Anorexia and My Brain

Really, I decided to begin to recover when my brain lost a significant amount of function. It lost some function at first, but, in the beginning, it wasn’t enough to make me want to stop and I didn’t believe it was malnutrition causing the lack of function. I blamed it on certain food groups, coffee, the issues in my interpersonal relationships. But later on, it became much worse, not allowing me to ignore it. It became hard to work as a fine dining server which takes wit, thought efficiency, and accuracy. As a professor, my other occupation, it felt impossible to give a lecture and I was exhausted leaving my classrooms, so much that I’d sit in the bathroom stall with my eyes shut, trying to gain enough energy to get to my car and leave after lecturing. I felt terrible for my students and embarrassed when I couldn’t find words, when I couldn’t speak in the way they deserved for me to, to explain concepts to them, when my bones in my elbow and shoulder would squeak as I wrote on the blackboard. I had recently graduated with a graduate degree in poetry, but I couldn’t write even an email anymore. My art, my breath, my talent, had went. Then, my mental stability declined even more severely.

I was lost in a wide ocean of extreme paranoia, not trusting anyone including myself and family. I had suicidal thoughts, fighting the agony inside me to finish myself, and severe depression which disabled me from staying awake for more than a few moments, or hours if I were lucky, for weeks. I forgot how to pack a suitcase, how to do simple math (I truly, literally couldn’t count my calories anymore), I couldn’t remember parts of my day or week. I do remember making a salad one day, and when I was finished making it, I realized I had taken four forks out, each time forgetting I already retrieved the one before. Soon, I forgot how to talk nearly altogether. I couldn’t speak in complex sentences or make intelligent connections with facts, thoughts, or observances. And I cried, cried, cried, in agony, for months. I had panic attacks because no one knew how to help me, and I didn’t either, and I was dissolving in every way one can. I was so afraid at times that I would walk to the Emergency Room at the hospital and just stay there, alone, just in case. I’d sit watching: a man throwing up blood into a bag clear, another sweating out a fever, an overdose. I’d walk to a catholic adoration chapel next door to sit and pray with a bible in my right hand and a tissue from a stranger in my left.

The pain was physical as well. The cliché of “a pit in my stomach” was very much real. And the pit sat hard, always, like a hard rock pulling my intestines down, down, down. I’d groan from the pain of that pit.

After admitting I had anorexia nervosa (restrictive) recovery began, which was an entirely painful process in itself and still is: your very fear becomes true; the way your body has to heal involves becoming larger and only very slowly goes back to its healthy size and state. The starved brain becomes healthier over phases of more confusion, of lows and highs of mania, of balancing itself back out. I read it would never repair. I proved it wrong. When my brain began to turn back on my happiness came with it. I felt alive again. My physical body felt like it was going through puberty again. But my brain was coming back on, fireflies lighting up in the night, on and off, on and off, until soon the whole landscape stayed lit. I began to be able to remember simple orders at the causal café where I was working; I no longer had to write everything down on paper. I could pack a suitcase without even thinking much about it. I could stay awake. I could laugh. I could feel hope. I could play songs on the piano. It felt like magic to feel that hope and to feel my brain and body repair.

The last thing that ever so slowly came back was my ability to be creative again, to write poetry again. Poetry was the last thing to come back; really, it still is healing, back to how I could write before. How amazing that is: society often discounts poets, creative people, artists, but from what I’ve gathered, it’s the most complex part of the brain and takes the most intelligence. Never again will I discount my creativity.

Never again will I discount the ability to do simple things. I am grateful for it all after I lost the most of it. Anorexia comes in quick and leaves you without the mind to fight it, controlling your body in a certain way takes all importance. You’ll do anything to keep your bones visible.

The truth is: Beauty is simply health of both mind and body. Beauty is being able to function. Control creates a reverse of loss of control. These are words I won’t let myself forget.