Day 4

Well... today was better than yesterday. Progress not perfection, I guess.

However, the spirit of Brian Wilson seems to have taken up residence within me today, minus the creative genius. So really just the spirit of some non-Beach-Boy antisocial dude in an existential funk who wants to stay locked in his room all day. Plus I seriously doubt Brian Wilson ever spent an entire day in his Lady and the Tramp pajamas. Assuming he had Lady and the Tramp pajamas, which I kind of doubt.

Everything just seems sort of at a professional and personal standstill for me, and for anyone who knows me, standing still is the one activity I cannot tolerate with any kind of real or pretended grace. I'm restless, anxious, and twitchier than a ferret on meth. Maybe time to lay off the caffeine as I battle my other addictions. In other words, I really need something new to happen. I need a pleasant surprise of some kind, an upswing of the ol' cosmic pendulum. The grandfather clock in the living room at my parents' house has an unfortunate tendency to arbitrarily stop mid-day, but it still continues to bong at periodic intervals even when the clock is no longer ticking and the pendulum is no longer swinging. I feel like this is the story of my life somehow. There's a metaphor in there somewhere I'm too tired to unpack.

I'll make it. Somehow.

I'll leave you with these parting words of wisdom for the day:

"Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believed that something inside them was superior to circumstance." -Bruce Barton

Day 3

Half measures availed us nothing. It's the one phrase from the AA Big Book that was seared into my memory from all the times back in 2007 I accompanied my recovering alcoholic ex-boyfriend to AA meetings. It has bothered me, troubled me, nagged at me, eaten away at me for as long as I can remember. And I was never sure why. It goes on to say: We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not. With all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Some of us have tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil until we let go absolutely.

Huh. That's the last line of Wasted, too -- "in the end, there is the letting go."

I remember sitting in rehab (during my first stint in January 2008) in group therapy one day, and having one girl clearly articulate what all of the rest of us felt.

"I'm perfectly willing to quit this eating disorder if... I can stay at this weight or get a little skinnier. I sure as fuck am not gaining it."  She was already about 20-25 pounds
underweight. If, if, if, if.

IF.

Addicts have more "ifs" than a Kipling poem. If I can still eat whatever the hell I want when I want it, if I can still binge/starve when I'm stressed, if I can keep all my unhealthy habits still, if I can still weigh myself 400 times a day (this is a big one for me), if I can zOMG NOT GAIN A SINGLE FUCKING POUND (also a big one for me), then I will recover. "Nothing will ever be attempted," Samuel Johnson wrote in 1759, "if all possible objections must be first overcome." And the human condition has not changed much in the last 250 years. 

I have a lot of "ifs" myself. And that's because I personally love half measures. I am half measures's number-one fan. If half measures were the Dallas Cowboys, I'd be decked out in a #8 jersey with my face painted blue-and-white clutching a star-spangled foam finger. The trouble is that half measures, if you were paying attention above, avail us nothing. After all these years, maybe I should have that tattooed across my face in mirror-writing so I will see it every morning when I wake up. Hey, it worked for Leonardo da Vinci (the mirror-writing, that is, not the facial tattoos; he didn't have any of those. That I know of.)

This.  My tattoo will look like this.

This is all my extremely circuitous way of confessing I purged last night.

Actually, in the interest of candor, I purged five times between three a.m. and eight a.m., and I wish I could say it was for some deep-seated, profound psychological reason, some interior tumult caused by my fucked-up Russian novel of a life. (It may not be Anna Karenina yet in the blow-your-brains-out-depressing department, but it's at least Crime and Punishment.)

But that wasn't the case. It was only because (I wish this were not true) around three o'clock in the morning I happened to move my bathroom scale about two inches to the left -- one corner had been caught in the divets between the bathroom tiles -- and stepped on it. And discovered that on a perfectly flat surface, I weigh about a pound and a half more than I thought I did.

