It Was Me All Along: A Memoir (20 page)

In therapy, I worked on what I’d come to know as my deepest, saddest realization: I’d used food, in one extreme or another, as love and comfort and joy for twenty-some years. Amid the chaos of my childhood and the insecurity of my adulthood, I could control the food. When I felt nervous, food was reassuring. When I was anxious, food was soothing. When I was sad, food lifted me up. For every single emotion, I could turn to food.

What I hadn’t realized until that point was that losing the weight meant turning away from food. It meant betraying my best friend. But I learned that as much as food comforted me, it hurt me, too. I had effectively stripped away the pounds that had protected me for so long, and now I was forced to stand naked in the world. Food had also been the bond in many of my relationships. I looked foreign to those I loved when I coldly turned away from our shared pastime. And even when Dad died seven years earlier, though my heart did shatter then, the food was there to help dull the feelings. Now, facing a different kind of sadness, I couldn’t turn to eating to distract me.

Therapy helped me see my problems and understand them, but it didn’t bring relief to my pain. The further down I dug to uncover the roots of my relationship with food and overeating, the worse I began to feel. It was like taking every belonging I owned out of the cabinets and closets and drawers of my house and having to stare at the mess of it without ever being able to put it all away. There was no closure to the chaos. When I relayed this to my therapist, she
suggested I see a psychiatrist—someone who could evaluate me and potentially prescribe medication—in addition to our weekly meetings. I took the earliest available appointment.

After I sat down in the cold leather chair of the doctor’s tiny office, she asked me, “So, let’s talk about how you’ve been feeling lately. Not so good?”

I waited to construct my thoughts into something more coherent than crying.

“It’s not that I want to die,” I began. I paused, trying to find the words. “It’s just that I want to go to sleep for a while.”

“And why is that?” She tilted her head in caring concern.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do all this.” I looked around the room and out the window as if to wave at everything surrounding us to mean
all this
. “I guess it’s just … life. It feels … so hard. Unbearable and … I don’t know how to get through it. I don’t know what to do with myself from minute to minute, how to fill the hours.” Something about our conversation already made me embarrassed. I was ashamed that I couldn’t just feel better. I wished contentment were like misplaced keys, something to search for and find.

She sat up straighter in her chair and then leaned forward. “Have you always felt this way?”

I looked down at my hands, considering. The sadness, the intense anxiety—they did feel oddly familiar. That writhing discomfort I so often experienced almost seemed as if it were part of me, something deeply innate. Pangs of nostalgic sadness hit me, one by one, memory by memory.

We talked a while longer, and I slowly came to consider the possibility that I’d always held this darkness somewhere inside of me.
Maybe my inner self weighed as heavily on me as my outer one once did.

She explained to me in fancier, more articulate terms that it seemed to her that I’d always suffered from depression—that it was likely something that ran in my family. Perhaps it was why Dad drank, she proposed. To soothe himself. To self-medicate. Perhaps it was why I ate. To soothe myself. To self-medicate.

And I knew she was right.

I hadn’t known myself to be sad before I lost those 135 pounds. But now, without that numbing agent—the one that came in a two-pack with cream filling—I was alone with myself. I was exposed. I was left with emotions I’d eaten for twenty years.

She prescribed me an antidepressant, telling me that, no, it would not be a cure-all. The medication wouldn’t make me happier or fix any of my problems, but it would help to lift the heavy cloud that was weighing me down and making me feel hopeless. She wanted me to be able to see beyond the gray fog I was stuck in, at least temporarily.

“Taking a medication to adjust this imbalance is not taking the easy way out. You’re not taking drugs to feel amazing; you’re taking them to feel normal.” Her words calmed me. “The talk therapy is where you’re working through it all.”

Am I, though?
I wondered.
Am I ever really going to get through it all?
I was sober from the food. I was a thin person reconciling with two decades of compulsive eating. It felt as if I’d drunk myself into oblivion at night, gotten sober by morning, and had to now clean up the house party I didn’t realize I had thrown.

I stayed in therapy for the remainder of my senior year. And in the end, though I never felt as though the heavy fog lifted entirely,
I knew that I’d progressed. I realized that focusing on the control I could maintain with my body helped, at least subconsciously, to diminish my ability to feel unsettling emotions. In the past I avoided my feelings by consuming huge quantities of food. Now I avoided them by focusing on counting every calorie and carefully planning every meal. Food had always distracted me. Obsession left no room for anything else.

A part of getting to a healthier place was taking risks with food. With the guidance of my nutritionist, I learned—at times painfully slowly—to trust myself. That trust came from realizing that in order for me to heal my relationship with eating, food had to be a friend, not an enemy.

When I first admitted to myself that I had been dependent on food for the majority of my life, I was angry. I wanted to get as far away from it as possible, not to allow it to be my focus any longer. But something I’d heard another formerly morbidly obese man describe in a documentary about obesity stuck with me: “Food addiction isn’t like addiction to alcohol or drugs, where you can just remove it from your life. With food, you need it to live. You have to have it every day.” It was true. The only way to get through food addiction is by making peace with the food and uncovering the reasons we use food for anything other than hunger. I began to recognize the danger in attaching too much judgment to the foods I chose. Chocolate cake wasn’t “bad,” carrots weren’t “good,” and Bavarian cream doughnuts alone didn’t make me morbidly obese. I was the one who abused the food and gave it character. I was the one who combined them all in massive quantities, eating well beyond fullness. I learned to view food as a neutral entity, not positive or negative.

By shifting the emphasis from my emotional bondage with food to a focus on building a new and healthy relationship with it, I was seizing a unique opportunity to start over. I regained an understanding that eating, while pleasurable, was not the be-all and end-all of my happiness.

