If and Only If: A Journal of Body Image and Eating Disorders Winter 2015 | Page 107

My first day of work at the A&D halfway house I wake at 7 a.m. As I stand in front of my closet looking for what I will wear, every pair of pants bleats out a story of discomfort and displeasure. It is a curious irony, like that of the vanishing, spot-lit anorexic, that all of my clothes are somehow both too tight and too loose, their tale the tale of living at both ends of every spectrum at once—in this case somehow both too large and too small, physically of course, but psychically as well. At last I settle on a pair of grey jeans, a gigantic faded pink t-shirt belted at my waist, and flat-soled, black Chinese slippers. Whether I think this outfit is professional is lost on me now, though I suspect I bypassed the “professional” question by telling myself it was “creative.” However, since my awareness of how I look to the outside world flits in and out like a nervous bird, what will happen today is that I will get to work and the bird of awareness will flit in and I will see the grey jean/pink t-shirt ensemble for what it is: weekend wear at best, and even then, ill-fitting. Imagine (if you can) a mirror over which a curtain falls every other second while you are pulling on your clothes or fixing your hair or putting on your makeup. Now imagine the mirror is a rippling lake. This is body image distortion, and while the fat/thin juxtaposition is what the anorexic is most famous for (seeing her skeletal body as waddling and gelatinous) her ideas about how to present herself—what to wear where, for example--are also shifting and unstable. Certainly starvation wreaks havoc on acuity, but low self-esteem plays a part here as well, given that body image distortion can live on once nutritional stability is restored. Here I think of a hydroponic plant, growing in the absence of soil. Certainly something is feeding the roots—a rich mix of rigidity, self-contempt, and anxiety, for example—even if that something is no longer vividly apparent to others.

It seems to me a glitch in city planning that Bridgeway sits in the middle of downtown Tifton. Before my interview, I romanticized the idea of halfway houses, envisioning them in remote idyllic locations removed from the pressures of city life and the glare of the public spotlight. This I now recognize as my younger self’s own escapist fantasy. I recall that in response to a therapist’s question I once asserted that desert-island living was the place for me, as it would remove me from public scrutiny, thereby allowing me to eat whenever and whatever I pleased (suggesting that I believed my problems with eating came from the simple condition of existing side by side with other humans). The therapist wasted no time debunking my preposterous proposal, by suggesting that the glare I found myself so uncomfortably caught in was none but my own.

“I think you already live on a desert island,” he said. “I think you need more of the real world, not less.”

He was right of course. Over a span of twenty years I’d virtually never listened to a news story all the way through. I’d never given thought to my religious upbringing (except to quit Sunday School out of a boredom I couldn’t even disguise as moral disagreement because it didn’t occur to me to morally disagree with conservative Judaism). When called upon to give my views on the “Israel/Palestinian problem” I recused myself by calling the topic “too heated” (though I didn’t know why it was heated, I’d only surmised it from the fact that people felt compelled to ask me, a Jew, about it). Certainly I had never voted, and though I could name who was on the ticket, I could not discuss what was at stake nor did I care. No, over the span of my twenty years I had done little besides chronicle, in a succession of carefully chosen lined and unlined blank books, the mostly miniscule moments of my existence. Bad tennis days were dissected, but there is no mention of the Manson family murders. Trips to the Chattahoochee River on horseback were recounted, but nothing about the young black boys (13 of them by the time Wayne Williams was convicted) who were being abducted and murdered, including one whose body was dumped in—yes—the Chattahoochee River. At college in 1979 I meticulously noted my ever-changing moods, even describing how seeing the chalk phrase “Free The Hostages” on the street fueled my sadness about a world whose machinations terrified me, but my compassion did not extend to the actual men and women being held hostage in Iran. Mine was an insular world where everything that happened boomeranged back to me for the sole purpose of inflaming or frightening me. There is a joke about a man who hears that the hostess of a party he was supposed to attend has died tragically, which forces him to cancel his plans.

Bemoans the man, “Why does everything have to happen to me?”

This was me.