Since that day with Ryan on the sidewalk, things had changed dramatically in my life. My mom, sister, Kya, and Ryan swarmed around me like worker bees attending to the queen. It had been cute in the beginning but soon got old, and I had snapped at them more times than I cared to admit.
Now I was about to pour my heart out to a complete stranger, and she was going to...well, I didn’t know exactly what she was supposed to do. Fix me, maybe? Show me how to fix myself? What if I wasn’t broken, though? What if I went in there and she said, “I don’t know why you’re here, Abigail Hall, because clearly there is nothing wrong with you. All those people are crazy, and you can go home and carry on as you were.” Wouldn’t that be nice? Then I could go back to being a normal teenager again. One who could eat dinner in her room if she wanted to, and who didn’t have a friend tracking her calorie intake at lunch.
Okay, that was dramatic. Ryan wasn’t being weird about it. When I had seethed about him and my mom conspiring behind my back that morning, I had pictured him with a checklist, handing me items of food and making me open my mouth to check I had swallowed everything. He had been as chilled as I guess he could be, but on the few occasions that I had tried to convince him that I didn’t really need a sandwich and an apple for lunch, he had quickly shut me down. I could imagine that he felt a lot of responsibility, not just to me, but also to my mom who was trusting him to watch me when she couldn’t. That was a lot for anyone, and I didn’t know if I could do that for anyone else to be honest. Maybe I wasn’t as good a friend as Ryan was.
In fact, he came across as really wanting the best for me, and I, in turn, wanted to make him happy, so I mostly did what I needed to, although it often took me an entire forty-five-minute lunch break to finish my lunch pack.
My mom had told the principal and some of my teachers too. The school nurse was also clued in so that she could help if I had any physical issues. I wondered how long it would be until the whole school knew about Anorexic Abby. What would Brandon think if he found out? Would he wonder why I hadn’t made an effort to lose weight while we were together? Would he put two and two together and realize that our breakup had been part of what had triggered me? Would that make him feel special? Maybe he and Grace would laugh together about his crazy ex-girlfriend who had started starving herself when he had broken up with her.
A lump formed in my throat.
“Abigail Hall?”
My stomach plummeted. I looked up to find the voice coming from a lady peeking around a door. She smiled broadly at me when my reaction made it clear that I was the person she had called.
My mom took my hand and squeezed it. “I am going to be right out here the whole time, Abby.”
I smiled as brightly as I could. I wanted to reassure her as she seemed as nervous as me, but I simply didn’t have it in me at that point. I could not even reassure myself.
I stood up and walked toward the woman who had now opened her office door completely and was standing to one side so that I could enter. I managed a small smile as I brushed past her. She smelled of jasmine, but not in an old lady way. She was probably slightly older than my mom, and she was a classic beauty. Her black hair was pulled back into a clip, but loosely so that strands of black hair tumbled around her face. When she smiled at me, her face creased around her eyes and mouth, but somehow it just seemed to add to the overall character of her features. Her skin was smooth, and her aquamarine eyes stood out atop high cheekbones. Despite her beauty and professional look, she didn’t come across as cold. Her eyes were warm and expressive, and her smile natural and genuine. A far cry from the bespectacled old man I had expected.
“Hello. Abigail. I’m Theresa.” She held out her hand and I shook it. She cupped her other hand over mine. “I’m really pleased to meet you.” She looked directly into my eyes, and I felt her sincerity. I also briefly wondered if she was trying to read me, but I was sure it was far too early for that.
I took a seat on a soft lounger that matched the one I had been sitting on with my mom in the waiting room, just smaller. Theresa’s desk was a gleaming dark oak, and she sat in a leather office chair with built-in back support pillows.
The office was painted the same color as the reception, except there was a border painted about a quarter of the way down the wall. It stretched around the room and consisted of various small sketches of symbols, characters, and people. There was a cracked egg, a woman crouched down with her hands over her face, and a dog on its back. The sketches were no more than four inches high, but they contained a huge amount of detail, and no two were the same.
I tracked the sketched border with my eye around the room and realized that it only went halfway.
Theresa noticed me looking at it. “Do you like it?” she asked. “I thought it was something a bit different. It’s being done by a patient of mine. She sketches and paints them by hand for me.”
I traced the sketches with my eyes again. They could hold your attention for hours if you looked at each one individually. I like the idea that this therapist let her patients express themselves artistically, on her office walls no less. The fact that she had no problem with them becoming a permanent fixture made me feel like she really cared about her patients.
Now, I was one of her patients too.
I couldn't help but comment on the fact that it only stretched halfway around the room, though. “It’s not finished, though. Is it?” I asked, and Theresa smiled and nodded.
“We’re thinking about leaving it that way. It’s a work in progress, just like all of us that come here.” I looked at her. That was a pretty cool way of looking at it. She had used the word ‘us.’ Did she consider herself a work in progress too?
“You too?” A small smile danced on my lips.
