The Worst Dinner Party in the World

Hi! We are excited that you’ll be joining us at our dinner party tonight! Please follow the simple rules below.

We look forward to seeing you!

• You must finish everything on your plate.

• You must finish everything on your plate within the time allotted—no more than 20 minutes.

• You must use a utensil for everything on your plate – even if it’s finger food.

• You are being watched, as you eat, by people who are trying not to act like they’re watching you…but they are.

• You will eat more food than you’ve eaten in months, and your body will likely rebel as you eat. It may not be pretty. If you choose to use the restroom, one of us will accompany you!

• Unless you remembered, when you initially responded to the dinner party invitation, to tell us about the foods you don’t like, you cannot ‘opt’ out of what is already on your plate and thus must eat every morsel.

• You’ll be eating with a group of other people with eating disorders, but please feel free to have fun and make casual conversation.

• When you’re done, please bring your empty plate of food to the person sitting at the kitchen counter who will ask you, “How was it?” with a cheery smile, even as everyone knows exactly how it was and you’re ready to bolt. You’ll need to say, “Fine!” or they may ask further questions you have no interest in answering, and you won’t be able to leave in a timely fashion.

No one would say, at the outset, that eating disorders are humorous. I mean, we don’t typically walk around laughing about how hilarious bulimia or binge eating are, and the pain and suffering that accompanies the mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion that EDs can wreak upon our lives. That said. When I was writing the call for submissions for the anthology I’m editing, I wondered if anyone would have funny stories or silly moments to share, or could infuse some humor into this deeply traumatic topic, and so I wrote a prompt to encourage submissions that might find the funny in some of our stories.

I was talking to a friend the other day about my experiences in the partial hospitalization program I attended in 2023 at the age of 54 years old. And I started laughing when a particular memory came up for me. At first, she was taken aback by my laughter. But she knows me. Laughter is my love language. Humor is a part of my healing. So, she smiled and asked me to share.

I spent five days each week, ten hours every day, with a group of approximately 20 other people living, eating, exercising, playing, crying, and resting within the confines of one floor of an office building, where the treatment center was housed. There were big windows in the spaces where we spent most of our time: the primary group therapy room and the large dining area (which also served as the art space). We all came to know each other quickly, as you can imagine.

During the first week of the program, I come in one morning, put my bag down on a plush chair with a pillow that’s printed with a colorful “wheel of emotions” (yes, even the décor counsels you) in the main room, and head over to talk to a couple of other people who are already there.

“Socializing”, when we’re not in group or individual therapy, or engaged in some kind of therapeutic activity together, is awkward at first. On one hand, we’re talking about the things anyone talks to acquaintances about: someone’s cat that knocked over a bottle of olive oil that morning, a passive-aggressive coworker, or why we love (or hate or have never seen) the show The White Lotus. Then a counselor comes into the room and suddenly we’re deep in dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), sobbing in each other’s arms as we confront the darkness of our struggles.

On this particular day, I sit down, cross-legged, on the floor next to a few people. The conversation pauses, and I launch into a light story about a movie I had recently seen, happily connecting with everyone. I wrap up by saying, “And, honestly, the movie was just so horrible – it made me want to vomit!”

Um. Whoops?

Did I just say, “…made me want to vomit” to a room full of people with eating disorders, in an eating disorder treatment program?

My eyes widen, and I throw my hand over my mouth. I pause. Everyone cracks up. I realize I’m not breathing, so I exhale and laugh with everyone else.

“Oh my god. I am so sorry! Is that okay to say here?!” I wince. I’m a little bit horrified at myself and, if I’m honest, also proud to have broken some sort of seal. They all assure me it’s fine, but that it does make sense to keep an ear out for what and how I share because it could be difficult for some people in the program to hear.

I was in deep pain. I was scared to be in treatment. I was almost literally pulling myself out of bed every morning to get myself into the car and drive myself to the center every day. I had brain fog and stomach aches. I cried most evenings. But when I made that joke—and when I felt myself laugh and made others laugh as well—I knew I was still me. I knew I had the capacity to feel joy and ease, if only for the most minuscule of moments. Humor can be an essential element in confronting pain and trauma by reducing stress, releasing some damn good hormones like cortisol into our bodies, alleviating anxiety and depression, and reflecting the absurdity of life.

I am not talking about cruel jokes that feed into our cultural obsession with thinness and can fuel disordered eating. You know, the tiresome (and truly unfunny) bits from well-known comedians who joke about starvation in Hollywood or the media’s branding of anorexic bodies as “heroin chic.”

When I talk to other women about our eating disorder experiences, there’s very often laughing involved at some point in the conversation. It might only be funny to those of us who have eating disorders. Or for those of us who are farther down the recovery path than others. But a part of my own healing process over the years—not just from my eating disorders but from other traumas, navigating grief, addressing old wounds—has always been rooted in being able to find something to laugh about, even when it hurts. Humor can be a defense mechanism. It can be an auto-response that masks a fear of feeling something deeper.

I know that I can default to humor as a way of making light of an experience, or memory, or hurt that I’m not quite ready to face. But laughter is also an incredible medicine, and being able to find the absurdity in some of my more difficult or painful experiences that I’ve worked hard to face and process has helped me to reframe the story I had been telling myself about those experiences. What about you?

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