Appetites

by Caroline Knapp

  In those moments of prayer, Margaret has that rarest of human experiences, satiety.

  It is probably no surprise that the most consumer-oriented society in modern history has also turned into the most oddly soul-searching one, a world in which day traders log off and head to meditation workshops, in which books about angels and past lives vie for top spots on best-seller lists with books about millionaire entrepreneurs. Nor is it any surprise that spirituality has emerged as a solution to the troubled appetite, which, after all, is such a close cousin to the troubled soul. A Christian weight-loss program, the Weigh Down Workshops, boasts 30,000 chapters nationwide; First Place, a similar program, is taught at an estimated 12,000 churches across the country. As is the case in many Twelve-Step programs, the purpose behind these approaches is simple. They aim to replace the hunger for food with the hunger for God, which may sound black-and-white but is really a version of what anyone who grapples with a compulsion around appetites must learn to do: Direct the focus inward (or, if you choose, heavenward); still the self; learn to grasp the true source of hunger rather than merely reacting to it. And, in the process, learn to fill some of the emptiness with more nourishing things: connection, beauty, God, whatever fills you, however you define that.

  The totems of hope on my desk speak to such lessons; they have to do with leaps of faith, with tiny shifts in perspective that yield to larger shifts, with the messy business of muddling through, reaching for that shore of contentment. Some of them, like Margaret’s, are spiritual in the strict sense, stories about discovering a religious connection, or sense of belonging through a spiritual community, or a path to joy in prayer. Others defy easy categorization but nonetheless involve the spirit, the effort to hear its whispers and to heed its directives and to move, step by painful step, in its direction.

  A line from a transcribed interview reads, cryptically: Exercises in pleasure—this from a woman with a long history of compulsive promiscuity, a woman whose need for validation and worth were so inextricably linked to male sexual approval that she’d put even her most basic human needs on hold in order to secure it: If she was on a date and she had to go to the bathroom but the man in question was in a hurry to get somewhere, she’d wait; if he was ready to have sex and she wasn’t, she’d go ahead and have sex; if he had a need, she’d ignore her own: “If I put mine first,” she says, bluntly, “he’d leave and then I’d die.” Getting beyond this mind-set has involved redefining pleasure in the most elemental ways, detaching it from men and from sex, coming to believe that she can experience pleasure—and deserves to experience pleasure—on her own terms, without the defining presence of a man. Hence the exercises, which she developed with the help of a sponsor from Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. They include activities: bowling, hiking, swimming, all of which have reintroduced her to the concept of nonsexual physical pleasures. They include people: friends to join her in these activities, to help teach her that it’s possible to have fun and to feel connected with others without the stamp of sexual validation. Celibacy has been an exercise—dating, she had to learn to believe that she could go out with a man and be liked without sexually pleasing him, that he might actually call her again if she didn’t sleep with him, that she might not even want him to call—and so has masturbation: She had to learn, too, that she could feel good physically by herself, that pleasure could originate within her own body, that her own desire did not depend on male desire for its satisfaction.

  “I’m much more sure of myself today,” this woman says. “I have a much stronger sense of self. I’m able to walk away from a relationship and not have that fear that I’ll die without it. I feel . . . I guess the phrase is spiritually grounded.”

  A line from another transcript reads, Let the body decide—this from a woman who’s battled with weight for most of her life and who, in her mid-forties, is just learning to tune out the voices of self-recrimination in her head, to tune into her own body instead. She often has to take concrete action in order to do this: If she finds herself engaged in some twisted debate over a piece of cake, she’ll literally walk out of her kitchen, go into another room, sit down, close her eyes, breathe, a kind of adult time-out in which she tries to locate the source of the discomfort, the nature of the hunger, the real need, which may or may not involve the piece of cake. If the debate involves a more substantive question about desire, like a job change, she heads to the natural world: the woods, the ocean, places where the voices of obsession and anxiety can be eased by sound and smell and touch, where the physical calm can clarify the puzzle, make the voices of spirit and truth more audible.

