When youre only one of the things in his dream

"Too often the shrinks assume an eating disorder is a way of avoiding womanhook, sexuality, responsibility, by arresting your physical growth at a prepubescent state. But more recently, some insightful people have noticed that some of us may be after something quite different, like breathing room, or, crazy as it sounds, less attention, or a different kind of attention. Something like power. An eating disorder appears to be a perfect response to a lack of autonomy. By controlling the amount of food that goes into and out of you, you imagine that you are controlling the extent to which other people can access your brain, your heart. You also throw the family into turmoil, neatly distracting them from their endless bickering, focusing their worry on your "craziness" while you yourself saunter off stage left. The shrinks have been paying way too much attention to the end result of eating disorders--that is, they look at you when youve become utterly powerless, delusional, the center of attention, regressed to a passive, infantile state. The end result is not your intention at the outset. Your intention was to become superhuman, skin thick as steel, unflinching in the face of adversity, out of the grasping reach of others. 'Anorexia develops when a bid for independence on the part of the child has failed.' It is not a scramble to get back into the nest. It's a flying leap out.

And no, it doesnt work. But it seemed like a good idea at the time. You don't just get it, the way you just get a cold, you take into your head, consider it as an idea first, play with the behaviors awhile, see if they take root. And the sharp hiss of one voice that started out softly as though below layers of moss, or flesh, and gradually became so loud it drowned out everything else: Thinner, it said, youve got to get thinner. But you know, even then, that word was wrong. It is more than Thinness, per se, that you crave. It is the implication of the thin. The tacit threat of Thin. The Houdini-esque-ness of Thin, walking on hot coals without a flinch, sleeping on a bed of nails. You wish to carry Thinness on your arm, with her cool smile. I fell for the great American dream, female version, hook line and sinker. I, as many young women do, honest to god believed that once I Just Lost A Few Pounds, some how I would suddenly be a New You. I would have Ken-doll men chasing my thin legs down with bouquets of flowers on the street, I would become rich and famous and glamorous and lose my freckles and become blond and five foot ten. I would wear cool quasi-intellectual glasses and a man's oxford shirt in a sunny New York flat and sip coffee and say MMMmm and fold my paper needly. I was on a mission to be another sort of person, a person whose passions were ascetic rather than hedonistic, who would Make It, whose drive and ambition were focused and pure, whose body came second, always, to her mind her "art." As soon as I left my hometown and lost a few pounds."

--Wasted, by Mayra Hornbacher



exactly