So I walk in, sit down on that leather, rotten-plastic smelling chair, and I scrutinize this doctor. She’s a wheat blond, the plain face of an intelligent woman, and she looks like the sort of lady that flosses every morning. A floppy body, she looks like she’s getting a little chubby, her stomach slightly bulges from her ruffled light green blouse. Menopause will hit her hard. It's not that noticeable, but when you have a body obsession you tend to notice these things. She looks at me, and smiles all wide like she’s so glad to have me here to bitch.
“How are you Marieanne”
“Fine”
“Would you care for some peppermints?” She mentions towards the glass bowl of peppermint candies. They’re red and white and they look like they’re staring at me. Sad, pathetic googly eyes.
“No”
“Now I understand that you were requested here because your classmate found you vomiting in the girl’s bathroom?”
“Yes”
“Do you do this often”
“Sometimes”
I couldn’t ever be anorexic, what else could I do? Anorexic people tend to get squishy soft stomachs. When I imagine that I imagine their stomachs rotting like soft bread soaked in milk, that gives me enough of a reason to eat.
I’m 5’4, and I weigh any where from 128lb to 145.3lb. But I don’t really care about my weight, its what I see in the mirror that kills. I have a strong body, I could take it if you beat me with a two-by-four, I could take it if you break your fist on me. I’m as strong and stubborn as an ox. I’m not small enough to be called petite, and definitely not big enough to be called fat. But I think being an In-between is the worst. When you're In-between, you are constantly reminded of everything that could be changed, that could go wrong. Your stomach could get flabbier, your hips wider, your legs jiggle more. You could grow.
When I stand naked in front of the mirror, I pick out these things. I let my hands wander over my body, slow over the curves, tender over the angles. I like holding my hips, feeling the hard steady bone underneath like a promise. But then there's the doughy plains of my stomach, over all of my body, the fat that round off the tighter path of skin over bone. Sometimes, when I get really into it, I grab my stomach and squeeze. I'd wish I could just cut off the excess parts of me, the ugly fat off of me, so that I could become happier. The next day there would be red indents of my nails, and tender blood bruises like little crumpled roses.
But as much as I hate my body, I have no control. I’m a compulsive eater, I’m an emotional eater. I have this habit where once I start I cant stop. Some people smoke, some people use razors. This is my way of killing myself. Using what I hate to kill the hate for myself. That makes sense right?
“Marieanne, you do know that this is unhealthy? Though it's very common in young girls of your age.”
I nod and force my face in that interested mode. She shifts herself, uncrosses her legs and folds her fingers and lean in towards me. I can see a fading blond hair hanging off her green shirt, I can see how the skin around her neck is loose and flapping. She is aging.
“Why do you do this?”
I almost laugh. I swallow it and I stare blankly at her, and drift off for a second there. I remember when I was pregnant. I’m 17 and I’ve been pregnant before. It almost feels like a lie when I say I’ve been pregnant. I never felt pregnant, there was just the foreign idea of something growing inside me, like a cancer. And I kept on living. I didn’t have the baby, I had it aborted. It was simple. I had sex with a sleazy boyfriend with a roomy backseat. I got pregnant, two months into it I got the little pills and it was done. I kept wondering whether it could scream or not. Screaming in this little peepy voice as my body washed it away. I don’t remember much of those days, I slept a lot, and I ate a lot, then I slept some more. I don’t even remember my dreams. Next time I got my period I celebrated with 2 large vanilla coconut milkshakes.
“Why do you do this?” She repeated, apparently she thought it was some break through, original question that was supposed to open up my eyes. That pissed me off. I wanted to explain to her that I knew more about myself than she could ever diagnose me with. I wanted to explain to her the relief of hugging that cool ceramic seat. I wanted to explain to her that wonderful feeling of lying down and holding my hipbones and feeling myself grow smaller and smaller with each breath. I wanted to explain to her how good it feels to be empty. Instead I say
“I don’t know” This was the right answer, because you could tell she was dying to educate my ignorant teenage mind.
“Well, Marieanne, some teenagers are struggling to find control in their lives, and many teenage girls find it in food, this is an escape from problems with their parents, their school, their friends….”
