When I do go on dates, my biological clock is no longer my plus-one to the party. I can enjoy hanging out with a man without constantly trying to ascertain whether or not he’s going to make a good father. I don’t feel the need to ask manipulative questions or pretend I don’t want a serious future with someone so they’ll perceive me as carefree and cool. I can now just be carefree and cool.
Even though freezing my eggs gave me a new sense of levity, I also try to be realistic about how few problems it actually solves. Here’s what egg freezing does not promise to do: make you happy, deliver your soul mate to your front door, ensure you’re a good mother when you do use the eggs for a kid. It doesn’t fix your shitty childhood, pay your bills, prevent cancer, or make you look younger. Guys, it doesn’t even promise to give you a freaking baby. In fact, most of the time, the process doesn’t even work. The statistics aren’t even on our side on this one. There’s apparently a 77 percent failure rate in IVF procedures with frozen eggs among women aged thirty and over and a 91 percent failure rate in women aged forty and over, which means most women have to do the procedure multiple times. I know, science can be a real asshole. Hopefully that statistic has improved by the time you read this, and continues to improve swiftly so we can all just start 3-D printing kids already.
Even if I did beat the odds and get a baby out of my chilly eggs, that isn’t a promise for happiness either. My vagina could tear during childbirth, the kid I have could be weird, or when it gets older, it could become an addict or make me take it to water parks. The point is, I’m not saying egg freezing solves your problems, but what it can do is help us all step in the right direction toward extending our fertility. What I needed at that point in my life was to change my paradigm from feeling like a puppet of my biology to being somewhat in control of my future. Even if the chances are small, I needed some relief from the panic of the bleak fertility timeline. What we all need is for this procedure to be viable. The more we do this procedure and show interest in fertility extension, the harder scientists are going to work at perfecting it and getting the percentages to a promising place so we can all be wrinkled old ladies in nursing homes having babies well after menopause, changing diapers while we’re wearing diapers.
It’s our responsibility to invest in what we want and fight for our future selves and our (possibly IVF-conceived) kids’ future selves. Whether it’s quitting smoking, not texting our exes, or freezing our eggs. If I’ve learned anything in this life, it’s that it’s short and the line of people dedicated to making your dreams come true is even shorter. We have to champion ourselves, and sometimes that means saving lots of money to impale ourselves in the stomach with needles. Maybe it means cutting out lattes, maybe it means launching a kickstarter campaign, or campaigning for the procedure to be covered by insurance. Whatever it is, your time won’t be wasted because girl, you’re worth it.
I have a history of passively sitting on the bench when I want something, so when it didn’t work out the way I hoped, I could find solace in telling myself that I didn’t try that hard anyway. I used to avoid taking risks because I was so scared of rejection and failure. If I got anything out of the egg-freezing debacle, it’s that I finally started accepting what is instead of what I think should be. Unfortunately, idealism and ambition don’t change biology. I’m the first person to tell you to challenge the social norm, to defend yourself against a shitty boss or abusive boyfriend, but when it comes to our bodies, for the most part I think it may behoove us to be a doormat.
Women may have fewer and fewer social and professional limitations, but we still have very real biological ones. To pretend we don’t isn’t feminist, it’s just misinformed, delusional, and unfair to your future self. I’m not saying I think it’s fair, but I’ve had to accept a lot of biological annoyances: I have to floss, I can’t eat more than three pieces of cheese without a gastrointestinal revolt, I can’t change a guy’s values over dinner, and I can’t magically be attracted to a man who’s a foot shorter than me.
Look, after this ordeal, I still may never even have kids. I may sell the eggs I froze on eBay. Or I may have kids from my eggs, then sell the kids on eBay. Who knows? The point is, I did something to increase my chances of having choices. If you can increase your chances of not getting leveled by your primal biology by even 20 percent, I believe you owe that to yourself. And if you’re now thinking about freezing your eggs, good for you. Just take it easy. You’ll be fine.
THE EATING DISORDER CHAPTER
I know, an actress with an eating disorder—how original.
To be fair, I did have an eating disorder long before I thought about acting in case that makes me seem any less derivative.
A myriad of things conspired to give me an eating disorder. I say give as if it was some kind of generous present from Santa or a surprise hit to my PayPal account, but I’m not sure how else to say it. I developed an eating disorder? I caught an eating disorder? I downloaded an eating disorder? I think for the most part my eating disorder was cued up the day I was born, so I think of it as being a latent beast inside me waiting patiently to take over and ruin my adolescence and bone density. So maybe I was possessed by an eating disorder is the more accurate way to go? Nope, that sounds weird too.
Weight was a concept in my purview way too early in life. My mom was very thin, but every time someone complimented her, she would always respond with “No, no, I need to lose five pounds.” But she did not need to lose five pounds. She was tiny. That was confusing to my nascent, very literal brain. I mean, this was back when I thought McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets were actually made of chicken.
