January

Getting abstinent from an eating disorder is like traveling to hell and back, looking Satan straight in his fiery eyes and spitting in his face. Wrestling him until he tires and living to tell the story behind the scars he left above your left eye.

It’s the single most difficult thing I have ever done in my entire life (and this home girl has ‘done’ a lot. I’ve lived in Los Angeles and worked at a news station. Blood and botox, rooooooooooooooound the clock. Need I say more?)  The recovery experience is physical, emotional and spiritual. There are painful, physical withdrawals from stopping the eating disorder behaviors; similar to drug withdrawals. There is the rollercoaster of fears from losing control of life and body. There is the incomprehensible surrender of one’s self, choices, body and food to a fictitious ‘Higher Power” that lives in your head (most of us cross our fingers that this higher power is in agreement that ‘thin is in’ or ‘I am out.’)

I’m one of the lucky one’s. I’m part of the 80% of people who survive an eating disorder (source.) Oddly, in the recovery process I never heard anyone talk about the surviving part of an eating disorder. I would imagine we could compare it to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. You’ve lived through this traumatizing experience, you stop the behaviors and just for a moment you catch your breath and you start to believe that you just might survive. It’s almost like a scene in a bad horror film; the scene where the innocent girl thinks everything is okay so she peaks her head out of the closet. She waits a few moments, they tick by and she’s quite sure the killer is gone. She puts one foot out, but the second she fully steps out from her dark cave of protection, he’s there! He’s holding flowers and in a crisp new collared shirt! Good God! He’s her date! Run girl! Run!

For those of us in recovery, dating is gnarly. Maybe it’s gnarly for every woman, but from the evidence of my own experience and those of my friends in recovery, I’m gonna say that our breed of monkey’s got the brown banana in the bunch. Owning that ‘brown banana’ I have to remember that my brain, body and emotions do not function the way other women’s do. Which is probably why I have experienced an eating disorder, life is just too scary for me, and an eating disorder makes things much easier to cope with. I needed to find something that would help me cope with the mirage of feelings we are all given in the goodie bag that life hands us in the delivery room. My eating disorder was really good at numbing feelings of insecurity, fear, abandonment and pain. While I was in it I never had to open up that goodie bag and experience real feelings. I was fast asleep from a sugar coma. Convenient eh?

But, why don’t little kids ever want to take a nap? Because they may be small, but they’re smart! They have figured out that when you sleep you miss something fun that happens. When I was in my disease I was missing out on a lot of experiences and relationships. Now that I do date I experience all the feelings that go with it; they are incredibly uncomfortable. I feel like going back in that sugar coma and saying, “Don’t mind me! I’ll miss out!” However, I have to ask myself, “If I’m not willing to experience the painful aspects of dating and life, exactly what am I doing here?” It reminds me of the old saying, “The purpose of life is to live it.”

Dating is apart of life and if we want to be apart of it, we will participate in it. I encourage all of you girls (myself included) to look at dating as an opportunity to participate in life. I think if I’m really honest with myself, the thing that makes me the most nervous about dating is that I’m doing it for validation. I do it simply for an ego stroke. Seriously, I have found myself dating guys I don’t even like (and actually find annoying) just for the narcissistic pleasure of knowing someone likes me.  If they don’t end up liking me? Come hell and high water full of tears you will probably see me in a hot mess crying about it. Not good. I’ve learned a couple things from my mistakes.

#1. Dating is not about making anyone like you. It’s really like reading a book. You don’t read a book to make the book like you. You read it to enjoy it and learn something new. If you approach dating like reading, in order to find out something new about the human being in front of you, you’ll have less melt downs than I ever did.

#2. You have to know your own worth and value. If I was to put my worth and value in anyone else’s hands but my own I would definitely be scared and terrified. What we learn in recovery is not to put our worth in our eating disorders hands. We know that our worth and value encompass so much more than the size of our jeans. I think the goal for every woman should be an unshakable belief that no matter who likes or dislikes her she is still the same, strong, beautiful woman she was before she met this guy.

#3. Participating in life is an uncomfortable, wet, hot, sticky mess…and a whole lot of fun. I’ve learned that dating can be scary if I let it be, it can also be fun if I let it be. I think most of the time, I take life too seriously. Life is hard man; you lose friends, family, jobs, pets and really expensive cell phones. You’ll succeed, you’ll fail, you’ll laugh and you’ll cry so hard that you’ll be pretty sure you just might give yourself a heart attack. But, ya know what? It’s worth it. It’s so worth it! I remember being at a 4^th of July Party a few years back. I was standing on the balcony, laughing with friends when it occurred to me that exactly one year ago I wanted to kill myself. Not joking. I remember being startled with the realization that had I given up and decided "Game over", I would not be experiencing the joy I was sharing with the people I dearly loved.

Participate and en-JOY it!

Happy Recovery,

Irvina

The growth process is a tricky, icky, sticky one. I’ve been around for 20 some odd years now and I’m still towel drying off gobs of growth.  A few years ago I met a little boy who had a severe form of Autism. His condition bothered me so much that I did some research on it. I found that Autism is predominantly found in boys over girls. One of the theories is that at conception the fetus is female for 8 weeks, then the Y chromosome develops distinguishing the fetus as a male. The transformation process is so dramatic that birth defects occur during this stage. This particular theory believes that autism takes root during this transformation.  

I thought about this theory as I watched Black Swan, starring Natalie Portman. Portman plays an innocent, sheltered, ballerina with one passion: attaining perfection in her art form. The movie follows Portman as she strives for perfection in her craft and also parallels the imperfection of her human character that reveals itself as she cheats, lies, steals and purges in order to get to the top of her game. Quite the dichotomy eh?