Panic ensued. I am not exaggerating. Five hours of hysterical tears and sleepless tossing and turning. Five. I counted. I lived them. I weathered through them. And also through several Nutella-and-peanut-butter burritos. Don't even ask. And then threw up my guts in rage at a universe that would allow such a digusting failure of an obese cow to even exist. Whatever eating disorders are or are not, they become your private fuck-you to the cosmos, a radical way to physicalize your own emotional pain. But the old bone-ache returned almost immediately, the muscle spasms, the certain comfort that precedes certain death -- all the tangible and physical reminders of WHY I DON'T WANT TO LIVE THIS WAY ANYMORE. As Steve Buscemi's therapist character in 28 Days puts it, this is not a way to live; this is a way to die.

But I'm back on the wagon this morning -- I am. I hunkered down at eleven a.m. and had Polly-O-String-Cheese and Powerade and digested it with all the enthusiasm of a dysthymic crustacean on sedatives.

But I'm realizing this bloody half-measures issue is still a major sticking point. I have to accept that I can gain weight -- or I can die. For me, for my body, for my situation, there is no middle ground. And the fact that I would actually, at this critical juncture, rather die than weigh 120-130 pounds and buy size-four jeans is a concrete reminder of how far down the scale (no pun intended) I have fallen. It would be laughable if it weren't so fucking sad. I have to throw out the scale and gain the weight. I have to. And embracing that decision and just fucking doing it (a la Nike), is my own personal hell and Custer's Last Stand and Battle of Waterloo all rolled into one.

Why does this have to be so hard? Yet even as I ask myself that question, all I can hear is Tom Hanks's voice in my head from A League of Their Own: "It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great."

Also, there's no crying in baseball.

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CAN'T

by Edgar Guest

Can't is the worst word that's written or spoken;

Doing more harm here than slander and lies;

On it is many a strong spirit broken, 

And with it many a good purpose dies.

It springs from the lips of the thoughtless each morning

And robs us of courage we need through the day:

It rings in our ears like a timely sent warning

And laughs when we falter and fall by the way.

Can't is the father of feeble endeavor,

The parent of terror and halfhearted work;

It weakens the efforts of artisans clever, 

And makes of the toiler an indolent shirk. 

It poisons the soul of the man with a vision, 

It stifles in infancy many a plan; 

It greets honest toiling with open derision 

And mocks at the hopes and the dreams of a man. 

Can't is a word none should speak without blushing;

To utter it should be a symbol of shame; 

Ambition and courage it daily is crushing; 

It blights a man's purpose and shortens his aim. 

Despise it with all of your hatred of error; 

Refuse it the lodgment it seeks in your brain; 

Arm against it as a creature of terror, 

And all that you dream of you someday shall gain. 

Can't is the word that is foe to ambition, 

An enemy ambushed to shatter your will; 

Its prey is forever the man with a mission 

And bows but to courage and patience and skill. 

Hate it, with hatred that's deep and undying, 

For once it is welcomed 'twill break any man; 

Whatever the goal you are seeking, keep trying 

And answer this demon by saying: "I can."

Day 2

“But, when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.” --Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back.” --Marya Hornbacher, Wasted

I remember in my youth (?) -- it always feels bizarrely pretentious to refer to one's youth at 26, much like Hornbacher having the unabashed chutzpah to write a memoir about anything at age 22 -- the "in" work of nonfiction amongst the evangelical Christians with whom I went to high school (I am a Catholic, albeit a shitty one who has periodically come full circle from periods of half-assed piety to periods of lapsed agnosticism and back again) was Josh Harris's pro-Christian-courtship book I Kissed Dating Goodbye. For the sake of brevity, I will refrain from literary criticism of this work, except to say that Harris raises some legitimate points, using his then-It-Boy status to condemn a cultural paradigm of casual/disposable everything and encouraging romantic relationships to be purposeful in their intent. I first read the book at thirteen at the height of its popularity, and I remember Harris making one analogy which has remained with me ever afterwards:

Building well sometimes means first tearing down. Recently my dad and my younger brother Joel attended a birthday party for Stephen Taylor, one of Joel's best friends. It was a very special occasion. Stephen was turning thirteen, and his dad wanted to make Stephen's entrance into young adulthood memorable. Nice presents wouldn't suffice; Stephen's dad wanted to impart wisdom. To accomplish this, he asked fathers to come with their sons to the party and to bring a special gift -- a tool that served them in their specific lines of work. Each father gave his tool to Stephen along with its accompanying life lesson for the "toolbox" of principles Stephen would carry into life . . .

