Shapeshifter
By Livia Walker
The body has a way of carrying, remembering, and growing into what it has lived through. I can still feel embers of anorexia burning in my blood years after I ripped it from the cage in my chest. I feel it when I sit on the cold surface of an examination chair in a doctor’s office, when my eyes catch the label on the back of a package of food, when I linger in my reflection. But now, I feel it the most when I notice it in others like the embers within each of us ignites and flowers upon contact, upon friction. I notice when a friend pushes their food around and stares at their plate with dread, when a person inspects the contours of their form with sunken scowls. I know what it looks like to be hungry, to shapeshift and morph into a ghost of yourself. The embers of anorexia that remain in my body start fires in my throat as I advocate for radical wholeness and the abolition of smallness. The pain in my chest from where anorexia once thrived has been softened and opened and the hole in my stomach is filled and nurtured every single day. As a person who lived through it and grew in spite of it, I am fuller, brighter, and more alive because of recovery. Escaping anorexia and regrowing myself has allowed me to evolve into who I am today.
So far I have lived two separate lives and I am working on a third. The first life contained princess dresses worn on top of footy pajamas, hot chocolate with mountains of whipped cream and marshmallows every Saturday morning, squinted eyes and beaming smiles in every photo. I was shy in new spaces but vibrant and I can remember being so driven to soak up everything thatI could from the world. And then, slowly at first, I soaked up enough that eventually a new awareness festered inside of me, a collection of fragments that ushered in the end of one life and the beginning of another. As I kept growing up, I developed a proclivity for obsessions, numbers, smallness, and slowness. Eating disorders usually culminate for a long time inside of a person and although I felt young when it happened to me, I had already been spun into a vicious web that had been growing along with me, waiting for me.
As time moved around me, I figured out how to compress myself smaller and smaller. It was my first year of high school and my head was fogged over to conserve energy for my fading body to perform its basic functions. My hand hovered over text books and homework assignments suspended in the air by the fog. I could feel myself grasping for the words and the memories from class, from a couple days ago but they slipped through my fingers and I slipped further away from them. Of course not everything was foggy. I had memorized the caloric content of every combination of food I was presented with, I knew exactly how many calories I spent on every physical activity I engaged in, I had an expansive artillery of excuses and exercises for avoiding eating that I executed with great effort and precision. My brothers noticed first, then my friends, then my family and one day my mother picked me up from school in the middle of the day “for a dentist appointment”. I was instead taken to a yellow building with white trim and diagnosed and passed from room to room to be questioned and observed and quantified. Treatment was mandatory and it would start tomorrow they said, my eyes drooped and my fingers shook as they told me. The voice seemed so far away it didn’t feel like it was real. I rested my head against the cool window on the drive home and tried so hard not to succumb to the nausea that lived in my chest.
Living with anorexia was like being trapped in an abusive relationship and treating it was like being removed from our shared home by police and then being on my own for the first time. I did not belong to myself, I belonged to my eating disorder and I clung so violently to the part of it that told me I would be protected that I would do anything to protect it back. I would give up brain cells, clumps of hair, the calcium in my bones, the proteins in my teeth, my skin’s heat and color. I would give anorexia anything it wanted. But it wanted all of me, it wanted to swallow me whole and leave me rotting. So, I rotted. And the voices of doctors around me echoed inside my head as they moved me from partial hospitalization, to residential, to inpatient. The world was so soft and fuzzy it took longer than it should have for me to make out the next threat, a feeding tube that would pass through my nose and down into my stomach.
Time moved around me again but this time I moved with it. Slowly pieces started falling into place and fragments turned into something whole. It took me a long time to realize I did not want to be anorexic anymore and even longer to spin that into fruition. I remember the feeling of floating away from myself and then looking across from me at the anorexia. We were separating and I was the one slowly severing the silvery webs that spun us together. I was the one that was bringing myself back to life and defeating the force that was stealing my life away from me. I accepted the treatment finally, and I became aware of the network I now found myself a part of. I made friends that opened my eyes to new life, and felt the effects of therapy and medicine regrowing my brain, neurogenesis. I started to wake up without dread and nausea and I smiled at my friends and the staff that surrounded me, squinted eye smiles with big beaming tears rolling down my cheeks. I remember sitting in the scratchy tweed chairs in front of the community phones and twirling the long, winding cords between my fingers as I told my family what I was accomplishing and learning. I kissed the envelopes I sent to them and stained the ones I received with tears. I still have those letters and journals today stacked in a shoe box in the back of my closet. I will always keep them and I will always press them against my chest when I read them to myself whenever dread creeps back into my chest or when I am seeking out tangible proof of my resilience. I learned how to save myself, that nothing is permanent, and that I inhabit a body that is mine to love, with a mind that is capable of vast endeavors. One day, during the foggy autumn it became obvious to me what was happening to me, my wounds were mending over and the hurt I had lived in for so long was healing.
I am living my third life now, one where I have exchanged smallness for wholeness and I plan on never changing that. It’s unclear what this life will be made of but I do know that I will live all of it with the love, forgiveness, and resilience that has come from my past. I reject smallness and I take up as much space as I can every single day. I advocate for wholeness everywhere I go. I share food with the people I love, I exercise and feed myself as an act of radical love, I conspire against the disordered habits I encounter in others. I take full ownership of my own universe after it was stolen from me and the power I gained from that journey allows me to be who I am now. Anorexia is a powerful poltergeist but I am no longer possessed and I am far more powerful.
Leonardo Magazine 