By Katy Westlund
Winter 2011 Kaplan Award Winner
It takes a lot of guts to stick your fingers down your own throat three times a day. But it is not bravery by any means. She calls it cowardly. But she lost control of herself almost seven years ago.
She has a beautiful name. But here she’ll be known as “Audrey.” Audrey has a beautiful face, but any description would just sound like a good try. “A good try,” is what she calls her attempts to stop. Stopping, according to her would mean finding herself again. But again, she lost control of herself almost seven years ago, which she says “is a pretty damn long time when you are only 21.”
Seven years of a 21-year long life. That is one-third. One-third of all the meals she has consumed have ended up in a toilet.
It started in high-school for Audrey. Sophomore year came and with it a boat-load of friends with C-cups and belly-button rings. Her insecurity sadly stemmed from her involuntary nonconformity. “Small boobs and a big butt,” she says, “not hot by normal standards.” The obvious solution to 15-year-old Audrey was to get skinny.
From there it was a rollercoaster of pounds. She binged and purged, gained and lost, smiled and cried. A few of her friends knew, but besides tiptoeing around trying to encourage healthy eating, they didn’t do much.
She doesn’t like to talk about it but when she does she calls it her “problem.” What’s sad is that it isn’t her problem, it’s ours. Our media-conscious turned self-conscious society’s big fat problem. When she blames herself for her insecurities, I blame Cosmo and “E.” When she throws down some french fries and a Dr. Pepper and then runs to the nearest restroom, I thrown down my “People” glorifying Fergie’s glam gams and horrifying Jessica’s un-beach-worthy body.
She has become two people. The guilt-free Audrey who becomes guilty Audrey. Hyde becomes Jekyll. One minute living life to the fullest through a filled bowl of ice-cream, and then feeling full and filling the toilet.
Now her daily life is a continuous stream of promising herself that she will stop and then starting up again two days later. She says that it seems impossible that it will ever end at this point because she has developed such a terrible eating pattern. She binges on whatever she wants because she knows “it doesn’t matter, it’ll just come up later anyways.” The problem with that is when she gives quitting another go, she is unable to control the amount that she eats and then that leads to feeling guilty which in turn leads back to the restroom.
Being skinny is no longer the goal. Now the goal is to keep from becoming fat. I asked her why she chose to be bulimic and not anorexic. She says that people who have anorexia are in control of their situation to a point. They can choose when they eat and when they don’t eat. “I have no control anymore,” she says. “I eat and then I throw up. I can’t not eat, and when I do eat, I can’t not throw up.”
She tells me that hiding it from her parents is a top priority. “I’m less worried about them being mad and more worried about them trying to help. It’s my problem. I have to deal with it.” She says that she taught herself how to throw up quietly so no one can hear her in the act. She also says that she has become meticulous about cleaning up after herself. She even goes as far as wiping the inside rim of the toilet so that any splatter can’t be found during a later cleaning. That is how she has been able to get away with it all these years.
The loudmouth in me can’t help but say “Haven’t you figured out by now that you haven’t been able to solve this by yourself?” She answers that question with a few minutes of the silent treatment.
She has been caught. Multiple times. But Audrey has a long list of excuses to use when this happens. “I have a 24 hour flu. I am hung-over. I ate something bad at lunch.” It goes on. Because she is one of many people with bulimia who are what people would call “normal sized,” no one ever suspects that she is lying.
When she thinks that someone has heard her throwing up, she has an act that she puts on to avoid any suspicion. She will come into the room pretending to look sick. Then she will tell anyone who will listen that she just threw up and it was probably that bad egg-salad that she ate earlier. She talks about it too much, carrying on about how sick she feels or how she thought the mayonnaise tasted funny. I think about how a normal person would handle a food poisoning situation. I realize that they wouldn’t. No one who just felt sick enough to throw up wants to talk about the act of throwing up or what made them throw up. I guess she thinks that people will be less likely to jump to the assumption that she has a disease if she tells them that she ate a bad egg for lunch.
She has become incredibly aware, both at home and out. The interesting part is that in her normal home or school environment where she knows exactly how and where to get away with her actions, she feels less comfortable, than throwing up in, lets say, a Costco bathroom.
“How so?” I ask.
“If some random person catches me at Costco, they have only heard me throw up once and they are probably only checking to see if I need a glass of water,” she says. “If someone catches me at home or school, there goes my get-out-of-jail-free card. Then I can never be caught again because people who know me will catch on.”
The one thing that she is seriously scared of is the future. Audrey wants a husband and children, but she knows that with a serious problem like hers, building a stable foundation for a family would be difficult. “How would I teach my daughter to be confident when I am not?” she asks. “How will my husband find me beautiful if I don’t find myself beautiful?”
She has never sought professional help. She has never sought any help. As mentioned before, she says that she sees the disorder as her own issue and feels that she should be able to solve it by herself. I am disappointed in her for this. I am disappointed in society for causing this.
I watch as Audrey applies fruity smelling lotion to her hands so that no one will smell the stench that has permanently attached to her fingers from the stomach acid that runs over them every day.