  Another woman, whom I’ll call Natalie, has found hope—and satiety—in her daughter, a Chinese baby girl whom she adopted after a long struggle with infertility and a subsequent divorce. Natalie called me up about a year after she’d returned from China with her daughter and told me she’d been thinking about me all summer, and about the whole matter of appetites and where they come from and where they go when they’re unsatisfied. “I’ll tell you,” she said, “this is the first time in my life I’ve really felt liberated from all that.” Natalie is a woman who’s always worried about food, who’s both loved food and overused it, long relying on it in order to satisfy other hungers. Since the adoption, she said, that whole roster of concerns—what to eat, when, how much, how much is too much—had fallen away, as though she’d simply shed a skin and stepped gingerly away from it. Part of this, of course, had to do with being otherwise consumed: not only a new mother but a single mother, Natalie didn’t have time to think about food, or worry about it, or even eat it during much of the day. For the first time, food became stripped of its multiple meanings and became, simply, food: fuel, nourishment, something her body needed in order to function properly. She says, “I remember standing in front of the refrigerator one day and thinking, ‘God, I better eat something.’ And I reached in and took out two ice cream sandwiches and just kind of gobbled them down because I felt like I’d faint otherwise. Food as basic sustenance: That has never been my experience.”

  Her other appetites, and difficulties with them, went through a similar transformation. Work? Years of concern and confusion over ambition and anxieties about being adequately recognized just sort of fell away. Shopping? Sex? Who had the energy? Who cared? Natalie would lie on her sofa in the den and cuddle the baby, feel the baby’s soft warm heft against her chest and neck, and she’d feel completely filled, completely at peace, as though the whole constellation of needs and hungers that once dominated her daily life (need a new man, a new body, a new couch, a new job) had been miniaturized, down-sized, stowed away in a cupboard marked not really so important.

  What we want, of course, what lies in the cupboard marked important, is connection, love: If the deepest source of human hunger had a name, that would be it; if the boxes of constraint in which so many women live could be smashed to bits, that would be the tool, the sledgehammer that shatters emptiness and uncovers the hope buried beneath it. Love—the desire to love and be loved, to hold and be held, to give love even if your experience as a recipient has been compromised or incomplete—is the constant on the continuum of hunger, it’s what links the anorexic to the garden-variety dieter, it’s the persistent pulse of need and yearning behind the reach for food, for sex, for something. We may come to understand the vastness of this sensation as a buried hunger for a mother’s love, or we may accept it as an inevitable part of the human condition, or we may see it as a form of spiritual yearning, or we may dismiss it as an unsolvable riddle, but in the end, understanding only takes you so far. You can’t curl up at night with understanding, you can’t feed on it or hold its hand or share your secrets with it; knowing a hunger is not the same as satisfying it. And so it persists, for many of us, hunger channeled into some internal circuitry of longing, routed this way and that, emerging in a thousand different forms. The diet form, the romance form, the addiction form, the overriding hunger for this purchase or that job, this relationship or that
one. Hunger may be insatiable by nature, it may be fathomless, but our will to fill it, our often blind tenacity in the face of it, can be extraordinary. We long, we aim for the safety of the shore, we stay afloat, often clinging to nothing but the smallest buoys of hope. And sometimes, if we are very lucky, we find the right form, the right kind of satisfaction, one that feeds us, at least for a time, in a way that’s so deep and true it seems to take place at an almost cellular level, a need stamped, finally, met. This is it, Margaret feels, emerging from prayer; this is it, Natalie thinks, holding her child; this is it, I am home.