Slowly, I could go out to eat with Daniel without an anxiety attack. Slowly, I could enjoy a social life like the one I once had, in which the extra calories from cocktails didn’t unnerve me. I even took a spring break vacation with Nicole, Sabrina, Daniel, and his friends to Las Vegas—a trip that would have sent me into a panic just months earlier—and I reveled in the spontaneity of dining out.

The one area that still needed work was the range of foods I felt comfortable eating. I had begun to feel limited by the “safe” foods I’d clung to since losing weight. To branch out, my nutritionist encouraged me to bring back a few of the favorite foods I used to enjoy before losing weight. She suggested I try having one of these nostalgic treats in place of my afternoon snack. I thought long and hard about what those treats might be. Cupcakes, chocolate, doughnuts … just thinking about them was tumultuous. She instructed me to pick one, plate it, sit at a table, and eat it as slowly as I could, so that all my senses were engaged. For my first treat, I chose a cupcake. I followed her instructions: I set it on a pretty antique plate, brewed a steaming cup of tea, and ate it seated at the kitchen table for the better part of ten minutes. It was delightful. I’d made it special; I’d enjoyed it, and because of that—the eating lacked regret. And though I did wish I could have another, I didn’t feel my old urge to binge. Day after day, I repeated my afternoon tea and cupcake. And after I had tried all the delicious flavors of cake and frosting, I moved on to chocolate bars. Dark, milk,
white—it was sweet paradise. In time, I switched to doughnuts. The point of this daily dessert was proving to myself that I wasn’t a monster around food. I would not eat with abandon anymore. I could have the foods that I loved and not abuse them, and I didn’t have to live a life without them. And after a while of this healthy reintroduction to decadent food, I felt safer about how I used it to nourish me. I respected it, and in turn, I respected myself.

FOR SOMEONE STILL TRYING DEARLY TO MAKE PEACE
with a new body, righting her mind to fit it, I could barely handle the thought of another transition. Leaving college upon graduation was the last thing I felt prepared to handle.

Take me back to Amherst
was the only thought running through my mind as I moved the last of what seemed like thousands of boxes home to Medfield. I instantly missed the familiarity. I craved the routine, the normalcy of knowing what I had to do and when. For the first time, there was no planned next step. I had shuffled along through grade school—from ninth to tenth to eleventh and twelfth—and then I entered college. I was able to postpone living my own chosen path in life until at least twenty-two, when I graduated. And until that sunny May day, I made mostly dreamy plans about my future, mostly with Sabrina, and mostly while driving around in a car. I talked a talk as gigantic, as outlandish as I liked, because really, I didn’t have to walk it yet. It felt comfortable for me—and, from what I gather, the entirety of my generation—to
idealize the future and think everything would fall into place once I was done cycling through the education machine. Limitless possibilities, the ability to pursue anything, go anywhere, anytime. But the openness, the endless options paralyzed me. I thought of how much my family had sacrificed—everything Mom never had—just so that my future could be brighter. There was pressure with that large a gift. I began to feel the same way about life that I did about food. It was all a massive grocery store, and I had to choose the meal I most wanted to eat.
What if I chose the wrong one?

I had no idea how I was going to find a job. The ones I applied for—through Craigslist and all kinds of print and online listings—rarely replied. Carefully crafted cover letters, résumés tailored to each position, each company—none of it seemed to matter. I never heard a word in reply, which only made the pursuit more agonizing. I wished I’d majored in something with an actual trade, like nursing or education. The undefined, broad nature of a communications degree wasn’t doing me any favors in a hellish job market. “Broadcast journalism is a dying field,” people would tell me. “People are going online to get their news, Andrea.” In truth, I was, too. And perhaps I should have known that applying to the local affiliates for ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox came with a certain level of difficulty.
But they’ve got to be looking for an intern
, I thought.
I’d be good at this
.

With no income, no apartment of my own, and tens of thousands of dollars of college loans to repay, I recognized that the sadness I’d worked through the year before had begun to reappear. I became more preoccupied with my eating. I noticed myself counting and recounting calories with greater precision, even adding to my total the sugar-free gum I chewed.

I picked fights with Daniel during our phone calls. Our dinner
dates, when I’d drive out to visit him in Worcester, ended more often than not with both of us spewing hurtful words and my driving away. In every argument, I had a niggling sense that he had something over me—a sense that, since he’d seen me at my lowest, I should be grateful he’d stayed with me when anyone else might have walked away. He never said that outright, but still I resented my role as the one who struggled to feel good, the one who needed more emotionally. I also couldn’t help but feel triggered by his extreme all-or-nothing eating—a behavior that caused him to regain all seventy-five pounds he’d lost the year before. If Daniel wasn’t dieting and eating cleanly, he was bingeing; there was no middle ground. As someone recovering from both extreme modes of eating, it was difficult to watch.

Slowly I pulled away, unable to feel even a tickle of the romance we once had. Daniel was no longer my boyfriend. Instead, he was a parent, a caretaker. And even outside of the two of us, I couldn’t reconcile, couldn’t accept, that life after college wasn’t going as I’d hoped and expected. I wanted everything to be different, to be better, to be new. So I left him. I broke his heart and mine by ending our relationship.

I thought I could start over. I thought that he had encumbered me and that leaving him would feel like stretching my legs after sitting cramped in a too-small airplane seat. I thought that I hadn’t experienced enough of love to be so devout, so committed to one person.

It turned out that none of those thoughts proved entirely true. A greater despair sprouted within me, and I realized I missed Daniel. I missed familiarity and security and ease. I missed the team we were. Several times a day I wanted to call him, if only to hear him
call me “Andie” like he used to. The days—the ones that already left me bored and restless after graduation—grew longer, duller.