Soon after I wake up, I pick my two daughters up from school. They ask what’s for dinner and I sense the disappointment coursing through them when I say, “Oh, I don’t know…I haven’t thought about it.” Instantly, I’m forced to think about it. We all sit at the table together but suddenly I am a child again. I feel myself mentally retreating as my mind time travels back to the dining room table in my childhood home, I feel like I’m floating on the ceiling as I watch myself sit across from my mother. We’re having dinner together as a family, which was an occasion that occurred so sparingly it was typically reserved only for birthdays or holiday meals. My younger self fixates her gaze on our mother while our mom rakes food back and forth across the dinner plate. I remember this trick all too well; Pam is a magician and the silverware is the lovely assistant. Watch as the plate somehow cleans off despite the fork never once reaching her mouth.
The magic show ends and I come back to my body just in time to feel my 10-year old’s eyes shifting back and forth from me to my plate. Am I the magician now? Is this our family business?
I bring the fork to my mouth; I eat as quickly as I can to get it over but rave about how good it is the entire time. My stomach cramps. The feeling of being full makes me feel so disgusted and in pain I want to kick and scream and curse this horrible body for being so useless it can’t even digest food easily and without commotion. Or maybe I want to kick and scream and curse this horrible body because it has to digest food at all. Why can’t there be some other solution?
How do I raise daughters to love their bodies and feel good about themselves while simultaneously hating mine? Stella tells me she likes my outfit, that I look nice, I wonder if she knows my truth and is trying to build me up too. The young mothering the old. What a sick twisted thought. We tell ourselves affirmations in the mirror together. I tell Stella the more we say them we manifest them to be truths. I’m still waiting and I can’t help but wonder if she’s waiting too. Does she have her finger on the pulse of who I am at all? I wonder what she’d say if asked the question. I don’t think Pam asked herself these questions at all, not even once, which my therapist was always sure to highlight as a way to reassure me that I am not my mother.
This comforts me but only a little.
I got pregnant with my oldest daughter, Stella Pearl, when I was eighteen. I was 16 weeks along when I found out I was having a daughter but I’d already known in my heart that I was having a girl. A week before the ultrasound I had a dream about a little girl who was probably close to two years old. The little girl had ringlets of bright blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. That dream got me through that pregnancy which was emotionally tumultuous. I can’t explain why that dream was so comforting at the time, there was nothing particularly poetic it.
A couple years later, I was sitting in my neighbor’s driveway as he grilled the dinner he’d invited us to share. Stella stood a few feet in front of me, twirling and dancing even though no music was playing. The sound of her beloved red cowboy boots thudding and heel-scraping the pavement acting as the only musical guest for the evening. As she spun and jumped I couldn’t stop thinking about her blonde hair, each individual ringlet perfectly defined as it bounced along with her dance moves. Her ocean blue eyes occasionally met my gaze with a demeanor that seemed like they would belong to someone far older than the toddler looking back at me.
I guess it should have felt like déjà vu, to see the little girl from my dream two years prior standing in front of me. But déjà vu doesn’t feel right. That moment felt the exact same as the moment I heard her first cry after she was born, it felt like recognition maybe. There was a familiarity, I guess, despite her being brand new. Those two moments with Stella were the first moments in my entire life that I experienced true peace; they were fleeting and lasted only minutes, but they were monumental in way I couldn’t articulate if I tried—I’m not sure there’s a language existing yet, not with the vernacular I’d need to accurately depict what I want to say about those moments. About Stella. About how I think we were meant to be together in this lifetime or maybe we’ve already been together in a previous one.
I’m not insinuating I’m psychic but I believe some omnipresent entity graced me with that dream as a glimpse into the future. As if to say, “here’s what’s to come, just hang on a little bit longer.”
So, I did. And I’m so glad.
But I brought a lot of people down with me in the process.
My addiction didn’t start with me, as no addiction does. Its roots spread through generations, displacement, poverty, and trauma. I’m trying to sort that shit out and stop it in this branch of our family tree but addiction is a shapeshifter. I’ve grown comfortable in calling out my addiction for what it is but I worry my daughters won’t. Or that they can’t, god willing this terrible monster doesn’t try to one day swallow them whole too. More importantly, I’m worried that this is just another thing they’re forced to think about and work through and deal with, despite the unfairness of it all.
My behaviors had their purpose when I was still deep in the throes of it all—in some ways they kept me alive when my options were “kill yourself” or “drink.” They saved me from the fear, abuse, and confusion that felt far too awful for me to face head on. They carried me through as the only tools I had.
It’s a contradiction but it made sense. I was looking for something and these behaviors helped, so I made a deal with them:
take these terrible things into their terrible care.
So, they did, and they worked, until they started taking everything else too.
I have felt guilty and drank the guilt away. The longer I stayed there though, the guilt turned to shame. I can’t use my shame to atone; by trying to do so it turns into self-destruction, and self-hatred has never been nor ever will be an apology. Shame does not benefit the people we have harmed.