During the gift giving, a father who was a professional home builder handed Stephen a small box. "Inside that box is the tool I use the most," he said. Stephen opened it and found a nail puller. "My nail puller, simple as it might seem," the father explained, "is one of the most important tools I have." This father told the story of how once, while in the middle of building a wall, he discovered that it was crooked. Instead of halting the construction and undoing a little work to fix the wall, he decided to proceed, hoping that the problem would go away as he continued to build. However, the problem only worsened. Eventually, at a great loss of materials and time, he had to tear down the nearly completed wall and totally rebuild it.

 "Stephen," the father said gravely, "times will come in life when you'll realize you've made a mistake. At that moment, you have two choices: you can swallow your pride and 'pull a few nails,' or you can foolishly continue your course, hoping the problem will go away. Most of the time the problem will only get worse. I'm giving you this tool to remind you of this principle: When you realize you've made a mistake, the best thing you can do is tear it down and start over."

The undoing of a thing is vastly more difficult than doing it right the first time around. And sometimes pulling a few nails would have saved me a lot of fucking effort in the long run. I "make mistakes like the next man," to borrow a phrase from Dumbledore; "in fact, being -- forgive me -- rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger." So correspondingly huger, in fact, that the undoing thereof tends to less closely resemble the tearing down of a wall and more closely resemble the unraveling of a Gordian knot designed to make a Boy Scout cry.

Do anything for 11 years and then attempt to quit cold-turkey; the very act of stopping is more difficult than mapping the human genome on a Commodore 64, becomes a brutal and death-defying act of the will all its own. Whether your obsession of choice is stamp-collecting, crack cocaine, or supporting a six-cups-a-day coffee habit, the very routine itself -- the familiarity -- becomes a cold comfort, a safety net that strangulates. It has often been noted that girls who develop eating disorders and other comorbid addictions tend to be the same girls that have always been categorized as Brave, Independent, Self-Sufficient, right from the very get-go. I remember having a curious idea as a kid that Satan lived in my closet (Scrupulosity? Catholic guilt? Parents who let me watch Roman Polanski movies one too many times? I have no idea, but I do know the 1941 movie The Devil and Daniel Webster and the Wishbone episode of Faust both gave me weeks of restless nights as I lay awake wondering if it was possible to accidentally sell one's soul to the devil), but yet despite these oddly specific fears I didn't sleep with a nightlight, my stuffed animals (although numerous) were largely decorative, and never once in my life have I owned a security blanket. (Linus from Peanuts, in fact, has always been my least favorite character for that very reason.) Bring on the demons -- I would fend them off with my irresistible girlish charm and my Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtles-acquired martial arts skills.

I am known for many vices, but cowardice is not one of them.

So it is not altogether surprising that we, having denied ourselves the right to our childhood fears, latch hold of these misguided security mechanisms in adulthood. Boys, booze, and bulimia may have been my three-headed Cerberus over the years, but to give credit where credit is due, they saved me all the while they were killing me. Addictions form a paper-thin protective layer between you and the world around you. They enable you, however briefly, to cope, to feel normal, to just fucking deal the way everyone else around you manages to do without chemical or edible assistance. "It is the thing you believe is keeping you safe, alive, contained," writes Hornbacher of her eating disorder. "And in the end of course, you find it is doing quite the opposite." Never do I feel more paradoxically invincible than when I am demolishing the entire contents of my refrigerator (the Great Uncooked-Brownie-Batter-Pickles-and-Kidney-Beans binge of 2007 was particularly memorable) and washing it down with a bottle of Bacardi. The blackouts on the bathroom floor, the half-remembered ambulance rides, the shaking hands of a palsied eighty-year-old, the muscles crying out in anguish at years of abuse, the brain set loose upon itself in a devouring fit of madness -- all these seem inconsequential, for in the moment the combined effects of solid and liquid courage (in a caged match, I could probably triumph over the Bacardi but not the brownie batter) seems your own personal Armor of Achilles: impenetrable. You are Okay. You are untouchable. You can almost hear the Super Mario Brothers invincibility-star theme song playing in your head as you rip up the back of your throat with your fingernails.

