Meet Olivia

This has been the single most difficult blog entry for me to write to date.  In my effort to shed light on how one becomes open and vulnerable to the insidious promises of Anorexia Nervosa, I feel compelled to honor my promise in my opening blog post, to choose honesty over decorum, to show the parts that aren't pretty or dignified. But real.

One day early in my first round of treatment at Mercy Hospital's New England Eating Disorder (NEED) Program, I was listening to a young woman who has Anorexia Nervosa (Binge Type) explain that "Ed" was really loud over the weekend and that she couldn't make him shut up.  The young woman is a starting center for her college basketball team but she is in this program with me because her coach and Dr. both told her she can no longer play due to her extremely low weight and because of her last two suicide attempts, still freshly visible on her arms.

"Ed" was telling her to restrict all weekend, even though she was getting close to discharge and to her healthy weight.  Practicing with the team was on the table for her in the next weeks as long as she could maintain her weight.  I wondered to myself who this jerk, "Ed" was... her Father? Brother? Boyfriend?  And, why on Earth would he be telling her to restrict?  It made no sense to me.

Later, when I met with my therapist in the program for the first time, she explained to me that the behaviors of our Eating Disorders start out for many of us, as ways of coping with something unbearable in our lives.  Later, they take on lives of their own and the disordered thoughts become our way of thinking and we are completely overtaken by them, often unable to distinguish between the disease's and our own wills.

She drew two circles, one on top of the other.  The first circle was the "me" that I used to be, with normal eating patterns and a healthy attitude towards food and exercise.  The other circle, which she drew over the "me" circle, was my Eating Disorder.  We had become so enmeshed that the Eating Disorder thoughts became my thoughts.  One important goal of recovery then, was to eventually disentangle myself from the Eating Disorder circle so that it was a separate entity from me again, and I could eventually eliminate it from my life.

She went on to explain that many people found it useful to give their Eating Disorder a name so that it had its own "identity" to help me recognize my thoughts from "It's" thoughts.  Before this moment, I was frighteningly and genuinely concerned that I might be crazy.  Having heard this "voice" in my head for so long and never telling a soul for fear that I was losing control and that others would certainly concur if I told them, I lived 4.5 long years in it's hell of twisted, painful and daily, self-loathing derisions.   After the suggestion from a therapist that I might try naming my Eating Disorder, I was certain that I was only a short distance now from that special room with the padding on the walls and that as I had, even the medical community had given up on me.

I wish that the story of naming "Olivia" was more memorable or exciting.  I hadn't really bought into the idea and honestly, felt a little silly doing it, so I asked the group to name it for me.  (This was not a condition of treatment... but I was willing to try anything to start feeling better so I took the suggestion).  Somehow, they arrived at the name and it stuck.

Like an abusive partner, my relationship with Olivia started 4.5 years ago all hearts and flowers.  Abusive partners are cunning and charming.  They draw their victims to them when we are at our lowest, willing to try anything to make the pain of what was happening in our lives, loosen its grips.

"Olivia" swooped in at that moment, promising that she knew how to stop the bleeding of my soul.

I was ready for her.  Open to the salvation she could deliver.

When she arrived,  my life was becoming unrecognizable to me, due in large measure, to my misguided weakening to the guileful encouragement of a poisonous man outside of my marriage, paying attention to my transforming figure, which I mistook for the love I craved.

You see, inherent in all extra-marital endeavors, I have come to learn, is a lack of foundation, trust and genuineness.  What I know now to be truth is that no action required to take place in darkness and deceit could ever lead to true intimacy or fulfillment.  

What I have also learned is that many people find themselves in situations that they never dreamed they were capable of.  I used to be one of those people.  Full of judgement and ready to scoff at the bad decisions of others, blaming them for their weaknesses.

Now I understand when people make decisions that hurt others.  I understand the faulty thought-processes that lead them there and make it plausible to do what others would consider unthinkable.

I don't judge people anymore.

In the beginning, Olivia was subtle, worming her way into my brain through the doors left open by a yearning to rectify the gap between what I valued (marriage, family, truth) and the unimaginable opposite actions I was engaged in (infidelity, lies and deceit).

