This is a piece I edited and read at the 2013 Cape Cod Writer's Conference. It was a blend of my first piece that I ever wrote about my eating disorder and my new perspective that I had on that time after a few years had passed. I had begun to think of it in terms of "songs of innocence" and "songs of experience." I have many versions of this essay, as my insights steadily change and as I come to believe new elements are important to communicate. Everything I write is as honest as I can make it at the time. It is an interesting lesson in growth to see how, with time, I am able to reveal a fuller picture. I used to want to control the reader's reaction- propaganda style, really. I am happy that that need has diminished. This is not what I would consider to be a current reflection, but important to share, nonetheless.
When the body first begins to shrink, everyone praises you. My grandmother would parade me around shopping malls and boutiques, indulging my every desire, gallivanting me before department store damsels as if it were my debutante ball. I was a haunting mist that wafted into the shoe department, interrupting the girls on benches who were flashing the latest patent-leather buckles on their feet. They gawked at me.
“See that?” My grandma whispered down my neck, “They’re jealous.”
The mystifying, relentless praise polluted my mind, and the delusion from low blood sugar warped my senses, together transforming me into a creature of harmonious disaster.
The weight loss struck me like the crack of a leather whip. When my sophomore year ended, I was fine. When summer began, I was already too skinny. I don’t remember the process. I just remember it like a slide show: in this frame, we see the healthy, happy girl. And in the next slide, we see the sickly gaunt girl.
I never relaxed. If I was sitting, I was sitting up tall, either leaning back with my stomach muscles tense or lifting my legs over and over. On long car rides I hovered over the seat, squatting the entire time. At night after I got home from a four hour practice, I would stay up for hours doing sit-ups, leg-lifts and push-ups. To me, it was just another obligation, like walking the dog or turning out the light. I would sit down for a minute, and then think oh shoot, I forgot that I need to do 1000 sit-ups right now; it might slip my mind temporarily, but I always rolled out of bed reluctant to lie down and sleep. Every muscle in my body erupted through my skin like boulders striking through the gushing current of a shallow stream. My skeleton buoyed up, as if yearning to press through the surface of the tide and taste the forbidden air.
I weighed myself constantly. I knew that the red dial on the scale would bob above and below the number that is your actual weight, before settling still. One day I lifted myself onto the scale and stared down waiting for the red hand to stop; it barely made it past 80. Curiously, I never saw myself as any smaller than anyone else on the streets. I didn’t think I was fat, but I didn’t register my smallness either. I truly saw myself as average.
When I ran my hands through my hair, the lifeless strands fell out as easily as lifting dried flowers from a vase. Ash-grey streaks drifted vertically down my teeth. My skin had the pallor of an icy winter sky. I had once been a great strong tree with sturdy branches, that was now shrinking back to a bending sapling, and disappearing back into the ground as a seed, buried and vulnerable.
I believe I was honest. I was as honest as I could allow myself to be at that time.
But it is incomplete. So much was left untold.
What I had indicated, was that it was all an accident. When I am feeling merciful, I can pardon my behavior with the fleeting excuse that I was in recovery- I was healing. But I know that I indulged that certain pity a confessionary tale invites. The seamstress always remembers where the fabric was cut, surged and knotted even amongst the clamor of praise for the dress.
What I was so careful to circumvent was my intention. But it is time take the blame and lay down my hand. Because, what I was hiding, was the thrill.
I sat in the lawyer’s office going over the terms of the divorce from my father. I was flipping through a contract as the mousy-faced judge twitched his nose and dryly read the document.
In the quiet room my voice suddenly cracked the stale air.
“Wait” I said.
The judge peered over his bifocals.
In the jungle of legal jargon I saw a predator. SCANLON. Kayleen Scanlon. They had changed my name.
“No,” my finger struck the page.
That is not me. I’m Kayleen Wilkinson. Kayleen Wilkinson was in yearbooks, scrapbooks, dental records, athletic results. Where did I go?
They never asked. They decided that I would take my step-father’s last name.
I crossed out their decision, initially KHW by each mark.
I was almost erased. I was in the closing claws of nonexistence.
Getting accepted to the Penev’s Gymnastics Team was considered an exceptional event. I was 13, you would think it was too late for them to do anything with me. But, the assistant would not have called the head coach in to my first screening if he didn’t see some sort of ability they could work with. At the end of a rigorous screening process, the Bulgarian husband and wife duo allowed me to enter their coveted training grounds.
I was a year older and two inches taller than most of the girls. These differences made my soul raw. My mind was skirmished with day dreams and booming voices yelling that I was big and old. I had to fight to keep my mind empty. I had to focus. I had catching up to do.
My mom made an appointment for me with a therapist. She was an older Christian woman and we met in the basement of a church. I sat on the couch, petulant, clenching my jaw.
“So why are we here?” Asked Sue-Ellen. She looked to me for an answer and received a shrug from my eyebrows. I tried to make the gesture as sinister as I could.
“Well, I want my daughter back” chimed my mother.
Well, you can’t have her. I looked away and pulled my arms into my ribs.
After another bout of failure in volleying the conversation, Sue-Ellen handed me a survey to fill out. Perhaps believing communication was possible if we used a different medium.
I scrolled the paper looking for something that would upset me. And here it was, on a scale of 1-10, how often do you think about suicide? That was my cue, and my lines came roaring out.
“You are out of your mind if you think I am your little science project that you can take notes on and study!” I crumpled the paper, threw it at the meek old woman and walked out. Brilliantly done.
I remember watching a teammate snapping the bones in both ankles on a bad landing. The room stopped and she had all the spotlight. The coaches brushed back her tears and her hair and coddled her. They hugged her, they carried her. I envied her.
I wasn’t given a childhood and it wasn’t fair. All I wanted was to be loved, coddled, tucked in and told I was was the only thing that mattered. But isn’t that how I was supposed to be treated? If God wasn’t going to give me what I was due, then I was going to go out and get it for myself. I took my life into my own hands. Time must be stopped. Childhood would be my haven.
“Let’s go down to the nursery, we will have more room there.”
How Sue-Ellen was endlessly even-toned and relaxed was mystifying to me.
“That’s fine. I hope you’re ready to work,” I told her.
“I’ve got my sweats,” She beamed.
“Good.” The last time we met I didn’t say a single word. There was no point. At the very end, Sue-Ellen asked if next time I could teach her some gymnastics.
The carpet in the Church Nursery was soft. We moved boxes of stuffed animals out of the way and began stretching.
“We do oversplits with one leg up on a chair. You have to get all the way down.”
“Ok.” Sue-Ellen pulled out a chair and put her leg up. I was surprised by her willingness. I decided we needed to do something more challenging.
“We do handstands against a wall,” she turned to me, “For ten minutes.”
Without a word, she moved a plastic kitchen out of the way and kicked up to a handstand. She had to be sixty years old. I smiled.
For a full hour, I dictated, she performed. She never once protested. I was amazed. I couldn’t believe she listened to me.
I fantasize about going back. When I feel myself slipping, losing momentum in my work or in my personal life, I miss that focus.
What a sensual time it was, my awakening. Nerve endings, neurons, emotions hot with anticipation to receive what I had worked so hard for. Everything I wanted to stop, had stopped. What had previously been dormant at my feet I had awoken. I was able to command all that I had always been so ineffectual over. I had not fallen victim to my circumstances, I made the most of an opportunity.
I loved the savage insistence of my torpor.
In my perfect destruction I found glory.
It was my friend, it was my comfort.
It gave me someone to talk to.
I was so focused on one goal, I was so devoted to achieving it. Why did it have to be my own destruction?
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