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sweat band. 4½" crown, 2¾" brim.90 SEPTEMBER 2019 THE ATLANTICsaying enough Hail Marys to be forgiven
for my sins. I still thought of the disorder
as something I needed to be forgiven for.
When I submitted that early jumbled
attempt to a writing workshop, another
graduate student raised his hand during
the discussion to ask if there was such
a thing as too much honesty. “I find it
incred ibly difficult to like the narrator of
this essay,” he said. I found his phrasing
amusing, the narrator of this essay, as if she
were a stranger we could gossip about. It
was my first nonfiction class, and I wasn’t
used to the rules of displacement—all of us
pretending we weren’t also critiquing one
another’s lives. After class, the same man
who’d found it difficult to like my narrator
asked me if I wanted to get a drink. In my
head I said, Fuck you, but out loud I said,
“Sounds great.” The less you liked me, the
more I wanted you to.
By getting pregnant, it seemed as if I
had finally managed to replace “the nar-
rator of this essay”—a sick girl obsessed
with her own pain, difficult to like—with
a nobler version of myself: a woman who
wasn’t destroying her own body, but
using her body to make another body
she would care for. A stubborn internal
voice was still convinced that the eating
dis order had been all about the “I,” all
about whittling myself to the shape of
that tall rail. Now pregnancy promised a
new source of gravity: the “you.” Strang-
ers smiled at me constantly on the street.
At my ob-gyn, once a patient was preg-
nant, she got to ascend to the second floor.
I no longer visited the regular gynecologi-
cal suites on the lower level. I got to glide
up an atrium staircase instead, destined
for ultrasounds and prenatal vita mins,
leaving behind those gonorrhea tests and
birth-control prescriptions—as if I were
advancing to the next level of a video
game, or had earned a ticket to the afterlife.BY THE TIME you were the size of a co-
conut, I was audibly huffing my way up the
subway stairs. My belly was a 20-pound
piece of luggage I carried every where. My
ligaments stretched and snapped, painful
enough to make me gasp. Each evening,
my legs were overcome by a maddening
fidgeting sensation, something my doc-
tor would call “restless legs syndrome.”
At a movie one night, I kept compulsively
crossing and recrossing them, unable to
hold still, so I left the theater to sit in a
bathroom stall for 10 minutes. My legs
jerked and stretched as if they were beingConnecticut, that summer I was preg-
nant with you, and lay on a big white bed
listening to the wail of the trains and the
patter of rain on the creek and imagined
it falling on the blue tarp covering the hot-
dog stand across the road. We ate ham-
burgers at a roadside shack and swam
in Cream Hill Lake, where the teenage
lifeguards almost kicked us out because
we weren’t members. We barely deserved
that deep blue water, those shores thick
with trees, those wooden buoys dappled
with sunshine. We’d had our whispered
resentments, our nights of fighting. But
I want you to picture us there: our voices
bantering, our laughter entwined. I want
you to know you were built from medium-
rare meat and late-afternoon light.WHEN I FINALLY got treatment, it
gave me a sudden, liquid thrill to glimpse
the diagnosis written on one of my
medical forms: eating disorder. It was
as if there was finally an official name
for how I felt—the sense of inadequacy
and dislocation— as if the words had
constructed a tangible container around
those intangible smoke signals of hurt. It
made me feel consolidated.
The psychiatrist who diagnosed me
wasn’t interested in that consolidation.
When I told her about being lonely—
probably not the first college student to
do so—she said, “Yes, but how is starv-
ing yourself going to solve that?” She had
a point. Though I hadn’t been trying to
solve the problem, only express it, maybe
even amplify it. But how to translate these
self-defeating impulses into the language
of rational actors? I’d failed to justify the
disorder with a Legitimate Reason, like
failing to supply a parent’s note excusing
my absence from school.
For 15 years after that appointment, I
kept looking for that note. I kept trying to
explain myself to that doctor, kept trying
to purge my shame about the disorder
by listing its causes: my loneliness, my
depression, my desire for control. All of
these reasons were true. None of them
was sufficient. This was what I’d say
about my drinking years later, and what
I came to believe about human motiva-
tions more broadly: We never do anything
for just one reason.
The first time I wrote about the dis-
order, six years after getting help, I
thought if I framed it as something selfish
and vain and self-indulgent, then I could
redeem myself with self-awareness, like