Personal Essay Draft 1

Couch Time
By Jessica Maas

“I don’t understand why you have an eating disorder—you’re thin and beautiful.”

In that moment my psychologist handed me the reason to never have to return to her cramped, bare office: she clearly knew nothing. Lucky for me, the red numbers of the digital clock indicated it was the end of our session, and though there was at first an uncomfortable pause after her remark, I managed to spit out a few words in response before flying out the door.

I’d been attending weekly sessions with Jennifer for about three months. Though her smile and questions always seemed forced and unsure, I was convinced that therapy alone would solve my problems and that progress with Jennifer would improve.

It had only been a year before, just weeks before my sophomore year of college, that I’d even realized I had a problem. What had started in my freshmen year of high school as a simple weight training program three days per week for softball had become, by my senior year, hours of cardio, weight training, and agility work almost every day. It was my sophomore year that I began regularly stepping on my father’s bathroom scale in the morning, waiting for the red numbers to indicate if I was winning or losing the game, waiting for them to indicate how many Wheat Thins I was allowed to count onto my plate that day. My junior year I started skipping a lot of meals, so by the time I was a senior I could go almost entire days without eating.

I equated running with purging. Though as an athlete it was necessary and healthy for me to run, my body wouldn’t feel clean and light unless I worked up at least two miles worth of sweat on the treadmill or pavement. My days were planned around when it would be most convenient to run or workout, and I couldn’t relax until after I’d done so. If for some reason it was impossible to exercise that day, I felt heavy, antsy, and incredibly guilty.

But I never believed that I had a problem—I merely thought I was a healthy person. In college, I continued to play softball, but the succession of two knee surgeries in two years managed to curb my exercise obsession somewhat.

But I still had an unhealthy relationship with food, though I didn’t realize it until after my first year. And then it just came to me, one day in the summer—nothing special happened; it was an ordinary day. The only difference was I knew that I had an eating disorder.

The realization of that overwhelmed me. I wrote about it a little in my poetry class that fall, and even did a performance piece centered around it, but admitting it out loud made me feel exposed and naked. I didn’t want people to know because I didn’t want them to be judging me or watching me eat—I didn’t want people to think of me as a weak person or someone who needed to be watched. So I tried my best not to tell anyone, though I agreed to participate in a panel discussion about athletics and eating disorders in the spring. After the presentation, a psychologist from the school came up to talk to me.

“Have you ever gone to see anyone about this?” she asked me.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Well, just think about it. It could help you.”

The thought of therapy did not thrill me, but I did think about it, and that was how I ended up with Jennifer the next fall. My eating had improved to an extent throughout college—I was eating regularly, and eating more, which I attributed to my friends and the schedule of the cafeteria. But my thought processes were very cyclical—I could go some months without feeling too constrained by my thoughts about eating, and then I’d go through a period of months where I felt totally controlled by my thoughts about food, from the time I woke up in the morning to the time I crawled back into bed. I’d have huge internal debates about whether or not to have a granola bar after class or eat a snack at 9 p.m., and these thoughts exhausted me.

So I went to therapy. The problem was it seemed to be exacerbating the problem rather than helping it. I was thinking about food and my choices more often—which I hadn’t previously thought possible—and she never seemed to tell me anything that I didn’t already know. After Jennifer demonstrated her complete ignorance, I found a new psychologist because I believed that maybe I’d just had a bad one and that therapy could still help me.

Patty was the antithesis of Jennifer—much older and much more experienced. She’d sit on the couch across from mine, sipping on the large to-go cup of Diet Coke she had leftover from lunch, and nod and talk to herself as I talked, and then something I said would hit her and she’d suddenly ask me another question—she seemed much more aware, and was much more “go with the flow.”

But even she wasn’t helpful. She asked me to keep lists for her of what I ate everyday and she wanted to have “goals” each week; how many times I would let myself eat dessert, for example. I dutifully scribbled lists on yellow sticky notes and followed the goals she set for me, but I found myself standing in the cafeteria, staring at all the food and trying to decide what would be acceptable to write down and when I should have dessert based on the number she set for me that week—it was like I needed to prove that I had a problem.

As I began to realize that my sessions were not helping, I stopped talking about eating during them. I discussed stress related to school or problems with my mother, and only talked about eating when Patty asked me something about it. Once, I discussed my fear of other people knowing that I had an eating disorder, but I tried hard to stay away from the intricacies of the problem itself. Yet I kept going back because it was supposed to help—therapy was supposed to make me better.

At my last session before summer break, though, I knew I wasn’t going to go back. I was content to simply understand that I had a problem—I didn’t want to write lists or make goals or comb through the sorts of punishment techniques my parents used when I was five. So I went to my last session, talked about my final exams and plans for the summer, and then left the office. I pushed open the doors, walked outside, and stared up to where the sun sat gleaming in a calm, blue sky.