If you're so Okay, then why are you crying?

I said in the moment. These are important words to the addict. All we know is the moment. All we operate in is the moment. Addiction can practically be defined as short-term satisfaction with long-term consequences. The idea that one can act opposite to one's emotions is utterly foreign to the eating-disordered/alcoholic/addict brain. So on this, my second full day without purging or drinking, I have discovered that half the battle is conquering the moment. We -- not just addicts, but people in general -- are creatures of many and fickle emotions. The jeans that fit me perfectly well yesterday, even when I know damn well they fit me perfectly well yesterday, absolutely categorically do not fit me today because fat is OOZING OUT OF MY EVERY PORE AND OHMYGOD I am beginning to bear a striking resemblance to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man AND NO ONE WILL EVER LOVE ME AGAIN AND I AM GOING TO DIE ALONE WITH CATS LISTENING TO MY "NEXT TO NORMAL" SOUNDTRACK.

This is all probably not true. In fact, I will go out on a limb here and say it is almost definitely not true. The empirical evidence would suggest otherwise. I am (a) probably not going to die alone -- people won't even leave me the hell alone even when I want them to -- and (b) am five-feet-seven-and-three-quarters-inches and 108 pounds, so probably do not markedly resemble the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Jolly Green Giant, or any other brand representative of legendarily mammoth (or green) proportions. I have in fact gained weight the last several weeks (up from 100), but I still have a BMI of 16-point-something (well below underweight), and on my trip to New York a week ago I zipped into a size 00 at the Gap with room to spare. (In other words, the smallest adult size they make for human people.) So from a rational standpoint, it's not only an egregious overstatement to say I've gotten fat but it's beyond fucking absurd. I know that. I do. I KNOW that. I am smart and self-aware enough to recognize that after I eat 450 calories (my entire breakfast, including a Mountain Dew Amp, this morning), I feel sick as hell and am going to be pacing in a frenetic panic for the next several hours. But once those several hours have passed and I've digested and forgotten about (okay, not forgotten about -- never forgotten about) the Greek yogurt or whatever the hell it was that was causing me such existential angst, I WILL BE OKAY.

I just can't trust the workings of my own head in the moment, or operate on my own feelings. And when you've grown up heeding Polonius's bullshit advice of "to thine own self be true", what do you do when the one person you can never trust is -- yourself?

It's a pickle, all right.

Mmm. Pickles. If you'd been around for the Great Uncooked-Brownie-Batter-Pickles-and-Kidney-Beans binge of 2007, you'd have seen how I feel about pickles...

NONONONONONONONONONO.

In a nutshell: Opposite-to-Emotions action is good. I'm working on it. All those years of dialectical behavior therapy FTW.

And that, my friends, was day 2. Or at least the first two and a half hours of it. I have a lot of day left to go.