  The tough part, of course, has to do with finding love, and then taking that sledgehammer and breaking out of the box long enough to hold onto it, which in itself is no small feat. That job involves naming desire, and it involves understanding what stands in its way, and it involves mustering the strength and courage and self-acceptance to smash through the constraints, consequences be damned. The key—the bridge to the shore—is agency, a feeling (almost always hard-won) that marries entitlement with power: I deserve to be filled becomes I can be filled, I can make it happen. Margaret spent years feeding her ravenous soul with food, Natalie spent years clinging to a bad marriage hoping that at least it would yield a child. At some point, both simply stopped, said, Enough, this road is fruitless and unbearably painful, I want something else, I need something more. And then, equipped with little more than faith, they changed direction, started swimming against the current. The satiety they describe is the result, fought for and finally attained and deeply fulfilling.

  Daughter of a psychoanalyst, I was raised under the Gospel According to Freud, so it’s no surprise that my own feelings about faith and hope, ill-defined as they may be, have been shaped in fifty-minute bursts, in a therapist’s office. Know thyself. Our father who art in analysis, hallowed be thy name. Some fathers want happy marriages for their daughters, or professional victories or healthy babies; mine dreamed of a successful transference. Unresolved conflict was the great barrier to peace and satisfaction in his view, self-knowledge the gateway: I grew up on these tenets, believing in my heart that analyzing problems would solve them, that talking about feelings would cause them to go away.

  It was my profound good fortune to end up with a therapist who saw self-scrutiny as a rather dubious goal, or at least an incomplete one, who focused so doggedly on those odd concepts of his: “fun” and “joy.” Of course, it took many years for me to understand what he was talking about. Fun? Feeling good? For years, eating (or not eating) had been my primary link to feeling and passion, if not the only link, and so words like “joy” and “delight” seemed mysterious and rather alien to me, if not altogether irrelevant. I didn’t want to have “fun,” or even talk about it. I wanted (at worst) to stay thin and (at best) to stop worrying about staying thin, and his insistent focus on the world of pleasure made no sense to me, as though he were talking about some other patient, or speaking in tongues. He is a very goal-oriented therapist, a man who believes in action, and this baffled me, too. Suppress the instinct to understand every nuance and source of feeling, he’d urge. Experiment! Try something new. I’d look at him blankly. Huh?

  I suppose I suffered from the form of delusion that always accompanies obsession, which is to view the object of desire as the solution rather than the problem: If I could get weight and eating under control, the rest would follow, I’d find peace, I’d feel if not exactly “fed” than at least free to be fed. And then . . . if I could get the right man to love me, then I’d find peace; if I could look sophisticated and mature and composed, then I’d be sophisticated and mature and composed; if I could shoehorn my life into a shape and form that looked normal, then I’d feel normal, problems solved. Add drinking to this stew, which minimized both clarity and the possibility of change, and you get a whole merry-go-round delusion, years of spinning in an endless sad circle.

  What a Sisyphean task that poor therapist faced. Every week, he pushed the same rock up the same steep hill, the rock being my intractably externalized focus, the hill being reality itself, with its inevitable pains and its moments of peace and its limits and its essential mystery. I droned on and on: weight, men, work, drone, drone, drone. I periodically worried aloud about drinking but showed no inclination to address the magnitude of the problem, let alone do anything about it. Instead, I bitched and moaned: if only this, if only that. And he chipped away at the rock: The struggle is not about food, he’d say; it’s not about the boyfriend, it’s not about the problem-of-the-week or the fantasy-of-the-week, which are no more than red herrings and false hopes, and the solution is not going to reveal itself in external form, in a new man or a new job or a bottle of Chardonnay. The real struggle (chip, chip, chip) is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for her life to begin.

  He chipped and chipped; the rock grew smaller by degrees, which is something that happens not in moments of blinding insight or revelation but in much more gradual and less dramatic ways: baby steps; tiny moves in this direction or that; experiments that seem so petty and small it’s almost embarrassing to claim them as victories. The therapist pestered and nudged. Eat an entire meal; now eat another: See how that feels, see how scary it gets to surrender some of the control, see what comes up. Don’t call the ex-boyfriend: See how that feels, try to feel what’s underneath all that need. Have you ever thought about getting a pet? He asked me that question about five years into therapy, and I looked at him like he had two heads. A pet? What is this, play therapy? Could he be any more dense?

