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I looked down at my bare feet.
“I can’t go anywhere without shoes,” I shot back.
“They’ll be returned to you for the trip if you eat breakfast,” she said.
I wanted to eat it so I could go to the shelter, but ED’s voice was too strong.
It wasn’t until I was in graduate school, enrolled in an eating disorder treatment class and readingBiting the Hand That Starves You, that I finally learned why. When it comes to eating disorders, ED’s voices typically fall into one of two categories—a mean girl or an abusive partner.
The mean girl constantly criticizes how you look and act, letting you know you’re not good enough but making you believe that if you’re self-disciplined enough to lose weight, you’ll finally be accepted by the popular crowd. If you ever dare question her, she lashes out at you, reminding you why you’re a worthless reject, which perpetuates your self-loathing and solidifies the delusion that the only way out of your hell is by listening to her.
Then there’s the abusive partner who at first appears like a comforting friend, telling you seductive lies about how he’ll always be there for you as long as you swear allegiance to him by following his orders to lose weight. If you dare stray, he tears into you, blaming you for being dumb and undisciplined. And if you ever dare recognize his voice as abusive, he deftly shifts gears, returning to a comforting tone, tellingyou he understands you, unlike everyone else, using a similar tactic to what an abusive partner might do if you question whether you should leave them after they hit you.
Both ED voices—the mean girl and the abuser—have the same goal: to isolate the eating disorder sufferer from their loved ones and support system so they have complete control over them. My ED voice fell into the abusive partner category. After Mom died, I felt nobody understood me the way she had until he came along, telling me lies that he did.
When Dr. Larsen said that I needed to eat breakfast if I wanted to go to the animal shelter, ED told me that she was trying to manipulate me and that if she really cared about me, she would let me go without making me eat anything, reminding me that he was the only one on my side.
“Ensure,” I told Iris, who was still holding my plate of eggs.
“Are you sure?” Dr. Larsen asked me.
ED was enraged—how dare she challenge him, who had my best interests at heart?
“What part ofnodon’t you understand!?” I asked furiously.
I stood up, accidentally bumping into Iris, who dropped my plate of food. Yellow bits of egg flew in the air and landed on the ground, leaving oil marks on the wooden floor. There were no ceramic plate pieces to pick up like there had been at home when I threw plates of food on the ground. These outbursts were common at Better Horizons, so meals were served on plasticware.
“Well, then, Ensure it is,” Dr. Larsen said stoically.
Later that day, Emily and I were in the living room tasked with doing a writing exercise in our journals while the other girls were at the dog shelter.
“They’re so weak,” Emily said. “Can you imagine choosing a dog over ED?” she asked.
I didn’t respond. I’d been ignoring her for a few days, mad because I was sure she had ratted me out when I tried to run away.
“Hello?” she said.
I still didn’t respond.
“Hello—” she said again when her face suddenly turned beet red, almost purple. She started coughing uncontrollably and couldn’t stop. I’d gotten so used to the plastic feeding tube hanging out of her nose that I hardly noticed it anymore, but she was frantically pointing to it.
“It’s clogged! It’s clogged!” she shouted between coughs. “I need help! Get the nurse!”
I ran out of the dining room to the nurses’ station, telling the nurse there was a problem with Emily’s feeding tube. She grabbed a syringe filled with liquid and quickly ran back to the living room as I followed her from behind.
While the nurse connected the syringe to the middle of the feeding tube to flush out whatever had clogged it, I looked over at Emily, whose eyes were bulging with fear. She was not the portrait of assured confidence and swagger as ED had made her and me believe.
I stared at my bare feet, thinking about the other girls who were probably at the shelter by now, petting the dogs, while I was stuck at the treatment center with a nurse, Emily, and her feeding tube.
For the first time since I’d arrived at Better Horizons, I heard a whisper of a voice inside of me,myvoice, a voice that dared to question if ED really understood me … before he quickly shut it down.
CHAPTER16
“IDON’T KNOW HOWto piece together everything I’ve learned over the last day,” I tell Eddie once we’re back at his place. “I keep hoping something will click so I can figure out what happened.”
We spoke to a few more neighbors on Margot’s old block in Malibu. An older couple that lived across from Margot echoed what her elderly neighbor said, that Margot was in a turbulent relationship with an older man who appeared to be using her for her money—a man who sounded a lot like the guy Joan said Mom was seeing. But none of Margot’s neighbors knew about specific therapists she saw or could directly connect her to Mom.
“This may sound silly, but would making a list help?” he asks.