I make my three-year old, Magnolia’s, dinner plate as she asks, “mama, are you eating too?” I make a plate and sit at the table with them and curse this horrible body for looking at a meal and feeling only shame. I have no way to justify this habit the way I’ve justified all the others.
Shame doesn’t go anywhere—it has no velocity and it can only take me down. But I’m still not immune to the shame burning inside, corroding any chance I could have to make things right. To just eat the fucking meal in front of me.
So, I lie and say my stomach hurts.
My stomach always hurts because I’m too embarrassed to say being diagnosed with celiac disease makes me tantrum like a spoiled teenager, kicking and screaming as if everything I care about is being locked away out of my reach forever. Wakefulness will never greet me at sunrise because I have narcolepsy, we’ve known that. Social anxiety can’t be pushed to the back burner because the numbing analgesia from a drink at dinner was taken from me, because I’m an alcoholic, we’ve known that. I can accept these things most days.
But now the entire dinner party must be rearranged, reorganized, carefully curated because my stupid feeble body can’t handle a single grain of wheat? I feel like too big of a nuisance to ask the waiter about allergens and active ingredients and if the same fryer or the same grill is used for ____ as it is for their gluten-containing food. So, I don’t ask at all. So, I don’t eat at all. And now I just don’t go to the dinner parties at all.
Nothing feels easy to me but what a first world problem this is to stomp my feet over having these resources and the ability to make these choices and seek the care needed for these things. How tone deaf can one person be to bemoan not being able to attend fucking DINNER PARTIES because of a dietary restriction.
I need to touch grass. So, then I tantrum over being so weak and dramatic that a single grain of wheat and the inability to eat it has me crying. But the fact remains that it does have me crying and it has me afraid to eat anything, scared of the pain that surely comes if my plate gets contaminated.
So, I’m embarrassed.
And I’m ashamed.
And I can’t admit that, not to two children aged three and ten, so I say my stomach hurts and like a dog with its tail tucked between their legs I do not make eye contact with Stella as I discard the shapeshifter disguised as my dinner plate.
There are many ways people describe their darkness:
the shitty friend
the shadowy companion
that thing they can’t ignore.
Some people say it’s the ditch beside them, the reminder of what they can fall into if they don’t keep growing and don’t keep going. Some people see it as a black hole that shrinks the more they fill their life with light. Some people feel it as a fog that takes them over if they’re not watching.
I’ve always saw my drug addiction as a current waiting to consume me, the surging riptide of my mean streak when I feel threatened. It’s my overwhelming tendency to want to escape but still be in control of something simple. It’s the zap in my brain that says, “You know what would fix this? A big fat drink.” It’s the echoing thud in my head that says, “No one would care if you died,” and my only comfort is then imagining people being very sad at my funeral.
It’s something I can fall into and it will take me whole. It grows if I feed it.
But what is disordered eating if its entire being is rooted in the polar opposite of what I just wrote? If I feed this darkness it doesn’t grow and neither can I but it still has the ability to take me whole. A doctor tells me if I don’t start eating better or at all my cardiovascular system is at risk of collapse, maybe not today or tomorrow, but sooner than later; sooner than we should be discussing while in my early thirties.
I sit in front of the cardiologist with a bruise still on my forehead from the last time I fainted four days prior. I’d almost made it to the bathroom before I felt my knees begin to buckle so I grip the door frame as my vision went out but then my head slammed into the woodened edge.
Still, this warning does not alarm me the way I know it should. The darkness will have me one day and if I didn’t have a family depending on me, I’d say, “fuck it! that’s just how it will be.” But the irony is not lost on me that the same day the doctor gives me a lecture on my health, I go to work and get complimented again and again and again.
If you develop an eating disorder when you are already thin to begin with, you go to the hospital. If you develop an eating disorder when you are not thin to begin with, you are a success story.
I go home and stand in front of my gifted bronze framed mirror, I pull up my shirt and count each rib, I trace my finger down the protrusions at my sternum and collarbones like there’s hidden messages mixed within and each word is only translatable by braille; looking at my back the crevice of each vertebra of my spine is outlined so intricately thru my skin only an MRI could give me more detail.
Every time someone talks about my weight I feel like I’m the lead in one of those movie scenes, you know the one where the main character has a nightmare that they’re suddenly center stage as the curtains quickly draw open. The spotlight flips on, encasing only their body as everything fades to black outside the frame. The audience apparently consists of every single person they’ve ever known either laughing or booing.
A seemingly innocent compliment on my appearance will have me feeling like I’m center stage during my most vulnerable moments, the laugh track flips on and plays on repeat in the back of my head. I know someone is going to say something so I try to beat them to the punchline. My entire world revolves around my weight and my worth feels intimately intertwined with that number.
