Addiction

This topic has come up in conversation twice in the past week, so I figured why not just put my dirty laundry out there for everyone to read? For ten years, from high school until my mid-twenties, I was bulimic. If you knew me during that period and had no clue, you’re in good company. With a few exceptions, no one else did either. I am excellent at maintaining a façade. Or lying, depending on your point of view.

Someone asked me recently how I could do it, how I could bring myself to vomit. But what’s impossible to explain unless you’ve experienced it is that I didn’t force myself to do it. I CRAVED it. A counselor I saw once, when I was sixteen and we still thought it was a passing phase, explained it best: You can’t be upset and throw up at the same time. Your body can’t process both, so it has to shut down the emotions. While the root of my bulimia was in my lack of physical self-confidence, in my dissatisfaction with my body, that soon became such a small part of the picture. It’s been years since I binged with the intention of purging, but I still miss the purging part.

In the same way that someone who hasn’t had a drink in twenty years will always be an alcoholic, I will be bulimic for the rest of my life. A few years ago I got into a fight with one of my friends, which turned into a war. The battle was fought for years, with casualties on both sides. And every time she walked into a party I was at, I went into the bathroom, vomited, and had to go home. Even now, when I get upset, the worst part is not necessarily the upset, it’s the bone-deep knowledge that if I just let myself slip back into my old ways, it would fix it. It might not fix the problem, but it would make me feel better. Immediately. Sometimes I’m not even sure which is the cause of my tears—the initial issue, or the frustration that after all these years and all this work and all that freaking therapy, that this is where my body immediately goes. To an upset stomach and a voice in my ear telling me “Just do it. You’ll feel better.”

Every time I stopped, when I was positive that I had beaten it, for real this time, I would tell a few people. My older sisters. My closest friends. I figured that if they knew, then it couldn’t happen again. Like saying the words somehow made it taboo in a way that my self-loathing didn’t. It didn’t work, of course. Anyone who’s ever battled an addiction knows that fear of exposure and shame aren’t enough to actually stop you. But they watched me, and they called me on it when I started again, and they made sure I couldn’t hide it. I think that’s what kept me from ever seriously hurting myself, or from ending up in the hospital, and why I eventually was able to beat it as much as I have. Those people never let me just sink down into the dark with the bulimia. They made me face it and talk about it, and expose it. And addictions don’t flourish well in the light.