PART I
1
i feel like i can't tell you anything. anything real. i'm so scared of disappointing you, or ruining this perfectly not perfect thing we have. if I bring up this ultra-cliche, lifetime movie issue, you'll laugh at me or be mad. and I don't want you to be mad. how do you tell someone, the someone you think you're going to have forever with, that you're 100%, certifiably crazy?
2
the first time we met, you pushed me into the mud. so I decked you. we were best friends from then on, making mud pies for our moms and playing cops and cops cause neither of us wanted to be the bad guys. sometimes we'd even let alice play with us, but she was always asking questions and whining like 3 year olds did. this was all in a time where my mom and my dad were still happy and mike was still alive. its hard to believe a time like this existed. a time where my naive little nine-year old self believed puberty would be the greatest thing ever.
3
on my 13th birthday you told me i was fat. you were angry that i decided to have a party without you. i had an all girl slumber party. we ate pringles and hershey's and painted our nails and wore face masks. we even watched the notebook. i was so shocked, when you stood there 4 inches shorter than me and told me if i sat on you, i'd kill you like the house in Oz killed the Wicked Witch of the East. you were so proud of yourself, all your friends cheering, egging you on. and i stood there, angry and embarrassed. i still am. because i was not fat. not even one bit. but you made me doubt myself, that one confrontation became etched into my mind. do you want to know what i did? i went home and told my mom i wanted lipo. she laughed at me, looking to her book club, socialite friends, as if to say, "kids these days". again, people blowing off my feelings like they were nothing!
that night, i stood in front of the mirror and noted every single thing wrong with me. and i could see it. i could see the fat and the pudgy and i was horrified. how had i been walking around like this for so long? my scrawny, preteen body had transformed into this blob like a bad frankenstein project.
mom let me do tennis as a form of exercise and i stopped eating chocolate. i let it go for a while. we still talked and hung out but it was awkward. i felt disgusting and you felt weird.
at the beginning of eighth grade, our class watched the perfect body. a shitty after school special about a 'fat' gymnast who started purging to lose weight in order to compete. she did, she looked great then she almost died and destroyed her life. at least, that was the message we were supposed to take away from it. all i got was that this girl was lost and unhappy and eating food she liked but not gaining a pound made her not lost and not unhappy. i was fascinated. and i thought, i should do this.
it was that easy.
you hear all these bulimia stories, the cliches, but the gods honest truth is that i went looking for it. i googled, i yahoo'ed, i read through the forum's, the helpful blogs. and in my head all these things sounded wonderful in a terrible way. it gave me an exciting thrill. of course i knew what it would do to me, but i reasoned that i wouldn't let it get out of hand.
4
it isn't easy to start being bulimic. it's gross and stupid and extreme...but it's not easy. i remember with perfect clarity the first time I made myself throw up. it was on a thursday after tennis, when my mom and dad were still at happy hour. i binged and binged so that i could get myself to the point where I didn't feel good and then it took me about an hour to get it to come back up again. i don't write this out to be gross, to guilt you or scare you - i'm writing this out because there's a level of commitment to bulimia that is overlooked. it's not enough to just dismiss it as a behaviour that can be discouraged with an after-school special. By the time you get to the point of actually crouching for an hour while you struggle with your gag reflex, you're beyond after-school specials. you need a solution.