Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher Page B
Authors: Marya Hornbacher
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knocked me into bed and left me shivering in the artificial night of drawn blinds and cold cloths. I began to have massive menstrual cramps, to complain of dizzy spells during gym class. I'd retreat to the locker room where I could barf and lie down in peace. I began to leave classes, dizzy and with black spots swimming before my eyes, and go to the school nurse, who had me lie down. It was very quiet in her office. She shuffled papers. I began to have stunning backaches. My mother gave me back rubs, knuckling knots the size of her fist. My parents took me to doctors. I spent the next several years discussing things with neurologists, biofeed-back specialists, orthopedists, orthodontists, gynecologists, pediatri-cians, back specialists. I sat in waiting rooms paging through women's magazines, reading diet articles and ads for liposuction. People gave me pills and tried to worry out a possible cause, but none was available. Rare and mysterious illness. Psychosomatic complaints.
[Bulimic] patients tend to somatize to other body systems. These patients are often referred to various medical subspecialists, because they complain of headaches, back pain, breathing difficulties, abdominal cramping and nausea, muscle and joint pain, and the like.…No doubt the pain is real but misplaced.
Raging internal emotions erupt in the body…[the patient]
would much rather have a concrete and treatable condition than a diffuse, potentially untreatable and shameful psychological one.14
I appeared at dinner one night, sat down, looked at my mother, and watched her open her mouth and scream. What the hell? I said, and apologized. Jesus, my father said, staring at me as if I'd grown horns. WHAT? I said. Honey, what's wrong with your eyes? He reached toward me. I jerked away and toward the mirror that hung above the buffet. I looked: The lower half of the white of my eyes was deep red. My eyes
14Ibid., 267-68.
looked as if they were welling with tears of blood. In fact, I had popped all the blood vessels while vomiting that afternoon, and the liquid red lay below the shimmery skin. I screamed and ran to my room.
Looking back, I can say: There. My life split in half, finally and definitively, right there, seventh grade. The outside world began to fade into the middle distance, and then to the background. Right there, I began to run toward the vanishing point with cold sweat running down my face. It did not seem that way at the time. It felt more like a bad day, an embarrassing event, a too-close call—I almost got caught. I sometimes think about how different my life might have been if I'd done what I should have that day: I should have confessed. I should have been scared off. I should have taken my cue from the universe that this was only going to get worse. I did not. I threw up again that night, half-afraid that my eyeballs would explode. But it was, by far, more important that I get rid of dinner.
Of course, by then, throwing up was the only way I knew to deal with fear. That paradox would begin to run my life: to know that what you are doing is hurting you, maybe killing you, and to be afraid of that fact—but to cling to the idea that this will save you, it will, in the end, make things okay.
At a certain point, an eating disorder ceases to be “about” any one thing. It stops being about your family, or your culture. Very simply, it becomes an addiction not only emotionally but also chemically.
And it becomes a crusade. If you are honest with yourself, you stop believing that anyone could “make” you do such a thing—who, your parents? They want you to starve to death? Not likely. Your environment? It couldn't care less. You are also doing it for yourself.
It is a shortcut to something many women without an eating disorder have gotten: respect and power. It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal
[Bulimic] patients tend to somatize to other body systems. These patients are often referred to various medical subspecialists, because they complain of headaches, back pain, breathing difficulties, abdominal cramping and nausea, muscle and joint pain, and the like.…No doubt the pain is real but misplaced.
Raging internal emotions erupt in the body…[the patient]
would much rather have a concrete and treatable condition than a diffuse, potentially untreatable and shameful psychological one.14
I appeared at dinner one night, sat down, looked at my mother, and watched her open her mouth and scream. What the hell? I said, and apologized. Jesus, my father said, staring at me as if I'd grown horns. WHAT? I said. Honey, what's wrong with your eyes? He reached toward me. I jerked away and toward the mirror that hung above the buffet. I looked: The lower half of the white of my eyes was deep red. My eyes
14Ibid., 267-68.
looked as if they were welling with tears of blood. In fact, I had popped all the blood vessels while vomiting that afternoon, and the liquid red lay below the shimmery skin. I screamed and ran to my room.
Looking back, I can say: There. My life split in half, finally and definitively, right there, seventh grade. The outside world began to fade into the middle distance, and then to the background. Right there, I began to run toward the vanishing point with cold sweat running down my face. It did not seem that way at the time. It felt more like a bad day, an embarrassing event, a too-close call—I almost got caught. I sometimes think about how different my life might have been if I'd done what I should have that day: I should have confessed. I should have been scared off. I should have taken my cue from the universe that this was only going to get worse. I did not. I threw up again that night, half-afraid that my eyeballs would explode. But it was, by far, more important that I get rid of dinner.
Of course, by then, throwing up was the only way I knew to deal with fear. That paradox would begin to run my life: to know that what you are doing is hurting you, maybe killing you, and to be afraid of that fact—but to cling to the idea that this will save you, it will, in the end, make things okay.
At a certain point, an eating disorder ceases to be “about” any one thing. It stops being about your family, or your culture. Very simply, it becomes an addiction not only emotionally but also chemically.
And it becomes a crusade. If you are honest with yourself, you stop believing that anyone could “make” you do such a thing—who, your parents? They want you to starve to death? Not likely. Your environment? It couldn't care less. You are also doing it for yourself.
It is a shortcut to something many women without an eating disorder have gotten: respect and power. It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal
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