3 - My Unwanted House Guest
When I was 14, my doctor told me she was concerned about my weight. I was sitting on a parchment paper exam table, alone, almost entirely naked, and she told me that I had to lose a little weight because "I was different from others my age." I felt the pressure of something climbing its way up my body. I felt a hand digging its nails into the skin on my back for a better grip.
I was unsure how she wanted me to reply, so I sat there and nodded. I didn't realize the impact of her words and that they would push me to think about my appearance for the rest of my life. Something made its way up my body further, its breath hot on my neck.
Maybe if I hadn't made it to that appointment, I would have ended up a little more normal or at least a little less hurt. I still daydream about what life would look like if I had gotten sick and had to reschedule, or my doctor wasn't in, and I had to see someone else with a duller tongue and a daughter she loved. Maybe I would have saved myself years and years of suffering. But that's not how life works. I felt a thump. Something had taken a seat on my shoulder, and it wasn't leaving.
When my doctor left the room, I removed the medical gown and reached for my clothes, neatly perched on the rolling stool next to a bottle of hand sanitizer. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I stood there in quiet reflection and tugged at my belly fat. I assessed how my arms and legs dangled and wondered how I could get smaller, weigh less, and ultimately become "normal." That something on my shoulder whispered a solution.
Anorexia devours more than the muscle of your heart. It does more than keep runway models stick thin and send middle-aged mothers into cardiac arrest. It eats away at your mind. It consumes your schoolwork, your relationships, and your inner thoughts. It becomes all you focus on and all you care about. It becomes the sun, the center of your universe. It's kind of funny, I guess - while you sit there, starving, Anorexia is lounging on the couch, stuffing its face, and chewing on your confidence and mental stability. Then it wipes its lips, places its fork down, and asks for seconds. Its belly stays full while yours grumbles in desire.
2.7% of teens will experience an eating disorder in their lifetime. The thing is, that percentage includes those who have come forward and claimed their torment. The rest of us suffer in silence, the faint echo of hollow stomachs our only proof of life.
~
The summer before my sophomore year, things took a turn because that's when I started hanging out with boys. I made a few new friends freshman year, and we accumulated this group of guys who hung out with us, but they weren't there for me. They only tagged along to see my best friends, Mara and Sophia. I noticed this after a night of sipping lukewarm coronas that I stole from my dad and had been hiding under my bed for a week.
We spun one of the six empty bottles, and it landed on Tommy. He was far shorter than everyone but still one of the cutest guys in the group. He had the haircut of a young Justin Beiber and would often flick his head to the side, shoving away the dark streaks covering his deep brown eyes. With another spin, the bottle landed on me. I looked up at him, butterflies rising in my stomach, cheeks turning red. He looked up at me, moving the strands of hair away from his face in one throw, and pretended to throw up.
"No, spin the bottle again," he laughed.
My eyes scanned the room for a hint of what I should say or do next. The remainder of the boys laughed with their heads high, Sophia, too, but with her grin facing the floor, and Mara shook her head in disapproval. Taking inspiration from past events, I sat there silently and let humiliation fill me to the brim. Sophia reached for the bottle and spun it again, and the fun resumed without much thought. That night, I took my stomach in my hands like I had done a few years before.
I started pre-packing my lunches so I wasn't swayed by the cafeteria's french fries and underbaked cookies. “You don’t need that,” my house guest would urge. “This is just temporary,” it would insist, “once you lose 10 pounds, you can go back to the way things were.” I weighed myself every morning and encased my body in plastic wrap and peppermint oil at night. Still, I saw little change. I could feel my unwanted house guest whisper, "You know you can do more, right? What do you mean you're trying? This is not you trying." I agreed.
~
By spring break of sophomore year, our friend group had accumulated even more guys. I remember begging my parents to let me stay home with my friends instead of jetting away to Turks and Caicos (thinking back to it, thank God they said no). I returned home Saturday night and went directly to Kyle’s house - he was the leader of the boys because his parents were divorced, and his dad once shotgunned a Bud Light in front of us. I always thought he was cute, and once, in a game of 21 questions, he revealed that he felt the same about me. His friend Andrew crushed that hope before it could grow, though, telling me later that Kyle was high when he sent the message. I understood.
I met up with Sophia, Mara, and a few more of our girlfriends and said a brief, carefree "hey" to the boys. They nodded back at me. At some point, I found myself with Sophia on the couch where the boys were. They were all trying to impress her, relaying to her their most recent run-in with the cops after a house party gone wrong. Sophia laughed and then looked at me and asked a question that prompted the end of our friendship:
"So, which one of us is hotter? Me or Maddie?"