"If you run a second time today it will help with the anxiety you are feeling about what is going on in your life.  You can make those feelings go away if you run more.  It's a healthy way to deal with your stress".

"You have to be the thinnest in the room to be special.  To matter.  I can help you get there and look at how much better you feel when you do what I tell you ".

"Look at what you can do.  I can help you be smaller, more perfect than anyone.  I can help you feel better.  Just do what I tell you".

This worked for awhile.  But as time went on, Olivia became more demanding.  My life was spinning out of control as my deceit became exposed to the light.

"You are disgusting.  You are weak when you don't listen to me.  You need me to get through this. No one else cares."

"I can help the pain go away.  Just listen to me.  Don't eat breakfast.  You are fat and disgusting and no one is going to love you that way"  (This was one of Olivia's favorite lines right up to my last ICU hospitalization this past May.   It hits me where it hurts.  She knew it).

Then, as my marriage began to unravel and my family and community became aware of the terrible decisions I had made, Olivia's quest for the ultimate cure for my life began.

"You can eat one meal today as long as you purge it after.  Make sure it is small and easy to bring up. I promise you that you will feel better."

"If you drink wine tonight, you will see that your hunger will stop.  Do whatever it takes to make it stop.  You are weak and fat.  Everyone knows what you did.  You have to be smaller.  You don't deserve to take up the amount of space that you do.  Throw.up.now"

"Yes, Olivia", I said.

To this day I remember with agonizing detail the first time I gave in to her demand to over-exercise, restrict my food intake to one meal a day, purging, and abusing alcohol at night.   I was both appalled and amazed at the ease with which I could make my own body betray me.  How I (Olivia) could take what was left in my life that was still good (nutrition and exercise) and use it against myself for her agenda.

I dutifully stood before the toilet.  Stuck two fingers down my throat and instinctively wiggled them around to cause the gag reflex to invoke the kind of violence within myself that when it strikes normally as the flu, makes people stay home from work/school for its discomfort.

When I was certain that I brought it all up,  I looked in the mirror and could see the damage I had done emerge instantly.

My eyes were bloodshot, my glands were swollen.  My face was puffed out.  But that wasn't the worst of it.

I felt better.

The calming that ensued for the next few hours, hunger subsided, anxiety and Olivia quiet, was like a fix for a junkie.  I was instantly hooked by this way to make the pain stop.  Even if only for awhile.

The next morning, I woke to a disturbing reality.  I had strained so much to forcefully expel the food that Olivia deemed my enemy, that where my eyes were once white,  a bright and demonic red had filled them.

The image looking back at me so startling, that I had to be sure that I was actually awake and not still dreaming.  I was frightened by it.

Looking back, I should have seen the symbolism so evident to me now.  Food was not my enemy.

It was Olivia, now inside of me, looking back at me that morning.

I quickly googled "red eyes from vomiting" for a reasonable explanation more palatable for my family and the children I worked with as the K-8 librarian than what actually caused them.

I found one.  I told everyone that the freakish look that I now was stuck with for the next two to three weeks was caused by the strain of attempting pull-ups for the first time in the gym.

To my astonishment, everyone bought it.

It got easier over time to bring up the food that Olivia forced me to expel from my body anytime I was given to eating it.

My eating disorder began the day I crossed the line of infidelity.

My marriage ended and I moved away from the place where I could no longer stand the haunting.  The shame.  The real and imagined pointing and sneering as I attended my childrens' sporting events.  "Home-wrecker".  "Bad Mother".  "Selfish Bitch".

Please understand.  I was not a victim in this.  I have owned my part in how my marriage ended and take responsibility for my part in it.  But in so doing, I also took on all of the judgement and guilt that people who once loved or respected me, heaped onto my already burdened soul, without regard for the heart that was breaking quietly behind their view.

I moved away from the area, but all of the pain came with me, packed in between my belongings, and hopes for healing, with Olivia carrying whatever didn't fit in my boxes.

She turned up the heat.

"You are a bad mother.  You left your life where you should be.  Where you should stay and endure the pain.  You have to be a perfect mother.  Everyone knows now that you aren't."

"You don't deserve to eat.  Purging and exercising are good but you don't deserve to eat.  You don't deserve the space you are taking up.  Be small.  Restrict."