My friends weren’t fans of this movie. I thought the hot and heavy lesbian scenes would at least have made my male counterpart put a 9 on the scoreboard, but even his reaction was, “I’m sorry I suggested we see this and by the way chicks are still crazy.” Personally, I thought it was brilliant. Mostly because it reminded me of myself. [Cue eye rolls.]

I found it captivating because it felt like watching one of the deep, dark secrets of humanity be revealed to a wide eyed teenager. The secret being, not one of us is pure and perfect. Not one. Call me crazy (most people do) but I don’t remember anyone ever telling me this as a child. I remember the world being painted as a grand place with possibility and I was a princess that reigned in it. I remember being encouraged to maintain the perfection of the world. Certain phrases encouraged me:

“Practice make’s perfect”

“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.”

“You can do anything you put your mind to.”

“You are the best and you deserve the best.”

But, I don’t remember anyone ever sitting me down and telling me.

“There will be a day that you’re so frustrated that you’ll cheat.”

“There will be a time when you want something so bad you’ll steal it.”

“There will be a day that you are so angry you’ll hit someone.”

“There will be a time you will be so disappointed in someone that you’ll gossip.” 

"There will be a day that you'll feel so ugly that you will starve."  

I pretty much figured that stuff out on my own. Well, I was told that lying, cheating, hitting and stealing were bad and not to do them. But, I don’t remember anyone ever telling me that just as much as I am good, I am equally bad and that’s a normal part of being human. It seems to me that as a society we believe it makes more sense to push our youth toward excellence and perfection than educate them on the dark side of humanity. I think that this leaves the entire human race ignorant because we start to hate ourselves for the dark parts of ourselves instead of learning from them.

So what does one do when the dark side starts to show? Like Portman, we try to ignore it so we dance and we dance exceptionally well. To humor you, we’ll just pretend that the crazy ballerina and I are the only people in the world who have ever danced the tango of a double life. Since you haven’t I’ll tell you one thing about it, as the cute British boys say, “It’s bloody hard.” The stark contrast between being pure, white and on the pedestal of perfection and the chaos of hunting, stealing and killing while trying not to get caught is mind rattling. Sometimes the dance between two worlds is so thrilling and fast that one forgets they are dancing at all. But, there is one thing we all know about every performance. Eventually the artist must stop and take a bow. Hopefully that artist can accept the applause with dignity of a job well done. Some (like me) turn around and say, “What did I do? Who are you? And where the hell am I?”

For many years of my life I danced this tango between party-harty-rock and roll and good girl who goes on mission trips with church. I quite arrogantly thought that I had everyone fooled until the dancing of the these two performances collided and left me with only pieces of each one left. Isn’t that what transformation is though? You take what you have; both good and bad, the black and the white and you make something new with them - you make something gray.

I have spent the last few years of my life trying to paint my life with gray. What I have discovered though is in spite of our affection for heather gray v-necks from American Apparel, our society does not like “gray”. We live in a culture of excellence and it doesn’t have the patience to watch a transformation and it certainly is not pleased with imperfection. If you say you’re going to do something, you better do it and you better do it well or dammit I’ll find someone else to dance, employ, date, make my coffee or walk my dog.

While painting the gray swan in me has realized that the applause from the audience only lasts for a few moments. Afterward some will send you flowers and some will tell you, “Beautiful girl, your form – sucks.” I could spend hours improving my form and living off the applause of others or I could accept that I am gray. I could accept that I am awkward, weird, confusing, but also funny, smart and pretty brave, I could applaud myself for that and call it a night. I have learned that being able to accept yourself with all of the slime that goes with it, is a painful transformation, but it can be even more thrilling than perfection. To be gray is to live with freedom.

Amanda Palmer

As much as I love writing on these subjects there is a heaviness that goes with eating disorder recovery. Even though I may have recovery under my belt I daily read stories and medical studies about those that do not. My mind is filled with the anguish of parents at a loss of what to do with this disease that is killing their child, I hear about people I once knew dying of this disease and of others refusing treatment. I hear about studies coming out about children developing eating disorders as young as the age of 8 and of rehabs and doctors overwhelmed with the amount of clients and trauma they are dealing with. Maybe this is why it’s so hard to get out of bed in the morning? Maybe I secretly fear what new eating disorder death sits in the Health section of The New York Times.

However, there are some days like today that I am given a morsel of HOPE and it’s always great when that hope is delivered with a melody. That hope came from a Los Angeles Times article featuring Amanda Palmer, who asked to split with Roadrunner Records in April. Palmer claimed the label sought to cut or alter shots of her stomach in the music video for the “Who Killed Amanda Palmer” song “Leeds United,” Palmer asked to be dropped in late 2008. As fans bared their own bodies in an online protest dubbed “The ReBellyon,” the singer took to performing a song pointedly titled “Please Drop Me” in concert. Palmer has gone on to join Band Camp an online music publishing platform that allows artists to have more control of their sales and merchandising.

This story blew away my “Debbie Downer Syndrome” and made me smirk at the audacity this young Rock & Roller has to ask to be dropped from her record label. In a day and age where celebrity eating disorders are as acceptable as celebrity divorces I was pretty shocked to see Palmer give “the bird’ to her record label. Here’s a chick who is edgy, popular and punk rock and won’t let the powers of “approval” alter who she truly is. This story gives me a good 500 mg of hope because this is a woman who very easily could have been motivated by fear and just gone along with edits on her body. Instead she stayed steady with what she knew was true, right and just and choose to stay stick with it and not sell out. It was a risky choice, but she definitely made a fan out of me.

Palmer gives me hope for 2011. Hope that if one girl can stand up and say, “I refuse to agree with you. My body IS good enough exactly as it is thank you very much.” I wonder what the rest of us could say?

Happy New Year!

Irvina