They arrived mid-afternoon, around three, and I took them to a little café near my house for tea, figuring we’d pass some time there, perhaps take a walk, then go out to eat. I’d already picked the restaurant, already memorized the menu in the window, already decided which salad I’d order, which rich pasta dish, which dense chocolate dessert. But my parents left after the tea. I suspect there was a marital explanation for this (they both seemed depressed and preoccupied that day), but they didn’t share it with me, just said something vague about needing to get back, having things to see to, calls to make. I remember feeling absolutely crushed—no meal? no reward? all that effort in vain?—and offering no protest. I walked them out to their car, said good-bye, then came upstairs to my apartment. It must have been four-thirty by then. The afternoon sun was still bright, I had hours to fill before darkness fell, hours to fill before I could allow myself to eat the same tiny meal I’d eaten every night for the past twenty-one nights, hours.
Anorexia is primarily a state of denial—denial of hunger, denial of pain, denial of emotion—but every so often the denial cracks and you feel the full force of your hunger, the depth of your emptiness and despair, the enormity of the ache. Recounting the story, I wept over that sensation, the chasm in my life where food and love and people were supposed to have been, but mostly I wept over my reaction to it. I did not cry that afternoon. The time passed like molasses. I clenched my teeth and waited for nightfall. I slogged through each minute, I ate the apple and the cube of cheese with my usual numb focus and then went to bed, and the memory of this filled me with an aching tenderness for that sad stoic creature, and also the most puzzling feeling of loss. Certainly it felt scary to give up that steely defense, the capacity to muscle through no matter what, but it also felt oddly sad to give it up, as though in leaving starving behind, I was saying good-bye to a kind of bitter and necessary consolation, a form of self-protection that had been painful but also deeply deeply reliable.
The therapist asked, What did it protect you from?
That, I answered, meaning: that very emptiness, that very level of despair and disappointment, those tears, which always managed to be unwept, denied, starved away. In a word: sorrow.
He nodded, and we both fell silent for a moment, lost, I suspect, in a complicated set of shared responses: a respect for the sorrow of that specific day, and an understanding of starving’s seductive but wholly illusory protection from it, and also an acknowledgment of sorrow’s larger reach, its durable place in the psyche. The ache I felt that afternoon—loneliness, emptiness, yearning—predated anorexia, coexisted with it, persisted in its aftermath, and no doubt always will; it was the simple ache of being human.
Sorrow is stubbornly resistant to insight. I can put together the puzzle pieces of anxiety and guilt and self-hatred, I can draw neat lines between culture and alienation from body and self, I can trace pieces of my anorexic history to this moment and that one, this lesson and that message. Sorrow is what runs beneath all that, a more mysterious pull that seems at once deep as earth and free-floating, and that casts the matter of appetite in a strong and singular light, all individual and known longings blurred and indistinguishable beneath its glare. Anorexia did not protect me from this feeling, nor has recovery from anorexia. It simply makes its presence felt, periodically and without obvious cause on a sleepless night or the first waking moment of a bad morning, a sudden pang of hollowness and yearning that seems wholly unrelated to any specific want, that seems instead to speak to a deeper variety of hunger, an oceanic brand from which other appetites merely split off, diverge, reveal themselves to be smaller rivers and tributaries of feeling that always, somehow, lead back to this. When the feeling hits, I’ll lie there and try without success to trace its roots, and only the tiniest, most steadfast comforts will seem to ease it: I’ll reach for the dog on the bed beside me and hold her paw in my hand, I’ll scratch her chest, listen to her deep, peaceful breathing.
Something is missing: that’s as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely and solid used to be. This, I think, is the coarse grit at the bottom of the ocean, the floor beneath appetite’s sea: simple human sorrow.
