Feed Your Head

A Story by K.L.Jax

Isn’t that what the dormouse said? Feed your head? (An essay about anorexia and nourishment through writing.)

Feed Your Head

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been terrified of eye contact. I’m confident to say that I know every crack and stubborn weed that’s struggled through the pavement that sprawls across Tucson. I’ve made acquaintances with concrete graffiti, those sweet little puppy lies “S.B. + K.T. 4EVER”. A crude heart finger-painted in wet cement. I nod my head to sun-dried lizard bodies baked like jerky against the concrete, resting in peace next to a stomped out cigarette butt and a browning circle of chewed gum. I don’t care what anyone says; looks can kill. I can feel eyes dissecting me, picking out the little bird bones and sticking them back in awkward places. I can see their pupils dilating, taking in the masses of bubbling yellow fat and loose white skin. I can feel them judging my Picasso face; I can see the upturn of the corners of their eyes as I squeak stupid Minnie Mouse words. So I don’t look. Not even at myself. Not even in mirrors. Not ever.

For the longest time I didn’t look or speak or eat. I was a ghost phasing in and out of mortal world, blood sugar roller coaster-ing between hypoglycemia and diabetic coma. Sometimes my eyes wouldn’t let me see, pulling curtains of black nausea over my eyelids till I woke up five minutes later in the nurses office of my middle school with a crack in my head and admonishments in my ears. So they locked me up. October 17th of my freshman year of high school. They gathered up my brittle bones, stuck me with needles and put me on a plane to Middle of Nowhere, Utah. I spent the first six months of treatment not eating, refusing to look, refusing to see the problem. I was okay if I didn’t look in mirrors, if I didn’t eat, if I didn’t meet the disapproving gaze of whatever random passerby I decided could judge my worth based on my appearance. I never spoke but wrote every day. Words marched like ants neatly on pages, ironically bringing food back to their anthill. The queen is always hungry.

I wrote pages after pages after pages. I wrote about evil. I wrote about justice. I wrote to rebel and I wrote to funnel calories from my fingers to the notebook paper. I wrote until I was crazy deep in my words, suffocating on the thick quicksand of the anorexic voice. I wrote until I tried to carve out the insanity with my pen, bleed out on the paper because my mouth could never form the words. Nor would they matter. People don’t listen to fat girls. But they can’t tell behind the ink and paper. It’s like a magician’s trick. Abracadabra.

They took my pens away after that. I couldn’t write poetry anymore, couldn’t journal, couldn’t write letters home. We weren’t allowed email. Or the Internet. Or TV. Too many triggers, diet ads promising to lose 10lbs in two weeks, skinny rich girls fretting about their upper class high school problems in southern California. 10lbs in two weeks? It was a competition to be started. A challenge I could easily win. I could lose 15 in a week and a half if they let me on the treadmill. And those bratty girls with their smooth high ponytails and designer bags? If their thighs touched they were still fat and that meant I was still winning. Winning at what though?

I became an angry locust and eventually its husk. I buzzed around the treatment center like a chainsaw, vibrating with words that I couldn’t write. I stopped eating. Starting exercising in secret. Carved little lines into my wrists just to spite my pen detention. Somehow I felt hollower than I did in my active anorexic days. I also felt overstuffed with emotion. In French they have a saying, “j’en ait ras le bol” which literally translates to “my bowl is full and spilling”, but in as an English idiom it would be more like “I’ve had it up to here.” At that point, j’en ait ras le bol. I was so empty-full of hate; the ambivalency of which catalyzed mood swings that would’ve made both Zeus and Hera equal parts jealous and impressed.

Then one day they gave me a blue marker. I remember it being stupid and thick and I hated blue and it was clumsy. My words were large and tripped over each other like an adolescent adjusting to his too-big feet. They took up too much space. But I could write again so I wrote my mom a St. Patrick’s Day letter. I wrote my brother an apology because I missed Christmas and his birthday and all the other holidays laced with sugar and family and nostalgia. As I wrote my eyes peeled open, like there’d been a second set of eyelids waiting to open. I was an ectotherm, shivering without a chance at maintaining homeostasis but at least now my third eyelid was open. I didn’t want this stupid blue marker or these stupid suicide watch robes. I wanted to be home and happy and warm. I wanted my hair to stop falling out and my skin to stop bruising colors of leprosy. I wanted to be a real girl who could laugh and smile and eat without wanting to purge or die. That letter to my brother turned into a declaration of war against my eating disorder. It was a war of liberation; overthrow the dictator. Hang her. Burn her. Worst of all: feed her. Isn’t that what the dormouse said? Feed your head?

So I ate and I wrote and I wrote about how I hated eating. But food cleared my mind, dusted off the shelves and vacuumed the floors that had been neglected while I was placating my trantruming two-year old of a disease. I could draw again and laugh and smile and make friends with the eleven other hungry girls. I could help them too. Food is good. Food is fuel. Food is a way to get home and hug my little brother and apologize and eat Mom’s famous Frito salad without puking and punishing myself on the treadmill.

Food was hard and scary and sometimes too much for my pink stomach but I found my voice in that blue Crayola and I wanted to live for it to be heard. I learned to open my mouth. I learned to swallow. I learned to speak. I wrote feverishly about futures I would have and dreams I would accomplish. I wrote about being alive to see my little brother become a dad because I know he’ll be goddamned amazing at parenting and I’ll be the cool aunt who gives the kids too much candy but tires them out with rounds on the park playset so it equals out at the end of the day. That marker was the safety vest thrown into the tempest of my life and I gratefully managed to survive with both my eyes, apologies to the Earl of Gloucester. Sight is a glorious thing. On behalf of suicide-watch patients and first-graders everywhere, I thank you, Crayola.

- k.l.j