To this day, I have no clue why she did it. It's likely because she was insecure and needed the validation, but at my expense? It was almost like they knew the answer before she asked the question because their fingers pointed away from me and directly at her. Some guys chuckled like the question was a joke in itself. I wanted to defend myself, but what would I say? Sophia was the right answer. She was hotter. I mean, she was perfect.
Sophia moved to the US from Brazil and could speak fluent Portuguese. What she lacked in academic talent she could make up for with worldly experience and the sway of her hips. She had teeth as white as the people in my suburban neighborhood and tanned olive skin. She had a dad who believed in the old ways of doing things, like beating his wife with a belt when she talked back. I felt the responsibility to shield Sophia from his grasp on their family. If she needed to be protected, I would help her in the form of sleepovers, paying for her meals, and bringing her on family vacations. She could count on me for anything.
She could also eat whatever she wanted and never seem affected by it. On the weekends, when I would numb my house guest with svedka and blue raspberry vape juice, we would devour Domino’s Pizzas and tubs of ice cream. It all caught up to me but never to her.
I never addressed what she said and let the rest of the night continue - I didn’t want to ruin everyone else’s fun. But later, when I got back home, I cried so much that I threw up. I stared at the vomit in the sink and decided bulimia would never be my route - I hated the taste of vomit and heard that it decays your teeth. But there was another option. "Just do it," my unwanted house guest clipped.
I took out my phone, took a picture, captioned it, and saved it to my Snapchat. I still have it saved on the app, and some days, when my memories pop up, I flinch.
"So, are you Anorexic yet?"
Looking back now, I should have deleted the photo and slapped myself in the face. I should have flicked my unwanted house guest off of my shoulder and purged my body of its evil. But words hurt, especially when you are a teenager and the most essential thing in life is getting a boyfriend and being skinny.
~
Spring went, summer came, and so did junior year volleyball season. The pre-packed lunches continued, but they slowly decreased in volume. A chicken cutlet on a roll with lettuce, tomato, and mayo slowly turned into 12 carrots, 2 hard-boiled eggs, 20 grapes, and a blue Gatorade.
I kept up this lunch order throughout the fall of junior year. I also gradually changed my other meals: Breakfast was no longer eggs and toast but a small cappuccino from Starbucks with nonfat milk and a dash of cinnamon. When my stomach grumbled loud enough for the entirety of fourth-period Advanced Calc to hear, I knew it was time to run to the cafeteria for another coffee. When dinner appeared after volleyball, I cut up my 20 shrimp, 10 zima tomatoes, and 1 zucchini with coconut aminos. I let those sizzle in a pan. My mom commended me for my efforts to get into shape. She was trying to do the same and had been dieting for what seemed like years. Maybe that’s why she never noticed that I stopped getting my period or that when I fell in the bathroom and slammed my nose on the marble sink, it wasn’t because I slipped on my bath mat but because my vision went spotty until all I could see was black.
On the days I wanted to be a "normal teenager" and get completely obliterated on the weekends, that meant no food leading up to the event. I mean, a single white claw was 100 calories. Also, no food meant I wouldn't have to drink as much to get drunk, and I would look better in my crop top when we undoubtedly took photos in the master bathroom.
~
By December, I had dropped nearly 40 pounds, and life was going great. Guys from my grade started talking to me, and popular girls who I didn't even think knew my name kept telling me how good I looked. I told everyone it was just volleyball, but I knew it was the combination of excessive exercise coupled with the 500 calories a day my house guest granted me.
Just when I thought my life would be normal, that I would live as the skinny girl who looked good in low-rise jeans and had a boyfriend who knew how lucky he was, life changed. Covid hit. I was locked in at home. Without school, I wasn't distracted during the day. The constant temptation of the refrigerator in our kitchen always pulled me in. I picked up running and took 6-mile "hot girl walks" once or twice a day for my "mental health," but eventually, I hit a plateau. I wasn't losing any more weight and couldn't understand why. “I’d say rapid shipping is best,” my house guest pushed, as it convinced me to purchase in bulk a type of tea that professional ballet dancers used to pass their weekly weigh-ins.
Senior year, I continued to track my calories and eat healthy, but I was allowed to indulge in an acai bowl twice a week as long as I did a Soul Cycle class those nights to even the score. At that point, if I wanted to enjoy some food, I had to punish myself via exercise. I was constantly stressed, partly because I had been rejected from some of my top colleges but mostly because of the impending doom of the "freshman 15." I was petrified, but how could one year in college lead me to gain 15 pounds? Well, it did, and then some.