“Desire,” said the French analyst Jacques Lacan, “has indestructible permanence. Desire is inextinguishable.” There is something, he suggests, fundamentally insatiable about being human, as though we come into the world with a kind of built-in tension between the experience of being hungry, which is a condition of striving and yearning, and the experience of being fed, which may offer temporary satisfaction but always gives way to new strivings, new yearnings. Once satisfied, the goal always leads to another goal, and then another and another.
Paul Hamburg, a Boston psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders, describes this tension by recalling the image of his daughter when she was an infant, nursing. For a very brief period, early in her life, she’d look utterly “narcotized” while breast-feeding, completely at peace, as though there was nothing else at that moment she could possibly want. But that period, he says, was relatively brief, and when he thinks about the nature of desire and appetite, Hamburg always returns to another image, not much later in his infant daughter’s life, when she’d be nursing and then she’d hear something, a sound from outside the window or elsewhere in the room. She’d want to see where the sound came from, and so she’d turn away from the nipple and not be able to nurse anymore, and in that instant you could witness the beginning of a central edginess or dissatisfaction, appetites emerging in competition with one another: The infant’s literal hunger for food pulled her this way, and her hunger to see more of the world pulled her that way, and there, in the conflict between those urges, was the nascent sea of frustration that comes from always wanting more. If there is an infantile experience of pure perfection—nirvana, utter contentment, all needs met—it is woefully short-lived; as Hamburg says, “It’s never going to be quite so simple again.”
Freud wrote about the human “death instinct,” a phrase that has less to do with an actual wish to cease living than with the longing, likely embedded in all of us, to recapture that early state of narcotized bliss, a place devoid of the tension between wanting and being, a condition of complete calm and release. Some of us do get back there from time to time—it’s where we go when we’re lost in music or rhythm or work or sex, or when we do drugs or drink alcohol, or when we give ourselves over to prayer, or when we lie awake in a half-sleep, curled against someone we love—but as a more permanent state it is lost, its memory folded into the soul, blended and paled and diluted with the passage of time until it’s no more than an echo, a whispering ache, that inarticulable sensation that something—something—is missing.
And yet it’s a powerful, haunting sensation, the ache behind it all the more pressing because its roots are so difficult to trace. Freud himself, along with most of his contemporaries, didn’t really attempt to locate it. In his view, infants were essentially narcissistic creatures—bundles of instincts, centers of their own need-driven universes, their relationships with others characterized entirely by physical dependence—and (to grossly simplify) the truly defining aspects of development didn’t really emerge until the child hit the Oedipal years, roughly ages three to six. Like many of Freud’s ideas, that conception of infantile life—passive, orally driven, essentially non-relational—has been criticized and extended, and if you were to plot the focus of post-Freudian thought on a graph, you’d see an increasing emphasis—from Jean Piaget and John Bowlby to Margaret Mahler, D. W. Winnicott, and Daniel Stern—on the earliest stages of life, a reach back to the baby at eighteen months, the baby at six months, the baby at three months, torn between the breast and the sound coming from elsewhere in the room, the baby reconceived as a profoundly relational creature who’s primed from the very first days and weeks of life to recognize, connect, and engage with others.
Mothers have emerged in pos
t-Freudian theory as much more complicated figures as well. Freud, among others, viewed the mother in rather static terms: a largely passive and stationary player in the baby’s world, a figure the baby reacted to rather than with, took from rather than engaged with—a bit of a vending machine with breasts. More recent work has viewed the mother in much more human terms, a dynamic, subjective, fallible, and complex individual whose earliest interactions with a baby can echo through a lifetime. What kind of dance did these two creatures dance? How much comfort was there? How much pain? How much consistency, how much hunger? “Each of us,” writes psychiatrist Polly Young-Eisendrath, “spent some time as an overwhelmed, enraged, unattended little bundle of nerves.” Each of us, she suggests, inhabited a land of squalling infantile need, cold or terrified or hungry, inevitable moments of pain experienced as absolute, moments of panic so intense they set the heart pounding; distressed, an infant’s heart revs up to 220 beats a minute. Each of us knew, too, the experience of relief from that state, which must have felt like an act of magic. Pain is aroused, registered, intensified, and then, just as suddenly, pain is eased; the nerves are soothed, the hunger is allayed, the mouth closes upon a nipple and begins to suck, the fearful moment is interrupted as a baby is picked up, held, contained in the vast warm universe of its mother.
