Beyond Body Language
by Jessica Heaney 

I can authoritatively cite very few periods in my teenage years where I was present and conclusively whole. Memories from this time play like interactive films, void of excitement, anger, elation, or anxiety. Instead of owning these feelings and joining them with my observation, I consumed them, forcefully and with detachment, by bingeing on large amounts of sweet, fatty, indulgent and “satisfying” foods. Then, like I wished I could do with my feelings, I purged the food, flushing them away never to be seen again. This was my bulimia—my emotional disorder projected upon food, a survival technique to repress and run away from abuse, fear, and loneliness. It was an attempt to escape my own life.

During my senior year of high school, my bulimia, by then out-of-control, halted my life. I checked in to the Eating Disorders Unit at the Princeton Medical Center— it was here that I first learned to connect my feelings to the chaos around me. I began to talk about periods where my memory blacked-out, masking emotional and possible physical and sexual abuse from my childhood. The emotions that I began to recognize are still poignant and gripping. When I remember this initial treatment, my physical impressions, actions, and my virulent, penetrating emotions passionately collaborate. I fell in step with the repetitive schedule and had to release control over my food intake. For the first time in at least ten years, days became a familiar routine— safe to remember and count on.

Mealtimes were, strangely, as ritualistic as the rituals the staff was hoping to encourage us to abandon. Like a prayer, one of the patients would read the twenty-something creeds we had to follow during meals:

∙Bread cannot be eaten plain, only with butter or made into a sandwich. Sandwiches must be made of two pieces of bread.

∙Bagels must be eaten with butter or cream cheese, not plain or with jelly.

∙Patients are allowed two extra condiment— salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, sugar— per meal. These must be ordered ahead of time.

∙Ice cannot be chewed or sucked on.

These rules— explicit, thorough, inflexible— necessarily sought to adjust and monitor bizarre and rationalized habits that we, the patients, had developed to feel comfortable around food. At first they seemed excessive and absurd. But after a number of meals, I not only began to welcome the rigid guidelines, I witnessed why they were essential. Elizabeth*, a prepubescent twenty-seven-year-old who permanently lived in the eating disorders unit, once had a hysterical fit over adding tomato sauce- 1 vegetable- to her pasta. Screaming and crying at this injustice, she threw her tray against the wall. There was also Mary, a weathered and sickly thirty-five-year-old (estimated age on sight: fifty-five), spitting blueberries from yogurt- 1 milk, 1 fruit- into her napkin and attempting to conceal a muffin- 1 starch- down her pants. She muttered no’s and sucked on her wrinkled lips when the nurse questioned her.

I always felt bad for but simultaneously jealous of the women who, at 90-odd pounds, were on a daily diet of 3,200 calories or more. Although I was horrified by the massive amounts of food, protein shakes and Power Bars they had to consume, I was jealous of their access to such quantities of food. Why couldn’t I have two desserts with each meal? Why wasn’t I that skinny that I needed drastic help? I was on weight-maintenance, meaning that I had a steady diet of 1,550-1,800 calories, and therefore, simple, “average” sized meals.

Regardless of our calorie intake, we all had jealousy of others and despair for ourselves. Food provoked fears and frustrations channeled from other areas of our lives. Outside of Princeton, we could control this palpable necessity and we sought solace from the violent and uncontrollable confusion particular to our stories. Unconsciously, we were also seeking help and recognition.

Eventually, I gratefully accepted the lack of control: the forced challenge of consuming the dietary mathematical equation on my tray and feigning satisfaction. In that multi-purpose “dining room,” grilled cheese was safe (I can count the number of grilled cheeses, outside of the hospital, I have had in the past two years on one hand), and my attention began to ground itself in the other areas of my life, however terrifying and intimidating. Without an absurd meal plan to blame nor eccentric-yet-locally-common self-punishment to inflict, I had to muster my emotional rages elsewhere.

A bizarre and complex family history began to unravel during my hospitalization. At the strong suggestion of the program, family therapy became an integral part of my hospitalization and ongoing rehabilitation. The vividness of these sessions refuses to wane; hot moments fade less easily than a bulimic episode which dulled and fragmented my memory.

A particular segment of a family session, dream-like but still potent and hauntingly real, hovers above other memories of my Princeton hospitalization. One weekday morning, I sat pushed into the corner of a couch in Dr. Miles’ office, as far away from my father as possible. Dr. Miles, a Harvard psychiatrist, tightly operated the Princeton Eating Disorders Unit, and, thanks to his non-identical x and y chromosomes, was the only therapist who ever unnerved my father. That afternoon I felt tight, wrung out: there was nothing more I could verbalize to my father that would be recognized, that is presently recognized or ever will be. I was exhausted. In my memory, the image of my father is more lucid than anything else; I had learned to survive, wide-eyed and intent, by reacting to him. I could not stay within myself; I felt a million miles away.

My father’s face pulsed a deep red and tears streamed down his face. Never before, or since, had I seen a man so distraught. In a gulping and pained voice, he forced, “When Jessica was little, her mother accused me of touching her. I would never touch her; I couldn’t hurt her. She means so much to me.” I felt distressed and sore at these words, but for him and his grief? Or for myself?

Dr. Miles stared hard at him, then threw a glance over at me. I sobbed, focused intently on my legs and shredded tissues— acting out what I violently wanted to do to my blocked, sodden throat. I was convinced my father meant it. I knew that he was terrified of the emotion that poured out of him— the love and compassion that he had for the seventeen-year-old girl who shook five feet away from him. I think he was terrified by his role as a father, as someone who was held accountable for years of his own escapism and explosion.

I hated seeing my father cry. I hated it. But I also hated him, all of him, before I could separate the man who tried to be a good parent from the parts of his nature and habits that hurt me. I hated this man whose car I had escaped from the night before, forty minutes from home. I hated this man who had terrified me throughout my childhood, and into my teenage years. I hated how the possibility of molestation and physical abuse continued to resurface and how I honestly could not find an answer. The black patches of my childhood and nightmarish and dreamy recollections of angry car rides and lonely weekends haunt me. At Princeton, and intermittently even now, I did not know what to feel, except that physically I wanted to leap out of my skin, out of my life and away from the people who have infected me from such a young age. Previously, I hated myself, but I didn’t understand why I felt victimized and yet so evil at the same time.

Two years later, I recognize that winter of my senior year of high school as the shift into owning myself. Practiced professionals, like Dr. Miles, witnessed my pain and the sources of my self-hate. With regular confirmation, I learned that I did not have to stuff my reactions or instincts back down my own throat anymore. After seventeen trying years of being my only companion, protector, confidante, I was exhausted. But at Princeton, my words, my feelings emerged from my body and I met them safely for the first time in years.

That year pierces with the flood of emotion and loneliness so long ignored. I was more terrified than I had ever been, because I was finally naming what I was up against. I began to feel again. I could no longer force myself to be physically numb and in a blind rage. Finally, I had permission to confront the physical realities of people and relationships. Remembering that time also exhilarates me. These new feelings were more forceful than the agonizing weight of a full stomach. The urge to rip apart my own throat became a signal to instead free this passage with words. Passion and fury opened my throat in a way that food never had. Triumphantly, I learned to brandish the power of language.

*All names have been changed.

Jessica Heaney is a rising sophomore at Scripps College from Ridgewood, New Jersey, majoring in French. She works for Dr. Frank Cioffi, the head of Scripps’ Writing Center.