Apple
Coffee x 2
Half wheat bagel
Whole sesame bagel
Banana
Bowl of pasta with sauce and cheese
Ritz crackers
4 mini-muffins
1 slice bread with tuna
Chocolate—4 mini
2 slices bread with peanut butter
2 cups dried fruit and nuts
bread—2 slices
bowl tortilla soup
half barbeque chicken sandwich
French fries
THREW UP
3 prunes (out of trash can)
mini-muffin
biscotti
coffee bean coffee (vanilla)
rice and beans
chicken taco
quesadilla
crepe and butter
large sugar cookie
ice-blended mocha
baby ruth
white choc crunch bar
pkt famous amos cookies
French vanilla coffee
THREW UP
4 boxes of (cal free) ricola
1 cup of tea with milk
YUP—THAT’LL ABOUT DO IT!!
Pxx (this was back in November)
Carolyn, knowing what I was doing to my body, went to work on my mind. Her therapy included not only discussions about my past, my sexuality, and the feelings I had surrounding food and weight, but we also talked about body image in the larger social sense. We talked about the image of the ideal woman in the form of models who were mostly unhealthy teenage girls. We talked about the idea that women in the postfeminist era, while supposedly strong and commanding and equal to men in every sense, looked weaker and smaller than ever before. We talked about how most women’s sense of self-esteem still largely rests on what they look like and how much they weigh despite their other accomplishments. Carolyn photocopied passages of Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, and I read them. I remember lying on my bed, reading the badly photocopied text on the pages and saying out loud to no one but my dog, Bean, “Oh my God. I fell for it.” I remember feeling ashamed for calling myself a feminist when I had blatantly succumbed to the oppression of the mass media telling me what was beautiful, how to look, and what to weigh. It was a turning point. I had always prided myself on the fact that I was smart, analytical, and someone who didn’t “fall for it.” By starving myself into society’s beauty ideal, I had compromised my success, my independence, and my quality of life. Being overweight was really no different. It was just the “f— you” response to the same pressure. I was still responding to the pressure to comply to the fashion industry’s standards of beauty, just in the negative sense. I was still answering to their demands when really I shouldn’t have been listening to them at all. The images of stick-thin prepubescent girls never should have had power over me. I should’ve had my sights set on successful businesswomen and successful female artists, authors, and politicians to emulate. Instead I stupidly and pointlessly just wanted to be considered pretty. I squandered my brain and my talent to squeeze into a size 2 dress while my male counterparts went to work on making money, making policy, making a difference.
I was told that recovering from an eating disorder is hard and not very fun. But apart from honesty, the gift that Carolyn gave me was the knowledge that I would be recovered. Carolyn had herself recovered, and she told me that I wasn’t just going to have to learn to manage anorexia and bulimia like an alcoholic managing her drinking. Managing the disorder—thinking about food to any degree other than something nutritious and enjoyable—is, to me, the very definition of disordered eating. I didn’t just want to maintain my weight, suppress the urge to purge, and still have a list of foods that were “safe” to eat. I never wanted to think about food and weight ever again. For me, that’s the definition of recovered.
After only a few months, and despite Carolyn’s urging, I stopped treatment. I didn’t stop because I thought I no longer needed her counsel, but because I no longer wanted it. As I was learning that there were no “good” or “bad” foods, just bad eating practices, I listened not to Carolyn but to my eating disorder as it told me that it felt exposed and unsafe. If I stopped weighing my food and myself, like she suggested, its existence was threatened. My eating disorder and I had been together for my entire life, and at that moment, it was easier to continue down the unhealthy path than to pave a new one. In retrospect, had I continued my treatment at this critical point of recovery, I would’ve discovered that wellness and happiness were closer than I could’ve imagined. Instead, I resumed the cycle of starving, bingeing, purging, and grossly overeating. And I gained weight.
My weight, the thing that I was convinced was paramount to my success as an actress, wildly fluctuated as I played the character of Nelle Porter. I whittled down to a size 2 from a size 6 and then I became almost like a spectator, watching passively as my clothing size went back up from a 2 to a 4, a 4 to a 6. I watched as my biggest fear came to fruition. I was a size 8. I was the size the stylist for the L’Oréal TV commercial had announced to the executives; the size that told them they’d made a mistake in thinking that I was special enough to sell their hair products. I didn’t want to be a size 8. It was seeing that number sewn into the labels of my Theory skirts that made me resort to bulimia. But because I was afraid of lupus, mainly I just overate and cried. After reaching the dreaded size 8, I alternated between extreme anxiety about my weight and just giving up caring. Like a binge, I felt if I was going to do a bad thing, I might as well just keep doing it. Size 8 turned into size 10, then a size 12, and in one instance, a size 14. I was so upset and confused that I could ever be a size 14 that I unfairly accused my costume designer of buying a size 14 just to make me feel badly about myself. I lifted my jacket up to expose my bare midriff to a producer to make my case. I told the producer that I wasn’t as fat as my costume designer was making me out to be and it simply wasn’t fair that she was playing this psychological game with me. I will never forget the look on the producer’s face as I cornered her and showed her my stomach, passionately wailing about the size of my skirt and how the costume designer had brought it to me to make me feel insecure.
• • •
Within a very short time I weighed 168 pounds. More than hating myself, I simply had no sense of myself. It was like I was completely without ego for those months of being at my heaviest. I had reentered life, but it didn’t seem like my own life. It seemed like I was passively observing other people’s lives. I didn’t talk about myself. I was only interested in talking about other people. I had decided that I would very carefully make it known that I was gay to a few gay people around me. I figured that I had completely ruined my career by being fat, so I might as well be gay also. I figured that if I ever worked again, it would be as a “character” actress or playing the best friend to the lead female, so if my homosexuality was rumored around town, it wouldn’t really do any further damage to the image I’d already created for myself by being fat. On one very brave occasion I accompanied an acquaintance to a lesbian bar. I stood in the corner at a table facing away from the patrons. I was terrified of being recognized. With a push from my friend I went out onto the dance floor and asked an attractive girl for her phone number. She was attractive not only physically, but there was a sense of freedom about her. The complete opposite of me at the time, she appeared to be both carefree and grounded. We dated for about four months. While I was enjoying being in my first relationship with a woman, my bulimia intensified. I remember after a binge/purge session that lasted hours, she surprised me by dropping over. When she saw the red dots above my eyes and how ill I looked and sounded, she ran to the store to buy ingredients to make chicken soup. As I ate the soup she lovingly made, I felt ashamed. I hated that I had to lie and hide my secrets from my work and from my girlfriend. My paranoia and fear of being exposed—for having an eating disorder and for my sexuality—were excruciating.