Revised Personal Essay

Authority Issues

When I started preschool, my mother told the women in charge that if they told me something was a rule, I’d be guaranteed to do it. Not only was that true at the time, but the same philosophy continued to play out in my life as the years progressed: I always had my homework done on time, I was always within earshot of my mother’s voice when I went outside to play with my friends, and I always ate all my food before leaving the dinner table.

Years later, though, the obedience with which I listened to authority wasn’t quite as harmless. Right before high school, my parents decided I should start weight training for softball. My mother introduced me to Deanna, who was to serve as my personal trainer, and I began a simple weight lifting program three days a week.

But it soon spiraled out of control. I became infatuated with Deanna; she was a great athlete with incredible muscle definition, and I wanted to be just like her. So I watched her behavior and adopted it as my own; I increased my exercise and decreased my food intake. Before long, numbers consumed my life—how many calories I ate, how many miles I ran, how much I could bench press, how much I weighed.

By the time I graduated I could go almost entire days without eating. I believed that I needed to workout every day to be a better athlete, that any day off was a day wasted, and that running was the only way I could purge myself of the feeling of excess flesh experienced after eating.

Things changed a little in college. I ate more, and regularly, and the succession of two knee surgeries in two years curbed my exercise obsession somewhat. But my thought processes were still 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 consciousness of food, from the time I woke up in the morning to the time I crawled back into bed.

And then, right before my sophomore year, I realized I had an eating disorder. Nothing special happened; it was an ordinary day, marked only by that sudden comprehension and the overwhelming feeling caused by the weight of it.

I researched it. I wrote about it. I admitted the words out loud very rarely and only in moments when I struggled most with it, but I regretted it every time. I didn’t want to be pitied or appear weak, I didn’t want people watching me while I ate, and I definitely didn’t want it to define me.

In the spring, though, I agreed to sit on a panel about eating disorders in athletics because they needed a student. After the presentation, a school psychologist came up to talk to me.

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

The thought of therapy did not thrill me, but I thought about it, and as I entered another period of feeling fixated on food, I decided to try it. When I returned for the next school year, I began seeing Jennifer, a young psychologist with a cramped, undecorated office. Jennifer forced smiles, asked textbook questions and gave textbook answers, and just appeared all-around uncomfortable in her own skin—I was skeptical that this insecure woman sitting across from me was ever going to help.

But I tried anyway—Jennifer assured me that these things simply take time, that I shouldn’t expect results too soon. Four months and one statement from Jennifer later, though, I walked out her door for the last time.

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

I found a new psychologist. Patty was the antithesis of Jennifer—much older and much more experienced. But even she wasn’t helpful. She asked me to keep lists of what I ate and she wanted to have “goals” each week; how many times I would 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—it was like I needed to prove that I had a problem.

As I realized that my sessions weren’t helping, I stopped talking about eating during them. I discussed school-related stress or problems with my mother, and only talked about eating when Patty asked me about it. 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 back. I still put the groceries away with the nutrition facts pointing away from me and I still couldn’t go near a bathroom scale, but 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 break, and told Patty to have a good summer. Then I walked out of her office and pushed open the outside doors for the very last time.