But the movie ended two weeks ago and I was still being compliant with the doctors. One doctor turned into four, and so there always seemed to be someone to answer to. They had me cornered. I couldn’t escape them even if I wanted to.
But I don’t want to. I’m tired. I’m sad all the time, and I’m in pain. I want to give up.
“Hi, Portia?”
“Hi, Dr. Andrews.” I waited for some pleasantries to be exchanged but none were forthcoming.
“There are quite a few things I’m seeing from the test results.” He took a beat as if to ready himself before delivering a blow. It scared me. I knew there would be something wrong, but his hesitation sent a wave of fear through my body. The wave of adrenaline connected the pain from my ankles to my wrists, and my head began to spin. My head had been feeling like half of its regular weight even when it wasn’t spinning. Because of that, I often felt unbalanced. I took a drag of my cigarette. Maybe my head is spinning from the nicotine? I calmed myself.
There is no point in being nervous because I can’t affect the outcome. What’s done is done.
“Okay. Let’s start with your bone density. Uh . . . according to these results it shows that you have osteoporosis.”
“Ah . . . how long has it been since you’ve had your period?”
“A year or more.”
“Okay. Your liver enzymes were extremely elevated, which are actually at the levels of cirrhosis.”
“Okay. Your electrolyte and potassium levels are pretty dangerous. At this rate, they could effect how your organs are functioning.”
“Okay. I guess the most important thing that the tests showed is that you have an autoimmune disease called lupus.”
I exhaled the smoke in my lungs and extinguished my cigarette in one motion. I limply held the phone and sat staring into the full-length mirror opposite my desk. I saw a round face, thin arms, a bony rib cage, a thick waist, and big, thick legs. It was the same body I had always seen, only smaller. The proportions were the same. If y is exactly half of x, then 2:1 is the ratio of my body parts. My thighs would always be the same in relation to my waist and my arms—it was all the same, but in a smaller version.
Game over. I lose.
The whirring of the treadmill sounded like a vinyl record stuck on a track.
Get on the treadmill.
The bars either side of the belt looked like a cage.
Get on the treadmill.
I don’t know what to say to the voice that will shut it up. I’m dying and it still won’t be quiet.
“I have lupus! I’m sick!”
You’re fat.
“No I’m not!”
The voice was echoing, reverberating. The word fat was swirling through my head, sounding the alarms. But above the din of the drill sergeant and the alarms and the ticks of missed beats, a sense of peace overcome me.
I’m sick. I’ve successfully lowered the bar. I don’t have to be a straight-A student or be a movie star to be proud of myself. I just have to live.
I accept myself just as I am. I accept myself.
The voice stops. Apart from laughter coming from the hallway I can’t hear anything. It is deathly quiet in my head. And then I said something to the voice I have always wanted to say:
“Go to hell.”
EPILOGUE
I CAN’T EXPLAIN THE birds to you even if I tried. In the early morning, when the sun’s rays peek over the mountain and subtly light up the landscape in a glow that, if audible, would sound like a hum, the birds sing. They sing in a layered symphony, hundreds deep. You really can’t believe how beautiful it is. You hear bass notes from across the farm and soprano notes from the tree in front of you all at once, at varying volumes, like a massive choir that stretches across fifty acres of land. I love birds. But not as much as my wife loves them. My wife thinks about them whereas I only notice them once they call for attention. But she looks for them, builds fountains for them, and saves them after they crash into windows. I’ve seen her save many birds. She holds them gently in the palm of her hand, and she takes them to one of the fountains she’s built especially for them and holds their beaks up to the gentle trickle of water to let them drink, to wake them up from their dazed stupor. No matter how much time it takes, she doesn’t leave them until they recover. And they mostly always do.
The sound of the big barn doors opening prompts me to begin walking toward the stables. I clutch my coffee mug and walk in bare feet, wearing only my pajama pants and tank to say good morning to my horses.
As I arrive at the barn, Julio, who helps with the horses, is mucking out the stalls, an activity that I would help with were I wearing shoes. I love to muck out stalls.
“Hi, Julio.”
“Morning, Portia. Riding today?”
“Yep. A little later.”
I love riding horses. I love bathing them and grooming them. I love their strong, muscular bodies, their athleticism, and their kindness. I love the companionship and the trust a rider builds with her horse. I love everything about horses. Horses saved my life.
“Good morning, Mae.” The regal head of my big, beautiful Hanoverian horse pokes out from her stall. I wrap my arms around her neck and kiss her muzzle. I bought Mae in 2002 when I was recovering from my eating disorder. Learning how to ride her, learning her language, and being passionate about something other than my weight or looks shifted my focus away from my obsession with being thin long enough to let the doctors and the therapists do their work. I had found love in Mae. I had found a reason to get up in the morning.
“Ellen not up yet?” Ellen usually accompanies me in the mornings to the stables.
“Nah. I’m letting her sleep in.”
I crept out of the bedroom this morning and out of the cottage not even grabbing shoes or a sweatshirt as I was trying desperately not to wake her. Ellen works really hard and needs to rest when we’re at our farm on the weekends. She especially needed to sleep this morning as she was awake most of the night reading long after I fell asleep. She was awake most of the night reading this book.
After petting Mae, Archie, Femi, Monty, and Diego Garcia, I went back up to the cottage. As I opened the door to the porch I heard the voice that makes my heart the happiest to hear.
“Coff-ee!” Ellen calls out for coffee like a dying man calling out for water as he perishes in the desert. It always makes me laugh.
I walked into the bedroom, plop onto the bed, and wrap my arms around her.
“Baby,” she says sleepily, “you were crazy.”
“I know.”
“So sad. I feel like I was reading about a completely different person.”
“I feel like I was writing about a different person.”
“You were so sick. What happened to the lupus?”
“It was a misdiagnosis. I just needed to eat. And the cirrhosis and osteoporosis—all of it went away. I was lucky that I didn’t do serious damage.”
“You poor thing. I wish I could’ve been there to save you.”
“You did save me. You save me every single day.”
I kiss her and get up off the bed to make her coffee.
“I’m so proud of you, baby. It’ll help a lot of people.” As I pour the coffee, she suddenly appears at the doorway of the kitchen, her blond head poking around the door. “Just be sure and tell the people that you’re not crazy anymore.”
I didn’t decide to become anorexic. It snuck up on me disguised as a healthy diet, a professional attitude. Being as thin as possible was a way to make the job of being an actress easier by fitting into a sample size dress, by never worrying that I couldn’t zip up my wardrobe from episode to episode, day after day. Just as I didn’t decide to become anorexic, I didn’t decide to not be anorexic. I didn’t decide to become healthy. I decided not to die. I didn’t even care to live better than I’d been living, necessarily. I just knew at the moment of hearing my test results that I didn’t want to live as a sickly person who would slowly suffer and end up dead. The news that I had seemingly irreversible illnesses punctured my obsessive mind and rendered my weight-loss goals meaningless. I lost anorexia. It was too hard to hold on to. By the end I felt as though I was clinging on to anorexia in the same way you would cling to the rooftop of a building, your body dangling precariously over the other side, begging for release. Because it was more exhausting to hang on, and because I had a real reason for the first time in the form of lupus, I let go of dieting. I watched as my biggest accomplishment, my greatest source of self-worth, plummeted to the ground. I had climbed slowly, methodically, all the way to the top only to fall too fast to even see where I had been.