If you’ve ever lost large amounts of weight, you know how much nicer the world becomes once you’re thin. If you’re thin and you don’t believe me, gain 50 pounds and get back to me before forming an opinion.
“They” say eating disorders, as drastic as it feels to call “this” an eating disorder, has nothing to do with food and everything to do with control. I guess that’s true in some way. Maybe I’ve always been nothing more than that little girl with broom in hand, searching for someone to look up to. Maybe when I don’t find that on my terms and on my conditions, I revert to these feral, animalistic behaviors to self soothe just as so many non-mothered people do.
However, as the years have slipped by and my obsession has settled into nothing more than an everyday routine I can’t help but look in the mirror and see nothing but a ghost. My body feels like a haunted attic: when trap doors open the dust moves, my voice clutters in the back of my throat, and horrors beyond comprehension make the floorboards creak.
Depression is a silent film, a monologue shot underwater; it’s sulking because I refuse to talk to it anymore by which I mean about it. This entire ordeal, the floorboard creaks, the haunts—they’ve felt so all-consuming while maintaining a position that seems like a threat to my sanity. These past two years have felt like something I couldn’t write about or scream about or even talk to anyone about as if I’m still that scared child I’ve always been.
As if I’m not even entitled to how I’m feeling because what is there to feel anyway?
My need to escape and to control are both deeply connected to a hole in my soul lying underneath The Addiction. This lonely, anxious, empty space really can and does take the shape of anything my brains thinks may make me feel whole.
This hungry chasms’ presence tells me I must seek that thing
that behavior
this activity
because I can’t tolerate being alive without what it wants to be fed.
It’s uncomfortable to exist with this ragged tear and the void underneath it, but fulfilling its desires by satisfying its cravings creates a need for more because it’s simply a shapeshifter. I’m sorry, there are no other metaphors for it.
Underneath my addiction is a deep need to escape, not only from my feelings but from myself, my circumstances, and the reality of this god-awful void. Drugs once unburdened me of my sense of incompleteness, loneliness, and alienation which seem to have been with me since birth.
Now I’m stuck in this painful liminal space of knowing I can never be drunk again but might not always enjoy being sober.
There’s this fear of asking for help directly when you’re not entirely sure of what exactly you need help with because the feelings of addicts, or of the mentally ill, are not always treated with a lot of sincerity or compassion.
Sometimes I stand in a room and realize no one within the same four walls knows what it’s like to violently hate themselves in a way that makes them open their skin, starve their body, and poison themselves just to get by. How do you explain that to someone who’s unknowing?
And even now, I know some people close to me will read this and immediately revert to the same SOS texts they’ve gotten so good at typing: “so, is your sobriety ok? Do you want to drink?”
The answer is no. Absolutely no. Its been “no” for almost seven years and I’m more sure of that today than ever.
Most days I’m able to sit a little bit more with myself in solitude than I was capable of the day prior. I have experienced so many tiny moments of joy over these last seven years I finally know what it’s like to not feel chained to the title “Addict” but in that same breath I have to say there are some days I feel so sad it makes no fucking sense.
And some days I can’t help but to question if I have the right to claim recovery when I’m still so deeply suffering from this spiritual malady I was promised to be freed from by the ones with more time under their belt than me.
Things that have brought me moments of joy lately:
- Stella’s drawings
- Magnolia laying her head on my shoulder asking “for the funny stuff” on my phone (snapchat filters)
- My patient at work who is multiple years post-double-mastectomy telling me her husband still sometimes motorboats her chest. This was completely unprompted, I was just listening to lung sounds.
- Another patient thanking me for listening to him talk about his childhood. “I think I needed to talk about that, I know you’re busy so thanks for sitting with me.”
- Finding Sherbet Swirl Alani at the spinx gas station
- Hot chocolate
- Seeing the aurora in Pomaria even though maybe that’s a sign of really bad climate control
- Winning any round of Uno (even if I lost 700 in a row before the win)
- Inside jokes
- Audio messages
- Car rides
- Mary Logan requesting her birth certificate so I can do her birth chart because she didn’t know her time of birth.
- Wicked: For Good soundtrack
- When people repeatedly remember the little things.
I so deeply wanted to end this on an uptick, with prose that tied all the loose ends together, but I’ve been sitting on this for close to three months and I think this is just the way it’s going to be. Which makes sense, I guess, for my writing to jump all over the place and never reach resolve.
This is not a fiction novel. This is my life and sometimes loose ends stay loose ends. And that’s ok.
Most humans have a hole in the soul we feel will be filled if we were better, different, smaller, hotter, happier, or move socially accepted and approved of. Rather than filling or starving it, we’re practically forced to build a meaningful life around it—otherwise it’ll dominate our every thought.
We find this out in recovery.
The difficult part, I’m realizing over and over, is that recovery never ends, and starts over each day.
What a conundfest, am I wrong?
Wanna be blogger 
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