Drunk on Control

Old habits die hard, especially once they have become so deeply entrenched as to become imperceptible.  For me, that habit is self-control, and anorexia became the perfect vehicle to steer that habit.

I was a highly sensitive child, highly perceptive, highly empathetic.  I scared easily.  I needed to understand everything in the world around me.  And when I didn't understand, I became afraid.  My parents crafted a perfectly routine life for me, but I could not embrace anything outside of that routine.  With no outlet for this fear and little means of expressing myself as child, I was left with only one means of communication: tears.

One expects a baby or toddler to cry.  Tears at the kindergarten or first-grade level are acceptable, but once a child reaches third, fourth, or fifth grade, individuals have little patience.  All I wanted to do was to please the adults in my life, but as I grew older and the tears still flowed, and I watched helplessly at the adults' frustration, I felt more and more out of control, an unease tripling by the day.  I simply could not control my body; I could not control myself--and my interpretation of adults' frustration was that I needed to learn some self-control.

Enter anorexia.  The power it gave me to control my tears and emotions was intoxicating.  Anorexia gave me the power to reinvent myself, and my appetite for more control became insatiable.  As events in my life spiraled into a hellish abyss, anorexia gave me a power that I never experienced before.  I was drunk on this power.  And like any addict, I lashed out at anything that attempted to take it away from me.

In reality, anorexia does not empower anyone.  I was dead inside, numb to all emotions and connections to others--and to myself.  I may have been able to hold back tears and anxieties, but that was only because I had become so disconnected from my Self that I couldn't perceive them.

Each treatment, each therapist throughout my teens and twenties encountered a monster when attempting to separate me from anorexia.  I refused to relinquish control.  I screamed, cursed, and talked my way out of recovery.  I told the doctors what they wanted to hear, recovered just enough to placate them and to cling to the fragments of anorexia to maintain pieces of control.  I was too afraid of the memory and feelings from my past, of being reconnected with that tiny, scared child.  In reality, I was afraid of my own power, of the real me that, ironically, seemed so reckless and uninhibited.

In my thirties, anorexia met its match with a therapist who took no bullshit, and who, with riot gear, pried loose the anorexia.  With each forkful, the tiny child re-emerged, literally, screaming and crying.  It terrified me.  Why couldn't I control these tears?  Why couldn't I control these emotions?  I was acting completely out of control--couldn't the treatment team see that anorexia was the cure for this sickening behavior?  Becoming re-acquainted with my former Self was terrifying.  Learning that this person was not a freak or abnormal was relieving.

Recovery is teaching me that control is an illusion.  I cannot attempt to master control; I can only make peace with the events as they unfold in my life.  I need not fear emotion and attempt to suppress it.  I need not fear the body's natural reactions to emotion.  I need not fear me.  Starving my body into submission will not alter the effects of life; it only alters my perception of how I am interacting with those events.  The only control we have in life is how we perceive life; our actions may or may not control an outcome, but our thoughts always have an effect.


Cheers!