I remember drinking a lot of diet soda as a kid. I don’t blame my parents for this; it was the late eighties, way before we knew a lot of important information. We didn’t know yet that artificial sweetener is bad for you, that Bill Cosby is a sociopath, and that denim shouldn’t be bedazzled.
My stepmother was also very body conscious and had thighs that didn’t touch each other, which I now know is not possible without excessive dieting or liposuction. I don’t remember ever seeing her eat, but I do remember her smoking Virginia Slims. Even the cigarettes in my house were diet.
Despite all the diet food around, I was not a small child by any means. By the time I was ten, I was already five-nine thanks to still-cold-on-the-inside fish sticks and thinking Flintstones vitamins were food. I had developed a pretty intense obsession with candy and would go down to a local store called Sugars most days after school and buy some. And by buy, I mean put in my pocket and not pay for it. I was alone a lot as a kid and food became a dependable source of happiness. People can let you down, but food never will. Mike and Ike were the only two boys who I knew would never hurt me. They gave me a lot of cavities, but never a broken heart.
Around age twelve, I started playing sports and fell deeply in love with basketball. It was the only time I wasn’t embarrassed about how tall and husky I was. What I was once bullied for, I was now praised for. But once I started practicing nonstop, I began losing weight and getting in shape. I also started getting the ultimate drug: attention. My family complimented me, coaches praised me, boys flirted with me. I imagine on a subconscious level my brain associated thinness with deserving love. I was hooked.
As a kid I felt like I had no control over anything—who my dad married, where my mom was and what she ate, who my friends were, whether D.J.’s date would go well on Full House . . . All I wanted was some predictable order, and my weight was literally the only thing I could control. This was of course incredibly unhealthy, but it soothed my brain to be in charge of something for the first time in my life. I learned from reading The Female Brain that organizing things reduces cortisol, our brain’s stress chemical, so maybe that’s why taking the marshmallows out of the Lucky Charms, sorting them by color, and eating them one by one felt so good.
From fourteen to eighteen, I ate mostly rice cakes, nonfat yogurt, and apples. I b
ecame irrationally terrified of fat. I of course now know that fat doesn’t make you fat, but at the time I was impervious to things like science or facts. Eating disorders can be all-consuming brain take-overs that blind you to reality, so my brain became a labyrinth of self-deception. I knew it was bad when my hair started falling out, especially when it was wet. I remember going to my friend’s house to swim in her pool. I was in a brown J.Crew bathing suit. That’s how little I thought I deserved: Of the kaleidoscope of colors bathing suits came in, I chose poop brown. Anyway, I remember getting out of the water and seeing my silhouette in the form of a willowy stick figure. My shadow was a mere suggestion of a person. I was grossly proud of how small my body was; it was more my whisper of a ponytail I was concerned about. So much hair had fallen out it looked like a skinny rattail. Every time I brushed it, the brush would end up full of my hair, so much so that when I cleaned it off and threw the hair away, it looked like my trash can was full of Yorkies.
By the time I was fourteen, my eating disorder consumed my priorities, behavior, and thoughts. I didn’t have real friendships because in order to be friends with someone, you have to eat with them at some point, and I wasn’t willing to take that risk. Eating out means restaurants, and restaurants mean butter. In high school, every day for lunch, instead of going to the cafeteria with the other kids, I would go to my car and eat a bag of dried fruit alone. I didn’t hang out after school either; I’d always leave immediately so I could get home and go for a five-mile run to burn off the aforementioned dried fruit.
Around fifteen, I started getting alarmingly thin. I had severe cheekbones, prominent shoulder blades, and ribs for days. I looked like the shadow of Jared Leto. The only people I allowed to get close to me were those who would joke about my weight instead of attempt a real intervention. I didn’t mind being called Olive Oyl—in fact I took that as a compliment—but a real conversation about my weight was out of the question because it threatened my small, safe world of diet soda, dried fruit, and steamed vegetables.
The thinner I got, the thinner I thought I needed to get. I hadn’t heard the term body dysmorphia back then, not that I would have thought I had it, but I now understand that’s what I was experiencing. My perception of myself and my body was incredibly warped. It was as if I were looking in a funhouse mirror that makes your hips comically large. I literally could not see myself how others did. One time I was jogging up a busy street in D.C. called Wisconsin Avenue past a row of shops. A car driving by slowed down for a moment, and a man yelled out, “Eat something!” I remember stopping in my tracks. Today it breaks my heart to think that even strangers were motivated to try to help me, although, guys, I promise you that yelling from cars at women will never get you the result you want. This guy was not at all flirting with me, but if I’d had enough fat on my body to inspire him to, my suggestion would be to pull over and approach me. I might not respond how you want me to but at least you aren’t perpetuating a boring stereotype. Post a missed connections ad on Craigslist, Catfish me—anything but yelling from a car.