Temperament, to be sure, affects the intensity of this experience, some babies naturally calm and sunny and resilient, others jittery and high-strung and fragile, the individual capacity for contentment in some respects a neurological gift, granted or withheld in utero by the gods of serotonin and dopamine. But environment affects its texture, too, its shape and resonance, for that dance of need and relief is negotiated, inevitably, by the caretaker, usually a mother, who sets the tempo and choreographs the steps, who either responds or does not respond, who soothes or smothers, who begins to stamp the world from the outset as safe or unsafe, others as caring or unreliable, hunger as fundamentally satiable or fundamentally insatiable. Mothers give us our first terrible instructions in giving and withholding, and I suspect these early experiences of need and provision become braided through the individual experience of appetite, that they form a kind of baseline sense of what it means to hunger.
Mothers, too, give us our first lessons in the complexity of appetite, its intrinsic links to relationships and love and nurturance. Lacan talks about this connection by describing the difference between infantile need and demand. Need, in his view, has to do with the requirements of brute survival: food, shelter, warmth, freedom of movement, a minimal amount of contact with others. Need is innate and instinctual and it requires real, tangible objects—the mother’s breast, the soft blanket, the clean diaper—for satisfaction. Demand takes place as a child enters more consciously the world of relationships and begins to develop language, a shift that fundamentally alters need by connecting, immutably, the thing that’s needed and the person who either fails or succeeds in providing it. Hunger, in turn, becomes (and remains) a much more loaded experience, relational as well as physical, forever yoked to the people who either do or do not respond to it. Bound up in the symbolic order of language, a child’s basic survival needs for food and warmth and shelter split off from their instinctual origins and take on multilayered social and interpersonal meanings. I am hungry begins to mean: I am hungry and my mother is (or is not) responding. Feed me not only expresses a physical need for food; it also begins to mean: Love me, take care of me, show me that the world is a safe place, heed my will.
This, I think, is the stuff that lasts, these frayed threads of original fear and original rapture, of huge hunger and hope, provision and failure. And however the story turns out—whether it ends in a happy childhood or a sad one—it seems that sorrow is an inescapable chapter in the narrative, the urge to reach back inevitable, the sense of something gone missing unavoidable. The fortunate among us may spend a lifetime longing for that early bliss, which we found in the arms of calm and consistent mothers but could not hold onto if we were to separate and explore and grow. The less fortunate may long for a bliss that was never ours to begin with, that was kept out of reach because we were colicky or irritable babies, constitutionally incapable of knowing solace, or because we had mothers who were too depressed or nervous or unavailable to soothe us, or because we grew up in chaotic or violent families. Felt and lost; never felt and yearned for—whatever paradigm inspires it, the sensation whispers and tugs, it keeps you up at 2 A.M. on a bad night, it compels you to reach for things, for food, for objects of comfort, for the dog beside you on the bed, a creature of heartbreakingly satiable needs.
Some of the saddest women I know, women who seem particularly prone to fits of sorrow and despair, are the ones whose relationships with their mothers felt somehow compromised or distant or tinged with resentment, who grew up with the feeling that their mothers didn’t really like them. I am one of these, although my own mother would have been horrified to hear me say that: I know that she loved me, and in the years before her death I also came to feel as though she liked and admired and felt close to me, but for much of my life I felt as though some early wires between us had been crossed, a pivotal connection never quite made or sustained. She and my siblings had a more natural, easier rapport; I was constitutionally and temperamentally more like my father, somehow more aligned with him, and I suspect this left me feeling out of the loop in some critical respect, outside the maternal circle, never quite sure how unequivocal or stable my mother’s attachment to me was. My conversations with her were strained in a way that my sister’s conversations weren’t; there seemed to be the slightest edge of wariness between us, as though neither of us felt truly attuned with the other, and for years I felt like a stormy adolescent in her presence, withdrawn and angry and dark. I’d walk into her house and regress within five minutes, as though some oppositional cloud had descended from the heavens and followed me inside.