~
By August, I had accepted an offer to a school I had no interest in and, in a last attempt to numb the pain of growing older, the sadness of saying goodbye to my childhood friends, and the anxiety of having to make new ones, I did what any 18 year old would do: Get drunk and send a text I would regret in the morning. Even today, I am astounded when a guy calls me pretty - I think it impossible to see me as anything other than ordinary, if not less. But to my surprise, the flirty “heyyy” I snapped to Kyle was answered with a much more aggressive “Come over. My mom isn’t home.”
Our time together was a dim-lit drunken haze. I was pleased to see the lights were already off when we entered his room: I could ponder my body under fluorescents for hours, but god forbid anyone caressed my skin with their eyes.
I remember every detail of our time together. I remember his back muscles and the way they shifted like a machine with each movement he took. I remember how he pushed my hair away from my eyes, and his fingers lingered against my cheek. But I also remember the bad parts. When his hand grazed my stomach, I could feel my house guest urging me to suck in. When he gripped my thighs too hard, my house guest insisted that he was feeling his way around my cellulite and would tell all of his friends about the night he spent with the fat girl who liked him. When he took my throat in his hands, my house guest sat there in awe of his sheer strength against my weakness.
I left in a hurry, quick to put on my clothes before he could look without the comfort of the comforter we had been tangled in minutes before. “So, how was it?” Mara asked when I stepped back into the car. “Fine,” I said. It was fine.”
~
When I got to college, I came to the conclusion that I had way too much work to keep fitness in the picture. At the same time, I thought I had finally healed myself, so I decided to eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. I preached to my friends how I had suffered from a painful ED for the past few years and that I was done with it. That was until sophomore year when I stepped on a scale and found that I had gained the freshman 15 and the additional 40 pounds I lost years ago.
I wasn't stupid. I saw what I looked like, who I had become. My unwanted house guest was disgusted. "How could you let this happen? For 4 years, you starved and pushed through everything just to let yourself not only put back on the weight but gain even more?" The girl looking back at me in the mirror was a failure. I hid in my room for almost all of my sophomore year of college. I was embarrassed to be seen in public and often told my friends I simply had "too much work" and could not go out. The real reason was that I was too afraid to have people see me at my worst, especially guys whom I had been forever trying to please.
At the end of my 2 years at Elon, I decided to get my shit together and started going to the gym. I shaved off 20 pounds by summer time without starving myself in the process. I've been able to continue to cut down and chip away at the parts of me I don’t like, but I won't say that my unwanted house guest has entirely gone away. I honestly don't think it ever will because ever since that doctor's appointment, I have never had a day to myself where I wasn't thinking about my appearance. I want to imagine a world where I can go about my life without having food at the forefront of my mind, but I can't. I will always have my unwanted house guest in the back of my mind - it sneaks up on me just when I think I'm getting better.
This past summer, I was at the pediatrician one last time. The doctor's assistant left me alone in the room so I could change into the familiar medical gown, but she failed to close the screen with my personal information. I couldn't help but take a look.
I plugged the weight and height from my checkup at age 14 into a quick Google BMI calculator and found I was at the perfect weight that summer. I was right on track to growing up a healthy young woman.
Many people say that even if something in the past has hurt them, they would not want to change it because it led to who they are today. Fuck that. What my doctor told me on that summer afternoon shoved a parasite down my throat. She forever instilled in me a sickness that nothing but time can cure. Maybe time doesn’t even have the power to heal this wound because no matter how much I try to convince myself that I am better, I know my house guest is still around. I hear its voice echoing whenever I decide to live a little.
You cannot hate yourself into loving your body. Healthy is not a one-size-fits-all word, and I had to learn that the hard way—the brutal way—the nonstop tracking my calories, drinking detox teas, and wrapping my body in plastic every night kind of way. It takes time and experimentation to know what your body likes. It takes lots of trial and error.
Hate won’t make you thinner, or healthier, or happier. Hate will never turn into love. Your body keeps score of what you say to it and how you treat it. It doesn’t forgive easily. Sometimes, I feel my unwanted house guest nuzzle further into my mind. I feel it lick its lips, its stomach growling, indicating that it might be time to fold back into old habits. Still, I will never be free. I would do anything to evict my unwanted house guest. I would do anything to tell my 14-year-old self that she is, indeed, perfectly normal.