Day 1

1. "What we call the beginning is often the end.  And to make an end is to make a beginning.  The end is where we start from." (T.S. Eliot)
2. Or, in the immortal words of Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, "Operation self-esteem -- Day Fucking One."
3. There have been a lot of day ones in my life.  I have about eleven separate journals from as many years that begin with "Today is the first day of the rest of my life!!!" or some exclamation-point-ridden derivative thereof.  Quitting some vice or another.  Starving, bingeing, purging, drinking, smoking.  The list is long, and seems to have grown longer with the passage of the years.  And this time I mean it, she said each time through gritted teeth, with the unshakable confidence of one who has yet to discover just how deeply psychic demons can be entrenched.  My name is Legion, for we are many.
4. And they can be dogged tenants at times; I tend to be, even under the best of circumstances, a magnanimous host rather than the autocratic landlord of my own soul.  I have grown to accept the demons, to make halfhearted peace with them, to rearrange the furniture to make room for the hideaway bed, to clean up after their broken bottles and cigarette butts and tuck them into bed after a particularly debauched bender.  For years I have pursued negotiations with them that make the Treaty of Versailles look like a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors.  I am still at core the fat kid on the playground apologetically maneuvering my weight on the end of the see-saw to play nice with the two svelte suburbanite second-graders on the other end.  Politics makes for strange bedfellows, but even more so addictions.

Ultimately, they are the presumptive houseguests we are too polite to ask to leave. We spend years on the psychoanalyst's couch, thousands upon thousands on endless hospitalizations and rehab and therapy and pills and hypnotism and acupuncture, carefully deconstructing our every childhood disappointment and reconstructing the genogram of our family of origin -- but until we tell the squatters to pack their bags and get the fuck out, we are Nero fiddling while Rome burns.  And we are damn fine fiddle players.  Contrary to popular opinion, it is not that we fail to notice the havoc being wreaked upon our house; rather, we require years of convincing that it is, in fact, our house.  

Much has been made of the elusive concept of rock-bottom in recovery literature.  I think this is a mistake.  The hippest of the hip addiction memoirs -- Marya Hornbacher's award-winning Wasted for the eating disorder set, Elizabeth Wurtzel's More, Now, Again for the speed freaks, Joshua Lyon's Pill Head for the Vicodin junkies, and Koren Zailckas's runaway New York Times bestseller Smashed for the good old-fashioned alcoholics among us -- make for fascinating reads but tend to capitalize on raw and lurid sensationalism.  This may do more harm than good in the long run.  I have a T-shirt that says BAD CHOICES MAKE GOOD STORIES.  If this is true, I should have several Pulitzers by now.  All too often, we expect our addiction stories to be like a Michael Bay movie: thin on the exposition, heavy on the explosions.

Wired Magazine reported in 2010 that Alcoholics Anonymous is known for "doing a better job of retaining drinkers who have hit rock-bottom than those who still have a ways to fall."  Which begs the question -- what the hell is rock-bottom, anyway?  As addicts, we like to haggle over semantics.  We admitted we were powerless over [insert drug of choice here], that our lives had become unmanageable, reads the first step of all Twelve-Step programs.  But what is powerless? we quibble.  How unmanageable is too unmanageable?  Over the years, I have been alternately diagnosed as bulimic, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (ED-NOS), and anorexic, binge/purge subtype (which as best as I can figure just translates to "skinny bulimic").  I have fought tooth and nail in rehab -- twice -- to avoid being diagnosed as an alcoholic.  I am NOT an alcoholic.  I just drink when I'm stressed.  Fuck you.  There's a DIFFerence.  Yeah, there is, but who gives a shit?  Whether you're chemically dependent or just plain irresponsible, YOU STILL PUT VODKA IN YOUR CEREAL THIS MORNING.  Do we praise the cokehead for not mainlining heroin? Is Tiger Woods a sex addict or just a cheating asshat? Either way, are his actions justified?  Hooray, you haven't killed yourself or anybody else yet -- what do you want, a cookie?

Look around you.  Are people still giving you that Look the addict knows all too well -- the Look of the rubbernecker at the scene of a fatal car crash?  Then no, you're right, you're not at rock-bottom yet.  Because rock-bottom is not a destination.  Rock-bottom is a trip to the morgue.  As Caroline Knapp writes in Drinking: A Love Story, "Really hitting bottom means death . . . it's a choice you make.  Get off or keep going until you end up six-feet under."  This is the way the world ends / this is the way the world ends / not with a bang but a whimper.  Platitudinously but truly, rock bottom is where you stop digging.  

It's taken me ten years and seven months, but I'm turning in my shovel.  

Day Fucking One.