I sit back and relax myself, I knew all this shit, we’ve probably read the same books. I nod at her as if this is new and exciting, and think about how stupid kids are, adults too. Somewhere around here, I realized that this lady was nothing more than another processed adult stamped into an office and labeled physiatrist. The stuff she was gonna spew out would’ve been no different than if I had this talk from my math teacher. I inwardly sighed. The system gets everyone. Those communists.
“…and of course the media doesn’t help. It’s millions upon millions of dollars used to sell. But you have to realize that the celebrities on TV are not that perfect….”
Yeah, yeah. I knew all this. Every time I turn on the TV, or flip through a magazine I see the media’s propaganda. But it really works, it does make me feel shit about myself, seeing the glitter, glamored, wispy women, even porn stars, the dirty dirty sluts of the female world, even they are skinny and desired. You watch these women, searching for a bit of yourself in their all consuming beauty. Maybe they have the same hair color as you. Or they also like crab ravioli. You also hate them, picking out each of their flaws and holding on to it as solid proof that you are so much better than them. Eventually you start noticing it in real life. I walk through the hallways comparing and analyzing bodies, calculating how much different I am from the slender frame of the track star next to me, totally trashing my self esteem. I compress and destroy myself like a junkyard crusher. It's a feeling of being pressing and flattened and battling inside. A storming, a flooding, an overdose.
Sometimes I get really fucking sick of feeling like burnt up shit all the time, it really gets tiring.  I may hate myself, but I tend to scorn my high school society, I mean kids are so stupid. I realize that I might be no different, I’ve been stupid, and I’ve done some pretty dumb stuff, but I still cant help but feel so much wiser than my fellow company when I hear some kid bitch about how they hate their life because their parents won't let them have the car for a night, or how I hear the scraggy, skinny bitches ragg on a girl for her granny underwear. And most kids are the sort that have no lives, yet they run around making up problems, and pretending that they know something wise about the world when really its just what the idealistic American values have been directing them their whole lives. Yes kids! You are special and each of you is unique. You hold such value in the vast vast universe.
Sara-lee Jacoblyn, is the girl who found me heaving my guts out. She’s one of those girls who wear the fuzzy pink sweaters, the cling-to-the-crotch jeans, and whatever ugly designer shoes are in season. 50 dollar hair cuts, and she gets her hair cut a lot. She’s the sort of stupid where she’d bawl over how “painful” it is for her to break up with her boyfriend of 3 weeks. Luckily for her and unluckily for me, she found me with my head down a toilet in the 4th stall of the girls bathroom.
It was a good day that day. It was a good day because I was feeling skinny, I had eaten a healthy breakfast of tofu and banana, and at lunch I hadn’t stolen my friend’s curly fries nor bought those giant killer cookies. I was wearing a tight shirt that stretched over my stomach, that was my idea of dressed up, and I had done 200 crunches the night before so I had that taunt ache in my abs. I loved that sort of pain, it made me feel so good and thin. When I hit food’s class 8th period, then it all went down hill. We were making muffins in food’s class, and I just cant resist muffins. Since we were the last class of the day, we got to make the extra batter. There was blueberry muffin, chocolate chip muffin, banana nut muffin…it was a muffin buffet. I was in muffin heaven, sugary, fatty bliss. And because of that once self destruct characteristic, I lost it. After that the day turned into a bad day, you know it’s a bad day when you feel shitty enough to go and puke up in the school’s bathrooms.
One thing you need to know about me, I’m not bulimic. I’m not bulimic because I don’t use throwing up as a way to lose weight. I know how bad all that shit is for you. I’m just obsessed with bodies, I constantly worry over how big I am, how much percentage of fat I’ll get from eating this or that. I exercise and I try to eat healthy, but since I’m also a compulsive eater, most times it clashes. I mean I can sit down and eat a whole tube of Pringles, I’d be miserable and guilty after the first half, but I don’t stop. I only throw up when I’ve eaten far too much, and I can almost feel the layers of fat swallowing my body. At that point I get so disgusted with myself I have to purge it up. Binge and purge. Worrying over your body is a religion of some sort, when you eat too much it’s a heavy sin, but once you puke it up it feels like a confession your soul is clean again, and your mind feels lighter. So sometimes I just binge because I know that I’m just gonna purge it back up. There’s a peace of pigging out when you know you’ll get a second chance soon. I love the feeling of emptiness afterwards, it makes me feel so beautiful. So back to the point, I’m not fucking bulimic.