  Baby steps, no matter how tentative and seemingly beside-the-point, lead you if not toward change than at least toward information. They are painful to take. You eat the entire meal and you feel like a blob, a cow, worthless and disgusting, but you’re also left with something to look at, feelings to examine instead of merely fear. You don’t call the boyfriend; you sit alone in your apartment instead and you feel desperate with longing and fear, but you learn that you can tolerate the discomfort, that it passes. You try things, and some of them backfire, and some of them lead you nowhere at all, and some of them make you stronger—certainly, quitting drinking was a powerful step for me, chipping several hefty slabs away from the rock of delusion and denial and warped perspective I’d been living under. And so it goes, the pace of change glacial and the effects rarely dramatic. If you are fortunate and sufficiently supported, you move incrementally onto slightly different terrain, a landscape that inch by inch grows less harsh.

  The key, I suppose, has less to do with insight than with willingness, the former being relatively useless without the latter. Left to my own devices, I would have talked in therapy until I was ninety, yammered on about the family and the past: this need to please and that need for approval, this little hurt and that little disappointment, who, what, where, when, why, why me. But without willingness—willingness to experiment, to take risks, to pick up a chisel and join in the chipping of rock and resistance—that kind of talk can get pretty hollow, a narrative with no action, not much conflict, only the faintest outlines of a plot. Willingness is grist for the mill of insight—it’s what gets you off the sofa, out of your own head, out of the paralysis of obsession long enough to view the self in different lights, and to begin filling in the narrative, or coaxing it in new directions. Willingness is also the antidote to helplessness and, as such, the kernel of a kind of faith. You take one baby step, then another; you leap off this tiny cliff and that one; you keep it up long enough, and somewhere along the way you begin to understand that moments of emptiness and despair can be survived, that pain can be offset by pleasure, that fear can give way to safety. Whether you choose to define that faith as spiritual, whether you call it an emergent belief in self or in a benevolent universe or in a higher power or in God is in some ways beside the point: By any name, faith refers to the mysterious reservoir of feeling that helps you tolerate the bad nights and savor the good ones; it�
�s what lets you believe in your heart that your hungers won’t kill you, that you can, in fact, find the succor and nourishment you need, that you’ll be okay.

  My great terror during the early years of therapy concerned the opposite belief, namely, that if I escaped the anorexic prison and truly surrendered all that hard-won control over appetite, two things would happen: I’d be so consumed with need and desire that I’d never stop eating; and I’d find this so horrifying I’d have no choice but to lock myself back up, this time in a maximum-security unit with an even harsher warden. At times today, when I’m feeling particularly pessimistic or grim, I still invoke that image, moan to the therapist that all I’ve really done is build myself a more spacious cell with slightly prettier things in it: nicer furniture that merely dresses up same internal structure. There is a grain of truth to this: I’m still prone to periods of isolation, still more fearful of the world out there and more averse to pleasure and risk than I’d like to be; I still direct more energy toward controlling and minimizing appetites than toward indulging them; I am one of the least spontaneous people I know. But the landscape is indeed less harsh than it once was; at times, it feels veritably lush. There are people in it: a man I’d trust my life with; a few cherished family members; a handful of close friends who make me feel known; the therapist. There is food: meals shared and delighted in, desserts indulged without anxiety. There is an animal on the landscape, too, a dog who has taught me volumes what it means to love another being unequivocally, and there are woods to walk in, and long, flat, beautiful bodies of water to swim in and scull on, all activities in which I can lose myself in the sheer physicality of rhythm and beauty. And there is work, which engages the heart and mind and, at least occasionally, lends a sense of purpose to my days.