Anger is easy to identify; it makes your heart race, your teeth clench, your blood run hot; it makes you want to rage and spit. I knew for many years that my mother made me angry, that whatever its origins, the distance between us made me edgy and restless and full of bile. What took much longer to understand, or to tap into, what I didn’t really begin to unearth until I reached back toward times like that August afternoon in Providence, was the deep current of sorrow beneath that anger, a yearning for connection so acute it defied ordinary words; voiced, it would have come out as a howl, the longest and loneliest keening.
Is this why I starved? Perhaps in part, but only in part: Starving sprang from many more sources and served many more purposes than ones related to my mother; to throw all the blame in her direction would be as one-dimensional and simplistic as to point the finger solely at culture or the media. But I do think my relationship with her left me with a particular kind of emptiness, a sorrow-laced brand that’s by no means unique to me. The wounds of childhood, deep and pre-verbal and way beyond the grasp of memory, are like footprints covered by new snow; they get hidden with time, sealed over, the traces of felt anguish difficult to perceive, even harder to access. And so the sorrow behind hunger tends to be acted out, described in symbol and code instead of nouns and verbs, a woman’s body and behavior communicating what words can’t quite capture.
For instance, a woman I’ll call Suzanne, now in her mid-forties, used to steal things. She never took anything she really needed, nor anything major or even particularly memorable, but periodically, during her teens and twenties and even into her thirties, she’d find herself in a store fingering a sweatshirt or walking past a cosmetics counter or standing in line by the candy rack, and she’d be overcome with the compulsion to take something and stuff it into her pocket or her bag: a scarf, maybe, or a pair of gloves, or a Clark bar. Later, she’d feel guilty and deeply perplexed—Clark bars? she didn’t even like Clark bars—but at the time the activity gave her an odd sense of power and satisfaction, as though she’d taken something she deserved, something essential.
Janet, also
mid-forties, used to cut herself, still does on occasion. She was twenty-one the first time she did it, alone in an apartment she shared with two roommates, and although she can’t recall the precise circumstances that motivated the behavior, she knows she walked into the bathroom, looked through the medicine cabinet, and happened upon a pair of nail scissors, which she picked up. Then she stood there for a long time, looking at the scissors, and then she opened them up and ran one pointed edge very slowly against the soft skin on the underside of her forearm. A long, red scratch appeared, and she observed this in a rather detached way. A moment later, she ran the scissor along her arm a second time, same spot, and watched as a string of tiny red beads dotted up along the scratch line, her blood. She had no name for this behavior—articles in the mainstream press about self-cutting were at least a decade away—but it gave her a sense of necessary release and she continued to engage in it for twenty years.
Kathleen, late twenties, has engaged for nearly fifteen years in bulimia, behavior that has ebbed and flowed depending on her state of mind, relative level of anxiety, circumstances. At the moment, she’s in a prolonged ebb, in which her symptoms have become, in her words, “manageable.” But in her teens and early twenties, she threw up once, twice, sometimes three times a day, the cycles of bingeing and purging organizing her life, dominating most of her waking thoughts, landing her twice in the hospital. Today, she is far more controlled. She follows a meticulously planned diet, exercises regularly, and binges rarely, maybe only a few times a year. She continues, however, to throw up, once a month or so, when she is plagued with an old sensation of horror about the shape of her body, a feeling so deeply ingrained by now that it’s nearly immune to rational thought.
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