My Students Know I Have

Bear In Mind, People With Eating Disorders Tend To Be Both Competitive And Intelligent. We Are Incredibly Perfectionistic. We Often Excel In School,athletics,artistic Pursuits. We Also Tend To Quit Without Warning. Refuse To Go To School,drop Out,quit Jobs,leave Lovers,move,lose All Our Money. We Get Sick Of Being Impressive. Rather,we Tire Of Having To Seem Impressive. As A Rule,most Of Us Never Really Believed We Were Any Good In The First Place.

We Turn Skeletons Into Goddesses And Look To Them As If They Might Teach Us How Not To Need.

You Never Come Back, Not All The Way. Always There Is An Odd Distance Between You And The People You Love And The People You Meet, A Barrier Thin As The Glass Of A Mirror, You Never Come All The Way Out Of The Mirror; You Stand, For The Rest Of Your Life, With One Foot In This World And No One In Another, Where Everything Is Upside Down And Backward And Sad.

This Is The Very Boring Part Of Eating Disorders, The Aftermath. When You Eat And Hate That You Eat. And Yet Of Course You Must Eat. You Don’t Really Entertain The Notion Of Going Back. You, With Some Startling New Level Of Clarity, Realize That Going Back Would Be Far Worse Than Simply Being As You Are. This Is Obvious To Anyone Without An Eating Disorder. This Is Not Always Obvious To You.

Somewhere In The Back Of My Brain There Exists This Certainty: The Body Is No More Than A Costume, And Can Be Changed At Will. That The Changing Of Bodies, Like Costumes, Would Make Me Into A Different Character, A Character Who Might, Finally, Be Alright.