Don't Torch The Skin You Live In

After a lifetime of battling my body, I'm waving the white flag

Me, 1980. Photos courtesy of the author.

TW: Disordered eating, eating disorders.

My first memory of food is my mother trying to pry the tines of a fork into my mouth. Her pleas were quiet and urgent, and it was a rare thing to see my mother cry. She was impenetrable, violent, and beautiful. Tears are the dominion of children, but it was as if I were birthed bone-dry — capable of sorrow, but unable to weep for it. That morning, before he woke before he would part the beaded curtain that separated their bedroom from where I slept before I would enter that room when my mother wasn’t in it before he would break me, break things, I remember staring at my mother as she tried to work food in me and feeling nothing.

I am five.

Back then, my mother was bone-thin. Body taut from waiting tables, charming customers, counting tips. Smoking through a pack of Kent 100s, fishing through it, finding a smoke, lighting another. This was before the cocaine and peach pies rotting under the bed. She was a woman who moved and I liked the look of her. The way she was thin, yet far from frail, and the possibility of her edging out of the frame.

And I wanted my magic tricks, wanted to disappear. Not to part the beaded curtain, not to remember how the lamps in the room lit them up like fire, not to remember the colors of the beads, even now, after all this time — the amber, aqua, and the blood of oxen. Not to remember the man on the other side. Not to want to wind the beads around his neck and tighten and tighten…

Be slight, be small, fade from the picture. Better to feel nothing than to feel everything. Better to whittle down and deplete than to remember the thing that threatened to yank the last breath out of your mouth. Be small, Felicia. Never betray your paleness. If you’re lucky, you’ll blend into the scenery. If you’re lucky, no one will see you at all.

Here I am, 14, shoveling food into my mouth. Otis Spunkmeyer chocolate chip cookies, bagels soaked in margarine, fried chicken cutlets, and macaroni and cheese out of a box and a pouch. Pizza Hut pizza supreme, McDonald’s two-cheeseburger meal with a biggie fry, Wendy’s baked potato with cheese and bacon bits, Little Debbie snack cakes, KFC mashed potatoes, Cinnabon cinnamon rolls, Roy Rogers chicken nuggets — until I feel chest pains.

This is good, I think, the pain — it reminds me that I am someone who can feel things.

I come home early from school before my pop makes the hour-long commute from the horse farm in Brookville where he works and before my mother tallies dollars bills in a corner table at the diner where she works. I am tidy, always tidy when I open the box of six cinnamon rolls. The icing binds them and I separate each with a knife I’ll wipe clean. I close my eyes when I eat. Already doing the erasure. I am full, expansive, until I walk into another room and I’m empty again.

Years later, in therapy, I joke that I could’ve been a successful serial killer in the ’90s. Always good at cleaning the scene, erasing the mess. It never happened if you can bleach it. You can’t remember what’s been flushed, bagged, or burned.

Years later, I will make cinnamon buns at home to dump and shower with water in the sink. Apparently, you can remember so much it threatens to break you in two.

I wear hoodies, baggy pants, and men’s shirts — anything to cover my body, make me less of a person. Anything to hide the body swollen from pain. I have all this pain, but where do I put it? Is there a container I can fill? A repository? A bank where I can make deposits and check my balance from time to time?

Tell me where I can put it. Give me instructions, a manual, a form I can complete. Because no matter how much I try to gut and hollow myself out, the pain returns like the old lover who never leaves.

Sophomore year in college, my roommate Liz will come home from class early. I don’t hear her enter the suite in the dorm where we live. She’s quiet like that, slippery. Later, we’ll walk to the campus cafeteria in the gloaming. Fireflies dart in and out of the trees and maybe we have dodged a skunk when she attempts to talk about it. I heard you, she says. I was drunk, I say. At 2 in the afternoon? Better to have her think I have a drinking problem. But she doesn’t buy it. We’re silent the rest of the way and in the cafeteria, I fill my tray high with pasta and cheese and rolls and Snapple iced tea and maybe a slice of coffee cake and I fork food into my mouth because I’m 19, not five, and I’m a big girl now who snaps at the friend who loves her, tries to help her, saying:

Here, I’m eating. Happy now?

I know what she’s thinking. I don’t have a problem eating food — I have a problem keeping it down.

That year, our other roommate, Audra, will leave school because she’s become the kind of thin you have to look away from. We find her blond hair in clumps in the shower. She hasn’t nicked our tampons in months. Her parents are in our suite and her boyfriend is holding her quaking body and she’s crying that she doesn’t have a problem. Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s okay. She doesn’t want to go home and I get up and bolt to my door and lock the door and sit on the floor of my closet because I want to cry but I can’t. I want to feel something, anything, but I can’t.

When she leaves, we gather in the space she used to fill. Later, we’re watching TV — maybe it’s 90210 or Melrose Place — and I feel Liz’s eyes on me. I’m five again, blank and black, able to recognize the hurt in other people but refusing to show my own. She looks at me while I look at the TV because back then I considered this a game of chicken and no way will she win.

After college, I am alone in a stark and clean 800-square-foot apartment in Riverdale. I buy five pieces of furniture and my cabinets are filled with vodka, which I drink when I play my Fiona Apple and Wu-Tang CDs. I’ve spent a whole childhood lonely, living in my head. What’s another few years? My friends are dots on a map. The letters and phone calls get fewer and far between.

One day, I take measurements of my body in parts. It starts with math, a desire for subtraction. It becomes a game of making a plan for my limbs — how do I get stomach smaller, thighs leaner, arms thinner. And it ends with daily seven-mile runs on a track, in the sand, on a treadmill, and subsisting on Lean Cuisine meals, bananas, and Starbucks.