After purging two and sometimes three (and sometimes more) times per day for 2 years, my body began to turn on me.  What was once so easy to do, bringing such perfected and predictable calm to my burdened life, now began to elude me.  At first I thought it was a fluke.  Just some strange malfunction in the reversal I had trained my body to so efficiently execute at my (Olivia's) command.

But the task became a chore.  Surely my body's attempt at survival.  To try and take back some semblance of calm, a fleeting moment that my healthy self perhaps recognized that I (Olivia) was trying to kill myself slowly, and its attempt to halt the demise.

"You're such a failure you can't even throw up right anymore.  What's wrong with you!"  You have to eat less.  If you can't throw it up, you have to eat less.  We are getting so close to your goal.  You can't stop now.  You are so fat and disgusting to look at.  You don't deserve to eat." 

Later, after restricting with great success, and purging anything I might have eaten for another two years, failing at any attempt to start or maintain a relationship, exercising to the extreme of exhaustion, unable to think clearly anymore for a lack of nutrition, Olivia added,

"You don't deserve to live".

And I believed her.  That's a story for another day.

What I now believe, after being a slave to Olivia's daily and relentless noise , is that I gave her the power over me.  I created this "other" and then later even gave her an identity by affixing a name, further inviting her to stay and be a part of my life.

Was this helpful to my recovery?  I'm honestly not sure.  While it probably helped me to separate from the eating disorder itself at times, I think it also distracted me (and others who tried to help me) and took valuable energy to "fight" Olivia.  "Fight" my eating disorder that I could have used to build my healthy self instead.

Fight.Fight.Fight. Until I was exhausted and defeated from the fight, and wanted to give in.

I almost did.  On the way to treatment for the second time, Olivia was telling me,

"You are not going back there.  Drive off the road.  You will not go back to treatment where they are just going to make you eat and get fat.  You will be miserable again.  You will lose all we have worked for.  You are at the lowest weight you have ever been.  You are special now."

"You can do things other people aren't willing to.  They admire you for being able to have so much self-discipline.  When you start to eat again, you are going to be fat and disgusting and miserable. No one will ever love you."

"Drive off the road".

I didn't drive off the road.  I reached out to a person who had seen me at my lowest.  Whom I had let Olivia drive out of my life with mean and hateful behavior.  I don't know how or where I got the strength to do so, but I am certain that a Power Greater than myself had a hand it it.

And this person, who had every right to ignore my cry for help, who had every right not to respond, told me that Olivia was trying to kill me.  That it is her end-game.  That I had the strength to beat this and that in spite of all that had happened, he believed in me.

I made it to Mercy that morning.  Determined.  Dedicated to healing.  Scared as hell to be back at square one again.

It was here that I was able to finally enlist the support of my family, including  my daughters and my mother, who I essentially left out of the process the first time around.  It was here that I was able, in spite of (or because of) all I had lost and still stood to lose, that I started to understand.

It was here that both of my daughters expressed both verbally and with their support, that they had forgiven me.  Long ago, my ex-husband had forgiven me.  My own family had forgiven me.  It was time for me to forgive myself.

It is not an accident that my daughter's high school graduation occurred the day after I was released from the Partial Residential program at Mercy, into the less-restrictive Intensive Out-Patient program.

Everything happens for a reason.  This was no exception.  I told my counselor at Mercy that my eating disorder began in Carrabassett Valley, and that I intended to leave it there after the festivities were over.

And that is exactly what I did.  In a very un-ceremonial quiet prayer to forgive myself for what I had done and to dedicate myself to healing this wound.

Once I said this prayer, I fell into the deep and peaceful sleep that had been eluding me for years.  A sign that it was the time.  It was the right thing to do.

Now, as I have reached a point in my recovery where I have never been before, with more days of choosing to honor my healthy self over my eating disorder self, it is time to say good-bye to Olivia.

What I believe truly, is that it is time for me to take back the power I gave to Olivia because it is mine to take.  It is time to tip the balance of power, with all that I have gained (quite literally) back to my healthy self.

It is time to put Olivia to rest.

Not violently, not ceremonially, but deliberately, as one who has a broken leg once requiring crutches to aid in its healing puts them away when she no longer needs something to do the work that her own healthy self can once again take on.