Well, I got a pass and I went to the bathroom for my confessing, it felt so dirty, knowing my face was where some stranger’s ass had been before. That only made me feel more disgusted at myself. So sometime while I was regurgitating apple cinnamon flavored vomit, Sara-lee walks in and hears my gagging. She barges through my stall and finds me choking on my fingers. Fuck the shitty bathrooms in public school. The damn lock never works. Of course she makes a whole big piss about it, pretending she’s so worried about me. “Oh my god Marieanne!? What are you doing?! Are you throwing up? Are you ok? Should I get someone?” I try to play it off that I was sick, but I knew she’d never settle for something like that, and she didn’t. She turned me in to the nurse, and they labeled me as bulimic teen. That was probably the greatest highlight of her small town life, that fucking skankwhore. In 40 years, she’ll be sitting at an office with ugly walls, with growing flab on her belly, playing physiatrist to some agonsty teen. She’ll be recounting the heroic tale of when she was in high school, how she rescued her best friend with an eating disorder by making the “hardest” decision of her life, which would be to get them help or something. This will be the glorified version of my story, coming from Sara-lee’s over dramatic mouth.
Remembering that day gets me heated, and that damn doctor isn’t really helping. I reach out and I grab a red and white peppermint and I unwrap it. I had to pull the plastic because it was stuck to the candy like it had been melted. It tasted half stale, but I crunch it down and count to 30 before I swipe another one.
“….so I hope you understand how dangerous this is Marieanne…”
“I know, I don’t do it much, I was just experimenting you know? A couple of friends of mine do it and they tell me about it all the time.” I was lying through my fresh mint teeth. I sorta liquefy my face and give her that ‘I’m just a dumb confused kid’ face. She falls for it.
“Well, I can understand that, you’re at a very influential time right now.” At this point I realize that I’m sort of hungry, and that those stale peppermints are tasting pretty good, so I grab another while bopping my head along with her.
“ You know I’m just going to let you go today Marieanne. You’re a good kid and I hope that you’ve learned something today. I’ll just be checking up on you once and a while….” I knew this session was over, and successfully evaded. I warm up towards her, and make her feel like she’s made a difference in my life. " It was nice talking to you. I feel so much better about myself now!"
Then we shake hands, I sneak a handful of those peppermints, and I’m out.

The first thing I do is I scarf down the candy, feeling it leave a cool trail down my throat and land hot in the pit of my stomach. Then I go out for lunch at Wendy’s, I get a giant taco salad, and a junior bacon cheeseburger and I eat in my car. As I was eating, I was kinda replaying the past hour’s conversation in my head, and that stupid question, “Why do you do it” came up again. Boy repetitiveness really works. So I dig out a pen and some scrap paper and I started making a list.
#1. Because porn stars aren’t fat.
#2. Because it’s healthier--I guess
#3. Because then I could stop comparing myself to every body better than me
#4. Because athletes aren’t fat.
#5. Because nobody likes a fat Marieanne .
#6. Because Jesus wasn’t fat
#7. Because I’d be happier.
I sort of got a kick out of most of the list, because I was rejoicing in how clever I can be been when my stomach’s well feed. Then it hit me, all the pounding obsessions, all the endless worrying, all the calculating and degrading myself, all the crash and burn dieting, all the broken promises to myself, all the skipped lunches, all the times I’ve stood in front of the mirror feeling unsatisfied, all the exercise-crazed evenings, all the binging and the purging, all the battles between my stomach and my self-control, all the guilty downs and the brief ups…it was all simply because I wanted to be beautiful.
After that I just sat around feeling depressed and lonely, I didn’t really know why though. I kinda blamed the psychiatrist for making me feel this way, then I blamed the school because they made me go to her, then I blamed Sara-lee for having such a big mouth and turning me in, then I blamed my food’s class for having muffins, then I blamed TV for broadcasting such beautiful women, then I blamed my mother for always telling me I was too fat, then I blamed myself for being weak and stupid.
So I did the only thing I knew how, I revved up the car, and drove to Steak N’ Shake and I ordered a large coconut vanilla milkshake. It tasted so good and cool smoothing down my wounded throat, so sweet and creamy and loving that I almost cried. In fact I did, I just sat there and let the tears leak as I swallowed down the most delicious thing in the world.