David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
The Imperfect Eating Disorder
By DANA WALTERS, New York Times
July 26, 2009
In high school, I was a skeleton of who I am now. With pangs of hunger and a jutting rib cage, I was waiting for confidence and determination to flesh me out, fill me and protect me.
The story of eating disorders, of young girls starving themselves for the sake of perfection, is a common one, written on the bathroom walls amid the graffiti of rumors and insults. Despite its ubiquity in high school, I believed my hunger was mine alone. Only later did I discover just how truly commonplace my story was. My eating disorder did not make me special. Only curing myself would.
I grew up in Swarthmore, Pa., a town not unlike Middlebury, Vt., where I now attend school, but I still thought the substitution of the Green Mountains for the Philadelphia skyline would be just enough to drastically shift my unbalanced psyche.
But the deeply instilled sense of overwork and suicidal efficiency still flourished. In Swarthmore, it dotted the driveways of professors, lawyers and doctors, gave nourishment to the soil along the streets named after the most competitive universities in the nation, and resonated in the enthusiasm with which parents flipped through the college announcement edition of the town paper. My new environment, it turned out, was much the same.
When I arrived at Middlebury, the beautiful New England buildings screamed of the same hunger for achievement. The competition for perfection was not over. Students glowed with the masochism that drove us to fast ourselves into oblivion.
Surprisingly, I did not react by spiraling downward. Instead, I saw these new students as ghosts of my former self, their transparent qualities pieces I never wanted to resurrect.
One girl?s constant jabber about how much she ate reminded me of my old false lies of fullness. Complaints of distended blubber on stick-thin girls reminded of my old internal fun-house mirror. More than ever before, I was in the immediate and constant presence of the disordered mentality that had stolen two years of my life, but in a different way. Instead of its befuddled existence within my own mind, I saw its ugly manipulation for what it was.
Living among these ruins, I renewed my devotion to a better life. When people ask me where I go to school, I say, ?Swarthmore in Vermont.? But where Swarthmore is what I used to be, where I never noticed the beauty around me because I was too busy counting calories, at Middlebury I count the roses.
In the end, the location was unimportant. This newfangled vigor I feel ? some call it real living ? was a result of my readiness for transformation. I had tricked myself into believing that college would flip the world upside-down, allowing me to become a new person. I did grow and I am stronger now, but not because this new land fixed me. Instead, college meant the opportunity to believe I could change, even if the air was still pretty much the same. No matter the reason, I breathe better here than I ever did before.
By DANA WALTERS, New York Times
July 26, 2009
In high school, I was a skeleton of who I am now. With pangs of hunger and a jutting rib cage, I was waiting for confidence and determination to flesh me out, fill me and protect me.
The story of eating disorders, of young girls starving themselves for the sake of perfection, is a common one, written on the bathroom walls amid the graffiti of rumors and insults. Despite its ubiquity in high school, I believed my hunger was mine alone. Only later did I discover just how truly commonplace my story was. My eating disorder did not make me special. Only curing myself would.
I grew up in Swarthmore, Pa., a town not unlike Middlebury, Vt., where I now attend school, but I still thought the substitution of the Green Mountains for the Philadelphia skyline would be just enough to drastically shift my unbalanced psyche.
But the deeply instilled sense of overwork and suicidal efficiency still flourished. In Swarthmore, it dotted the driveways of professors, lawyers and doctors, gave nourishment to the soil along the streets named after the most competitive universities in the nation, and resonated in the enthusiasm with which parents flipped through the college announcement edition of the town paper. My new environment, it turned out, was much the same.
When I arrived at Middlebury, the beautiful New England buildings screamed of the same hunger for achievement. The competition for perfection was not over. Students glowed with the masochism that drove us to fast ourselves into oblivion.
Surprisingly, I did not react by spiraling downward. Instead, I saw these new students as ghosts of my former self, their transparent qualities pieces I never wanted to resurrect.
One girl?s constant jabber about how much she ate reminded me of my old false lies of fullness. Complaints of distended blubber on stick-thin girls reminded of my old internal fun-house mirror. More than ever before, I was in the immediate and constant presence of the disordered mentality that had stolen two years of my life, but in a different way. Instead of its befuddled existence within my own mind, I saw its ugly manipulation for what it was.
Living among these ruins, I renewed my devotion to a better life. When people ask me where I go to school, I say, ?Swarthmore in Vermont.? But where Swarthmore is what I used to be, where I never noticed the beauty around me because I was too busy counting calories, at Middlebury I count the roses.
In the end, the location was unimportant. This newfangled vigor I feel ? some call it real living ? was a result of my readiness for transformation. I had tricked myself into believing that college would flip the world upside-down, allowing me to become a new person. I did grow and I am stronger now, but not because this new land fixed me. Instead, college meant the opportunity to believe I could change, even if the air was still pretty much the same. No matter the reason, I breathe better here than I ever did before.