Theresa nodded. “Of course. None of us are ever completely where we want to be in life. We are all fighting some kind of battle.” Her honesty floored me. I had expected someone in her position to be confident about her own ‘togetherness,’ but she seemed equally happy to admit that even she fell apart sometimes. I looked at the sketches. A child stood dwarfed by a tall man. I wondered what kind of battle this woman with her aura of stability and serenity could possibly be fighting, and then she continued and refocused my thoughts. “So, I specialize in treating people with eating disorders, Abigail. Would you describe yourself as someone with an eating disorder?”
The question caught me off guard. I was still focused on the sketch of the little boy. He seemed so tiny next to the tall man, but he was painted in color and the man was in black and white. Did I consider myself as someone with an eating disorder?
“I... I guess that’s what people have called it.” Ryan had called it that, and my mom too. Sometimes I had allowed myself to call it that too, but only sometimes.
Theresa cocked her head. “Which people?”
I swallowed. What would she do if I told her? Would she call them all in here so we could have group therapy? I snickered internally at the thought of her office packed with everyone who had said that I had an eating disorder in the last few weeks. She wouldn’t have enough space.
“Uh, my friend Ryan. He’s the one who called me out on this in the beginning.” I paused. “My mom too.”
She nodded.
I didn’t add myself to the list. I was more interested in hearing whether she, the expert in these things, thought I had an eating disorder. If I admitted to it, it would be a fact, and I would prefer for her to say it first.
“Okay.” She paused. “It sounds like you have a lot of people who really care about you. What do you think, though, do you agree with them? Would you call what is happening with you at the moment an eating disorder?” She wasn’t going to let me off the hook, I thought. One way or another, she was going to get me to admit or deny that I had this thing.
I had thought about nothing else since this had all come out, and the biggest part of me agreed that I did have a problem, but there was still that nagging little voice that said that no one else
understood and that I was just trying to be the best version of me that I could be. Most days, I listened to the rational part of me. On other days, I allowed myself to listen to the voice and feel sorry for myself because no one understood, and I was being forced to do something that wasn’t good for me.
“Most of me does.” It was the most honest answer I could give her, and she nodded like she completely understood. Whether it was the right answer or not remained to be seen.
“Well, that’s good. I can work with most of you.” She smiled, and I returned the expression, looking down at my hands as I did. “Can you tell me about a normal day with food for you? When do you eat, what do you eat? How does it feel when you eat? How does it feel when you don’t eat?”
The sketch next to the little boy was of a woman. Her long hair tumbled down to her waist. She looked fresh and full of life, but the artist had painted a big dark blotch inside of her. It was the thing.
I tried to consider her question, but every day had been different. Did I tell her what it was like before the secret was revealed, or did I tell her what it was like after?
“Well...” I started, carefully choosing my words. “Since this all came out, everyone around me is making sure that I eat. I don’t really have a choice right now.” I felt like I was pulling words out of myself. Why was it so difficult to talk about this?
Theresa nodded, and I felt encouraged. “And before everything came out?” She used my words instead of saying “before everyone knew you had an eating disorder,” and it made it easier to follow what she was saying. I wondered if that was a therapist trick. “When no one knew? What was it like then?”
If this had been one of those word association games where they hold up a card and you have to blurt out the first word that came to mind, I would have shouted, “Free!”
It may have been the first word that popped into my head, but that was the worst word to describe it. There was only part of me that felt free, and only because I could control what was going into my body. In truth, I was less free than I had ever been.
“I would wake up really early, before everyone else was up, and go for a run.” I remembered the pure exhaustion of those early mornings, the way my breath burned in my lungs, my aching muscles. I had felt so righteous for torturing myself, as though I deserved this punishment somehow. “Then sometimes I would eat a rice cake and some berries. A lot of the time I didn’t eat anything.” For some reason I felt like this woman would know if I was lying, so I didn’t bother. I just told the truth. Whatever came of it would happen regardless. “I always skipped lunch, and then I would just try to eat as little as possible at dinner. On Fridays, I could skip dinner completely because my mom lets us all sort ourselves out for dinner on Friday nights.”
Theresa nodded her understanding. “We do the same in our house on Fridays. It’s like announcing the weekend.” She smiled, and I felt that she had taken me into her confidence somehow by sharing that small piece of her personal life with me. “What did that feel like for you?”
The answer came without any thought process behind it. For once, the truth came out as easily as the lies had. “Good.” I hesitated, realizing I had said it out loud and not just thought it. “It felt good to be disciplined like that.”
She nodded again, and I wondered whether she was agreeing with me or just acknowledging my answer. “I know it’s often difficult for us to see what’s happening when we’re in the moment, but if you look at it now, how do you think you feel physically compared to how you were before this all started happening?”
There were several pictures of eggs painted into the border on the wall—red, yellow, and black eggs, all in different stages of cracking open. It made me think about the term “bad egg” and how you could ruin an entire omelet by cracking one bad egg into the bowl. Mom taught us to crack eggs into a separate cup and not directly into the bowl so that, if you did have a bad egg in the tray, it didn’t spoil all the others. Maybe someone should have cracked me in a cup, then I wouldn’t have impacted the lives of so many other people by my own stupid actions.
