Dragging the terrible thing into the light
Zoe Kazan on her first love and how it helped her overcome her eating disorder
I was19 and had fallen in love. He was a grad student who lived in a long, narrow apartment with a room devoted to books. I didn’t live there with him, but my toothbrush did. I lived in a dorm a 10-minute drive away, but he and I hardly spent a night apart.
When I’d finished my work for the day, he’d pick me up at the back gate of my dorm. I always ran to his car, because it was cold and because walking would not get me to him fast enough.
This was first love, the real thing, the full symphony.
But I thought his love was predicated on my ability to keep a secret from him. I’ll tell you that secret, because I’m not afraid you won’t love me: For a year and a half, I had been struggling with a bout of anorexia that had knocked 20 pounds off my already slim frame. I had to be weighed multiple times a week at the medical centre at Yale, where I went to school, and I saw a therapist almost as often.
The causes for my eating disorder ran along the usual lines: depression, an inability to express my rage, a desire to exert control, a desire to feel less, a desire to have my body express the things my voice could not.
That, and I had gotten in the habit of believing it was better to take up less space.
When I met the boy I fell in love with, I was a year into this disease and subsisting on less than 500 calories a day.
Love didn’t make me better, but it made me happier. And it gave me the incentive to appear well, even if I was not.
My boyfriend would make a full pot of Persian-style rice and put half of it on my plate. He’d buy me a giant bowl of oatmeal, loaded with peaches and granola and nuts. I ate everything he gave me. This was when I was still chugging litres of water before my appointments, to bring up my weight.
But in his presence, I ate, because I thought if he knew there was something wrong with me, he wouldn’t want me. And I ate because the food came from him, which pardoned it in my disordered mind. Anything he touched was good, including me.
I gained a little weight this way, pretending to be OK. At the end of the school year, my nurse told me I wouldn’t have to be weighed over the summer. “I trust you,” she said. This made me anxious. What if I failed? My summer internship took me back to Los Angeles, to my parents’ house.
My boyfriend stayed in New Haven to do research. I cried so much when he dropped me off at the Hartford airport, my face was still puffy when I landed at LAX.
My parents were leaving for the summer, so I’d be living in the house by myself — our old Craftsman house, which even family skeptics agreed was haunted. And the spirits had always seemed most active around me.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” my mother asked.
At 19, I had never lived alone. I still occasionally slept with my teddy bear. I was still afraid of the dark.
But I had an investment in being brave. I wanted not only to seem well but also to seem like an adult. “Yes, I’ll be fine.”
The noises began at night. Footsteps on the stairs. Running water. Voices and laughter from the other room.
It had been bad before, but never like this. I started waking up in the middle of the night with all the lights turned on.
One morning, I came downstairs, and the chairs had been pulled out from the dining room table.
I took to sleeping in my parents’ room, with the television on full blast.
If I was brave enough to get through the night, I thought, surely I could take care of myself in other ways.
But I had a practical problem: I had no idea how to feed myself.
In sickness, I had constructed a mode of eating that relied heavily on props. Filling a plate and eating only the vegetables, for instance.
With my boyfriend, I was eating real meals — but again, under his gaze.
Now, no one was watching. No one was weighing me. I was the only arbiter of my body. What does a person eat when her only goal is satiation? Who was I, when I was alone? Finally, I hit on a system. Mornings were yogurt and granola. Lunches were whatever they ordered at work.
And on Sundays, I would buy frozen tamales, fresh zucchini and tofu. Carbohydrate, vegetable, protein.
Every night, I would roast the tofu and zucchini in the oven while I steamed a tamale. Then I would put on a movie, to fill the darkness of the empty house, and eat.
It wasn’t wellness exactly, but night after night, I filled my plate and ate everything on it.
When I saw my boyfriend again at the end of the summer, I thought I could see surprise in his eyes, at the changed shape of my body. It made me defensive.
Full feeling had returned to me, and with sentience came sharpness, rage.
One warm night, walking home together, he asked if I had ever had an eating disorder.
I pulled away, stung, and pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about.
But later, in bed, with a strange silence between us, I asked him to cover his face with his pillow. I didn’t want to watch the love drain from him when I told him the truth.
It all came out, more than I thought I had to say. When I finished, he pulled the pillow away and met my eyes. I saw love there before he said anything.
Dragging the terrible thing into the light can strip it of its potency.
I didn’t get better all at once — it took years for me to stop counting calories, stop needing a system to get through a meal. Years to get my brain back.
But I set a change in motion that night, by telling that one person: This is me. I’m not perfect. Can you still love me?
Many years later, on the cusp of my 30s, I read Stephen King’s Carrie. In his introduction, he explains that the germ of the idea came from reading about paranormal activity, how it often clusters around teenage girls.
He theorizes such activity might be a skewed manifestation of the girls’ own power — their nascent sexuality and maturity bursting through the cracks of their girlhood.
Yes, I thought. Yes. I remember the birth of my powers.
Now, no one was watching. No one was weighing me. I was the only arbiter of my body. Who was I, when I was alone?