Yesterday I celebrated my 21st birthday.ÿThe festivities will continue tonight when six girlfriends and I get together for a night of wholesome debauchery.ÿTwenty-one.ÿA landmark year.ÿI should feel excited,ÿand I do. I should feel carefree,ÿbut I don't.
Five years ago, I was diagnosed with bulimia -- by my parents, my doctor and the succession of therapists to which my mother and father relentlessly dragged me. I was 16, I knew everything and I knew I didn't have a problem.
I was not those girls in the made-for-TV-movies who lost ridiculous amounts of weight in a month's time.ÿMy esophagus wasn't torn, my teeth weren't yellow and I never vomited blood -- well, almost never.ÿI was in control of this. I was fine.ÿAnd I was adamant about how very fine I was.
Now, with five years of sticking my fingers down my throat and dozens of hours of therapy behind me, I can admit that I am not fine.ÿI am "eating disorder: unclassified." My insurance form says so.
What that means is I still have a lot of hang ups about food and my body, but I neither binge nor purge often enough to be considered a full-fledged bulimic anymore. It's a process building towards complete wellness, and, like our city's esteemed mass transit system, I'm getting there.
Here's when it all clicked for me: I visited a neighbor from home, who spent the summer in Manayunk's Renfrew Center, a facility for women suffering from eating disorders.
There, I saw a woman so weakened by her refusal to eat that in order to even go outside for a cigarette, she had to be pushed in a wheelchair, and had to return to her bed immediately afterward.
I saw women struggling with all kinds of disorders, from anorexia to compulsive overeating.ÿWhile the young woman I was visiting is now a junior in high schoolÿ-- a "normal" age for an eating disorder to overtake a woman's lifeÿ-- I also saw women in their twenties and thirties, still struggling with these supposedly adolescent issues.
I saw a ghostly thin woman walking the facility's grounds.ÿShe was 60 years old.ÿAnd anorexic.
It blew me away. On the made-for-TV movies, women always reach recovery by the time they finish college or get married.ÿHere was this flesh-and-blood woman, three times my age, struggling with the same body image issues as I.ÿWas I destined to be a bulimic grandmother?
I don't think I threw up at all for a month after that, excepting one night when an Allegro's cheesesteak worked itself up through my pipes all by itself.ÿNo, seeing that 60-year-old woman's struggle snapped me out of it.ÿI determined that I would not grow old without shaking this problem.
Not that it's been easy.ÿAnd I don't expect it to get easy.
How can I, let alone the general public, ever understand or solve these problems when the television networks hijack eating disorders and package them into neat two-hour after school specials with cute resolutions? And when magazines with a teenage readership condense the entire struggle into 1,000 words, end on a chirpy note with a photograph of a beautiful woman and her sexy boyfriend, then strategically place an ad for a fad diet on the opposite page?
Now on the cusp of my 22nd year, I'm disappointed on several fronts to still be dealing with these issues on a daily basis. I'm tired of the secretiveness surrounding eating disorders, the covert whispers regarding women who spend far too many hours a day at the gym, who eat a tomato sandwich for lunch, who scurry off to the bathroom after a smorgasbord at dining.
AndÿI'm angry at myself -- for not being strong enough to appreciate myself for who I am, for the time that I have squandered trying to mold my body into somebody else's ideal, for the financial and emotional burden my disorder has placed on my parents.ÿSo these are my regrets.
But I'm proud of myself, too, and proud of all the other womenÿand, increasingly, men, who are in the process of overcoming similar problems.ÿEating disorders are addictive, scary, cyclical and, no matter what the made-for-TV movies say, not easily resolved.
Eating disorders are symptomatic of a larger, multi-faceted failure on the part of the media, schools, families and ourselves -- a failure to instill a concrete sense of self-worth in young women.
Not that I blame the media for my issues.ÿI'm just saying it didn't help.ÿThe women featured, the women worthy of a "story" typically ran ten miles a day, binged on family-sized bags of potato chips and whole birthday cakes.ÿHow could my two miles a day and late-night binges seem as bad as all that?
I wonder how many young women are able to rationalize their food and body image issues to themselves by pointing out women with "more severe" problems.ÿIt's a shame that the media, with its hunger for emotionally-wrenching stories, fails to portray more realistic, possibly mundane stories which place the struggle in a more honest light.
But more than that, I think it's a shame that so many of us have to get better before we can admit we are sick.
Rebecca Davidson is a senior English major from Glen Rock, NJ.