“Well, I guess I got much thinner, and I felt really tired, like I was dragging myself everywhere. I still mostly feel that way.” She was right about not seeing the changes when you are stuck in the situation yourself. Add to that the fact that I had these two very different pictures of myself in my head, and it spelled disaster.
Theresa paused to make sure I was finished, and then asked, “How have your body functions been affected? Your menstruation?” My cheeks flushed a little at the word, and I thought about my conversation with Kya. She had no idea, when we joked about my secret lover, that there was a bigger secret afoot. When she found out about what was really behind it, she was probably going to feel guilty like Mom. In all fairness, she had advised me to see a doctor, and there was no way she could have guessed what was really behind it. If I was honest, I hadn’t really understood how deeply my eating had affected my body until the doctor had explained it to me.
I had figured that my period stopping had something to do with my eating habits changing, but I hadn’t really allowed myself to accept that it was a negative thing. “I haven’t had a period in a while.”
“Do you know how long?”
I did, of course, it was marked on my calendar, but I didn’t want to say it. I thought about my commitment to Ryan and Mom, and most importantly to tell the truth and do my best in these recovery efforts. Darn it.
“About three months.” I said it so softly that I wasn’t sure she had heard me, but when I looked up from my hands she was nodding and writing on a notepad next to her.
When our family GP had asked me that question, I had lied and told him one month. I had no idea why I had lied to him, but with Theresa it felt different. Nothing I said seemed to shock her. It was like she already expected every answer I gave, and most of all, there was no judgment. No raised eyebrows or sharp intake of breath. I instinctively knew that I had to give her this information or she would not be able to help me.
My attention was drawn back to the sketches on the wall, each with its own story. One picture showed a boy half engulfed by a tornado. I wondered if the tornado was coming or going. Perhaps it didn’t matter.
She asked a few more practical questions. How much did I weigh before this started? How much did I weigh now? Did I use any other methods to help me lose weight other than exercise, like laxatives or diet pills? It shocked me that there were people that used laxatives to lose weight, but if I was honest, I probably would have eventually found my way there too. When exercise didn’t feel like it was enough, I could have tried to find other ways. Even though I felt like I had just brushed the surface of this disorder, the pull I had felt had almost been enough to hook me, and I could completely understand how people would get pulled deeper. Even completely sucked in.
It frightened me that, as I sat there, I still thought that maybe laxatives and diet pills could be an option. I was being forced to eat and wasn’t allowed to exercise, but I could still do those things without anyone knowing. The ridiculousness of the fact that I was sitting in a therapist's office thinking of ways to continue serving my eating disorder was not lost on me. I could only hope that the fact that I could acknowledge it would be enough to keep me away from the edge.
“You said when you structure your eating it feels good. Why do you think that is?”
I thought about the figure on the wall, half caught up in a tornado, whether it was coming or going irrelevant. “It was something that I could be in charge of, I guess. A lot of stuff is going on, and changing, and I just,” I paused, seeking the words, “I guess I felt like that was something that I could focus on while everything else was going crazy.”
Theresa nodded and smiled. It certainly hadn’t been intentional, and it only really made sense in retrospect. “What sort of stuff has been happening?”
I ran through the list of things that were happening in my life—Brandon, Jen’s wedding, college, prom. �
�So that’s a lot of big stuff happening at once.”
She agreed. “And when you chose not to eat or you went for your runs, did it make you feel better about all that other stuff that you could not control?”
It had to a certain extent, I thought. Although it didn’t take away any of it, or make it easier to deal with, having control over something made everything else feel less chaotic. The irony was this desire for control had only made my life more chaotic on every level.
“I guess so.” I paused. “But it was also a way of improving myself, you know?” I wondered if she did know. “Like some people read self-help books and meditate and stuff, and this is a way that I can make myself better.” It was a convincing statement, at least in my head.
“Did it make you better?” she asked. I wanted to say that it had. It had made me thinner, more determined, and more disciplined. I knew that wasn’t true, though.
“Not really.” I swallowed a lump that had formed in my throat. “It made me a liar. It made me hurt people that I love.”
Then she asked me a question that changed everything. “If you had to give ‘it’ a name, what would you call it?” It was the thing that had grown inside me. The thing that had defied the laws of biology and grown stronger every time I starved it. It was the thing that had actually been in control when I thought I was.
“I guess it’s an eating disorder?” I worded it like a question, but it wasn’t one. I knew it was the right answer.
I didn’t need her confirmation, but it still felt validating when she nodded. “What is that eating disorder called?”
The word was still so alien to me that I struggled to form it in my mouth. “Anorexia.” I lifted my chin as though saying the word signaled the beginning of a fight and I was preparing myself for the next punch.
Theresa smiled at me. “I know that was really hard for you to say. I’m proud of you, Abigail.” It was something I had lived my entire life to obtain—the acknowledgment of others. Now this stranger was saying it, and I felt like my heart would burst.
Not Just a Number: A Young Adult Contemporary Novel Page 14