I look back now and see the scenario as being particularly poignant given it happened in front of a store called Sullivan’s Toy Store, my favorite place on Earth when I was a kid. The little girl who was once so obsessed with colored pencils and stuffed animals was now all grown up, with that passion for fun having been replaced with an obsession with calories, carbs, and food labels.
Although my mom dieted herself and was likely battling her own cunning demons, she started trying to help me. I can’t even begin to fathom the pain it must cause a mother to see her child starve herself. I can hardly go into work if my dog looks the slightest bit sad.
I actually admire how my mom tricked me into going to an eating disorder specialist. She cleverly sold her to me as a nutritionist, so I thought she could help me figure out which foods had the fewest calories. However, as soon as I met the woman, I knew she was my enemy. Since my eating disorder behaved like an addiction, anyone who challenged my comfort zone was very threatening, and I instantly felt like a tiger in a cage. The beast in my head made me think in extremes—people were either with me or against me, food was either good or bad, you ate the whole box or none at all. In psych lingo, this is often referred to as black-and-white thinking, but this was way before I could see in color. As far as my addictive brain knew, this bitch was trying to kill me, which is ironic, since I was the one killing myself.
When I sat across from the specialist, she looked way too concerned about me for my liking. Her concern made me feel things, and feeling things was something I made a point to avoid. She started talking about how many calories we need in a day just for our organs to function. She talked about how protein keeps our hair follicles strong, and how fat keeps our skin bright and healthy. She was clearly trying to appeal to my vanity, but what she didn’t yet know was that my disorder wasn’t about trying to be pretty. It was about being in control and shrinking my body as much as I could to get the attention I couldn’t seem to get when I looked too healthy.
She got up and pulled a giant sheet of paper from a huge roll hanging from the ceiling. She pushed aside a coffee table full of random objects and Rubik’s cubes, which I always figured were a therapist’s way of setting psychological traps for their patients, making judgments based on what you picked up. Distrustful, I never touched anything, which of course told her everything she needed to know. The specialist then had me lie down on a big piece of paper. She kneeled next to me, and with big black Sharpie, she outlined my body. When she was finished she told me to get up and look at the drawing.
“Did you know that that’s the size of your body?”
As I looked at the outline of my frame, all I could think about were those chalk outlines of dead bodies at a crime scene. And Kate Moss. The two worst things you’d ever want an outline of your body to remind you of. But at that point, the sick perfectionism had taken my frontal lobe hostage, and instead of horror, I felt a sense of accomplishment. My isolating, lying, jogging, and starving had paid off. Anorexia is a disease of the mind that makes being thin your primary source of self-esteem and purpose, so the concern on this woman’s face felt like even more of a win. When I was alarmingly thin, people cared, they fussed over me, they wanted to see me again.
In fact, she asked if I could come in the next day. See? Being thin worked! She was obsessed with me!
However, I didn’t go back the next day because we couldn’t afford it. If nothing else deters you from succumbing to an eating disorder, please listen to this: It costs a fortune. Between the low productivity due to the constant mental distractions, pricey fat-free foods, and the medical specialists, it drains your bank account as much as it drains your energy from low blood sugar. I’m not sure how my mom figured out how to afford it, but I agreed to see the doctor once a week solely because I could tell she was having a complete meltdown underneath the crystallized shell of denial about how thin I was.
Going to this “nutritionist,” who I now realize was an eating disorder specialist, was a big obstacle in my ambitions for skeletal glory. She made me keep a food journal in which I had to write down everything I ate each day. This was perhaps my first piece of published fiction since everything I wrote down was a lie. At this point, I had lost sight of what normal people even ate, so I just wrote down whatever I saw on dinner tables in commercials.
When I went back to see the therapist, she read through my journal. She might as well have been reading Harry Potter. After she skimmed a couple of pages, it was clear that she saw right through my scam. She then asked me to stand on a scale to see if my eating had helped me put on weight, what with all the imaginary roast beef I had been consuming. The first time she weighed me, I remember trying to make myself heavier by bending my knees a bit and leaning back and forth. That’s how cunning eating disorders can be; I actually thought that would work. I thought I could literally defy the laws of gravity. Whenever I get frustrated with th
e people in my life who struggle with addiction or dysmorphia, I remember how delusional I once was, thinking I could magically put on weight with mental force.
The next session, I was more prepared for the whole scale rigmarole. I had a whole system down: I’d arrive twenty minutes early with four fifty-ounce bottles of water, the ones you see someone carrying at the gym and you roll your eyes at. Like, dude, if you’re that dehydrated, you should probably take the day off. Anyway, I would chug all of them before going into my appointment. As you can imagine, this was as uncomfortable as it was insane, but it actually worked. This time, when I stepped on the scale, I was four pounds heavier due to the water I was holding in my stomach and I guess the pee I was holding in my kidneys. She looked at me half confused, half impressed.
I really hope being pregnant doesn’t hurt as much as drinking four giant bottles of water in a row because I was certain my ribs were going to shatter and that my body would tear open, causing the entire building to flood.
I'm Fine...And Other Lies Page 12