Write Your Eating Disorder (Even When It's Messy)

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When I started writing about the eating disorder I experienced at 54 years old, I was in a writing group for midlife women (led by the incredible Stephanie Sprenger at Midlife Magazine). I joined the group to restart my writing practice and because I was only a few months out of a two-month partial hospitalization program to treat my eating disorder, I was consumed with mining my life for why, how, and when my eating disorders arose.

I was out of treatment, but I was still deep in the process of healing, and I needed somewhere for this pain to go, for the dirt kicked up by the daily excavations to pile.

I wanted to make sense of everything so I could be done and move on. Can’t I build something beautiful with all of this detritus, I kept thinking, turning my trauma trash into an ode to the brilliantly wise self I am now?

I imagined I was ET – the little alien from the movie of the same name. I’d write my way into a glowing heartlight, I thought, sharing the beauty of my story about healing from anorexia and bulimia and allowing others to find their path toward recovery. I wanted everything I wrote to be cathartic, educational, and wrapped up in a bow.

I quickly realized, of course, we are not one story waiting to be told, no matter what our challenges might look like. We are made of timelines and eras and always evolving versions of ourselves. We shed our skin as our cells die and are replaced. We grow into and out of ourselves. We harden and soften and release and revive and do it all over again. I do not have a story about my eating disorders with a neat beginning, middle, and end. I am living my story every day, and I write to understand myself and my mental health, the behaviors that accompany eating disorders, and to confront the trauma I carry.

One day, I showed up to my Zoom writing group meeting with a short essay I had written about how my adult kids were reacting to me post-treatment. Should I be writing about all of this [I wave my arm around on screen, gesturing to nothing in particular], you know, my eating disorder? I ask them nervously. I feel like I am barely knee-deep in recovery and I don’t have anything wise to say – I’m still figuring this all out. They stare back at me, and I am sure they are all contemplating how to break the news that I should most definitely not be writing about my experiences just yet. Instead, one by one, they practically leap out of their little Zoom boxes to assure me that this is my life, my story, my experiences, and I get to decide what, when, and how I write about all of it. There is no should here, they tell me. This is for you to write and own. No one else gets to make that decision for you.

And here’s the other thing: if I waited until I was healed, I’d never write a damn word.

Similarly for people who are in recovery from addiction of some kind (there are varying perspectives from health care providers, researchers, and those who suffer from eating disorders about whether or not certain eating disorders are addictions or not – I won’t weigh in on that right here), many people with eating disorders feel we will always be in recovery as well. It’s part of what has felt so difficult for me throughout this process of having an eating disorder at 54 years old, going into treatment at 55 years old, and being in recovery now, as I’m about to turn 57 years old.

I thought I had recovered, healed, and left eating disorders behind when I was 20 and experienced my first eating disorder.

Sure, I spent years as an adult, decades in fact, see-sawing between disordered eating and complete eating disorder behavior. The disordered eating and relationship to exercise were my default. Eat almost nothing one day and binge eat the next. Skip dinner for weeks on end. Exercise compulsively no matter what else was happening in my life. Obsessively count calories or angrily indulge in anything and everything as a fuck-you to…well, all of it. Purge off and on and become obsessed with exercise. But to me that was, as I’ve written, simply part of who I was—it was just old conditioning and a part of my personality I had to contend with.

Since entering and completing treatment and embarking on this anthology, I have heard these same sentiments from midlife and older women who are in recovery from an eating disorder. What exactly does recovery look like? Is recovery a lifelong process of vigilance about our relationship to food, exercise, and triggers that may tip the scales back into eating disorder territory? What does compassionate vigilance look like and feel like as compared to a more white-knuckled approach? Can I talk about my recovery as being messy and jagged and uneven and bumpy? Is that recovery? What if I slip back into some of my eating disorder behaviors? And, for that matter, if I’m still having some of the thoughts that accompany my eating disorders, is that a slip also?

These are some of the authentic questions I continue to have as I explore where I am in my own recovery process. And, as the universe is wont to do, a gift arrived to help me understand more about all of this in the form of Mallary Tenore Tarpley’s new book, “Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery.” It just arrived in the mail, and I am looking forward to digging in. She was recently interviewed on NPR’s 1A, and while most of it is not necessarily centered on eating disorders among midlife and older women, they do touch on it toward the end of the interview. Still, there is so much in this interview that resonates deeply with me, and I highly recommend listening. (And I have something in the works with her that I am excited to share here soon!)

I won’t fall down the rabbit hole about perfectionism in this post but if you have an eating disorder, you are likely quite cozy with the idea. The struggle is real. And it’s in part, as Tenore Tarpley shares in her book, why this idea of a “full recovery” is so challenging for many of us. The introduction to the NPR interview calls this out: “In her book, she writes about living in this ‘middle place.’ She examines how shifting from an all-or-nothing recovery approach of her teens and early 20s to one where setbacks are expected and accepted has allowed her to live a full life while continuing to strive for progress.”

It’s this grace that I am seeking for myself. I am seeking it for you. We are human. We are messy. We are (many of us) perfectionists who want to feel and be recovered. Here is the beautiful sculpture of my new self, molded of my old pain and presented to the world: Amie, fully healed. But that isn’t real. And thankfully, those who love me don’t want that sculpture. They want to walk alongside me in my struggles and understand the jaggedness of this path.

And so, I write. I write about the uncertainty. I write about self-compassion. I write what I feel in this moment. I write what I think I understand about my eating disorders, and I wonder what I don’t yet know. I write to connect with other women with eating disorders, whether in recovery, fully healed, slipping, or somewhere in the cracks and crevices of all of it.

Living our lives as honestly as we can is the recovery process, and I’m not willing to wait.