Excerpt: Bones

Anorexia and bulimia don’t care about the food. They don’t necessarily care about the weight, either. They don’t care who you are; they don’t care what you are. All an eating disorder cares about is that you can’t handle your problems, because then it gets to step in and handle them for you in the most self-destructive way possible.

Like most addictive and some compulsive behaviors, eating disorders are a grand oxymoron. In order to feed the beasts of anorexia and bulimia, it is necessary to hurt yourself more and more, over and over, until something ultimately gives way. Either it gets caught in time and you begin the long and arduous process of learning to overcome what has been controlling you, or the eating disorder wins and you die. There is no third option. Either way, the disorder can no longer sustain itself. If it wins, there is no longer a body to torment; and if you win, it has to fight against whatever newfound strength you have, and if you’re lucky the most it will ever gain is the occasional episode of backsliding.

If you’re lucky, you will continue to get better. There will be more days where the number on the scale doesn’t disappoint you, when what you see in the mirror doesn’t haunt your thoughts and influence what you put in your mouth all day long. There will be days when you grab lunch from your former favorite restaurant or go out to dinner with your friends and not spend the whole time worrying about how many calories are in what you’re eating and how many laxatives you’re going to have to take to make up for it. There may even be a time when you decide to treat yourself to a food you haven’t eaten in ages and feel no guilt for doing so.

But there will never be a day when you wake up and think to yourself It’s over, I’m all better now. There is no “all better” when it comes to eating disorders. They are demons that can never be fully exorcised, dark shadows which remain attached to you for the rest of your life. You may not see the shadow or the reflection of your particular disorder for a very long time, may even believe that you are somehow a rare and lucky person who has, in fact, managed to leave the demon behind, but it is always there, lurking. The shadow will show itself when the lighting is just right; the demon will rear its ugly head at the moment you are most vulnerable to attack. Anorexia and bulimia have ways of settling themselves into the dark cracks of your mind, of wrapping themselves around your insecurities and negative thoughts, and making them their own. Every time you revisit those thoughts and those places, your eating disorder will be there, waiting for you.