Everyone says damn, you look good.

In the changing room at Banana Republic, I ask if there’s a size smaller than zero and the sales associate rolls her eyes and tells me they don’t carry negative integers.

My doctor tells me I have to stop running because I’m developing arthritis at 23. I’m in PT calculating the calories I’m burning with these knee exercises that remind me that the pain is back (Oh, hello, did you think I checked out? Left? Silly girl, Trix are for kids) and it’s throbbing and real.

But — 

Damn, girl, you look good.

It’s 2009 and I’ve become friends with a woman who is sometimes kind, but often petty and cruel. She helps me get a job in an agency and when my career inches slightly ahead of hers, she wheedles, her voice at first a pin-prick becomes a razor becomes a hot knife plunging skin.

She used to say, sotto voce, look at your little waist! And as that waist expands from the stress, exhaustion, and shame — because naturally, I have to go at everything so hard — always, she starts subsisting on beet salads and vodka to lose the weight I’ve gained, purring, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.

A woman is a balloon on the verge of bursting.

But I am sick, sick, sick, and all I can do is grab at parts of my body and cry and then laugh that it’s taken me decades to turn on the faucet, fix the plumbing. During a staff meeting, I don’t notice that I’ve bled through my skirt onto the chair until a colleague whispers for me to sit back down, don’t get up, and she leaves the room and returns with perhaps the building’s supply of paper towels, and I’m shaking (but not crying) and she gives me her sweater to wrap around my waist as I clean up the mess.

A woman is a walking crime scene.

In 2014, I celebrate my comeback tour. I am a healthy, happy woman living her best life with a tabby cat. Cash rains in and I’m spending the bulk of what I earn on a nutritionist, gut specialist, and cabinets filled with gluten-, dairy-, yeast-free everything. For the first time in my life, I’m eating a plant-based, whole food diet. I find a megaformer workout that strips me of skin and I ignore my friends who tell me that what I’ve been doing to my body five days a week resembles torture.

I start the year at 173 pounds and leave it at 130. It will take me years to see this for what it was—disordered eating. Obsessive exercise. I was thin but far from healthy. And I grew tired of trying to whittle my body down to nothingness for the whole of my adult life. I don’t want to count calories or vilify food because food is neither good or evil—it’s what nourishes and sustains.

In 2015, my mother dies and everything changes. At first, it’s a shift imperceptible to me. Even though I haven’t seen her since I was 21, I don’t flinch or mourn or cry. And this fiction continues until I move to Los Angeles and I sit on the floor of my beautiful, empty home by the ocean and unravel over the next year, piece by piece.

What is emptied begs to be filled and made whole.

There go the drugs in your body, in your brain, that keep you alive. The pills that stop making daylight a violent assault. The pills that make waking up a victory. There goes your body — the one thing in which you had complete dominion — spiraling out of your control. Then there’s the “friend” in New York who tells you over Skype that you’ve put on a few pounds, to which you reply, well, that’s better than being dead.

There goes the woman who wanted to fade from the fame filling the picture.

Years ago, my pop shook his head. Why do you have to go at everything so hard?

It occurs to me the answer to that question is this: to feel something. Anything. Your insides match your outsides — barbed.

Sometimes, you need to set down your armor and armaments. You have to lay down your weapons of mass self-destruction. You have to walk off the battlefield because you’re done. You’ve learned there is a country, a whole hemisphere of ways you can feel without war and ruin. That the war with yourself was never about fat or skinny — it was about control and vacillating wants. You wanted people to notice and ignore you. You wanted people to love you down to the bone and not love you at all. You wanted to not live in fear of the beaded curtains parting and you wanted to not live at all. You wanted to love yourself and hurt yourself. You wanted to love your mother and hurt your mother.

It’s only when you’re older and glutinous to the nines that you’re able to comprehend that the possibility of never being full or empty is real. You are parts incomplete. A work in progress, a play for the middle. Human.

My body registers 4.8 on the Richter. The workout I used to love now leaves me panting in agony within the first 10 minutes. I get up, wipe down the machine, grab my bag, and walk out the door. I walk all the way home.

I hold up a white flag, hoping it lights the way.

For the past few years, I’ve occupied scores of homes while feeling homeless, rootless. Peripatetic. I keep looking for the box that’s going to complete, set my whole world to rights when the box is me and I’m all the home I need. I’ve let the torture devices gather dust. I go on pre-dawn walks and hikes. I eat noodles in the morning and an avalanche of roasted vegetables at night. I am neither big nor small. I am neither below the floor nor above the sky. I’m not in love, but I love. 

I have a Post-it on my laptop and above my mirror that has weathered with age, which reads: There’s so much you can’t control. I sleep on the grass and stare up at the charcoal sky. I don’t claw the earth or wear Orion. I hold blades of grass in my hands. Dirt in my nail beds. I write people who don’t love me and tell them I’m thinking of them — even if I know they’ll never reply.

Because there are so many ways you can feel without plucking out your still-beating heart. When you realize that the joy that is your exhale liberates you from your own imprisonment. After shattering my kneecap and pulling this and tearing that, I’ve realized the privilege of a body upright and moving. I’ve set aside the desire for small and instead want to return to the hiking I used to do. I want my knee to bend itself without pain. I want to wander and get lost and listen to music. 

No need for a warden when you’re waving your white flag.

There’s no need for a neat and tidy container for your pain. Sometimes the best you can love yourself is sit in the mess, get nice and dirty in it, and let it go.