Attics

"I will love the light for it shows me the way. Yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars." ~Og Mandino

When I was little, my favorite thing to do during the winter was to sit in my grandma’s attic and watch the snow fall. My grandmother’s house faced an old street that was paved in bricks and sparsely lined with streetlights. I would sit by the window, my head resting against the cold glass and watch the snowflakes drift down to the sidewalks through the streetlights’ orange glow.

Now, my therapist’s office is in the attic of an old Victorian mansion. Twice a week I climb up an antique staircase, pass a huge stain-glass window, and continue up two more flights of stairs until I come to her heavy wooden door and knock.

The house where my therapist works is eerily similar to a house that has regularly appeared in my dreams ever since I was very young. And, equally as eerie, in my dreams I am always locked in the attic. I’ve heard that when houses appear in our dreams they represent us, and attics are a symbol of our heads/minds. So, I think it is quite fitting that each week I meet my therapist in an attic to talk about my brain that has been broken by this pesky eating disorder I’ve had for about fifteen years.

I don’t know how to describe anorexia, really. It is very complex. The surface problem is with food and eating, but that is only how the disorder manifests itself. It really doesn’t have a whole lot to do with food or eating, and has more to do with having overwhelmingly intense anxiety, deep depression, and an extremely low self worth. It’s not so much a loss of appetite as it is a complete loss of self. And recovery isn’t so much about learning how to eat again (though that’s obviously part of it) but more about learning how to live again and how to regain a lost identity, a buried self. Confusing, I know.

Researchers, therapists, and doctors in the eating disorder field have found that anorexics share certain personality traits, such as being over achievers, people-pleasers, perfectionists, and highly attuned to others’ emotions, wants and needs. They are often empathetic motherly types and many anorexics are in caretaker roles. They tend to be “others-centered” rather than “self-centered,” which might sound nice, but anorexics take everything to the extreme. We have no sense of balance or limits and we end up obliterating ourselves. We deny our own needs and wants, burying them so deep that it gets to the point where we can’t even fulfill our first and most basic need, which is to eat. We become robots, machines, mannequins. We—figuratively and literally—disappear. Why do we do this? Some say it’s like a penance. We feel so unworthy of existence, so certain that we will be abandoned by everyone if we don’t constantly please them, that we give away our entire selves trying to prove how sorry we are for breathing or for taking up space, and to prove that maybe we are in fact worthy of your time.

Jenni Schaefer, one of the most famous recovered anorexics, compares an eating disorder to an abusive husband, which is incredibly accurate. Eating disorders hover over our shoulders 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, constantly reminding us that we are fat, pathetic, selfish, disgusting, weak, stupid. Eating disorders isolate us by convincing us that we are burdens, that we ruin everything, that we are unworthy of love, friends, and of course, food. It really is a sort of penance, a never-ending apology for existing.

I sit with my therapist in an attic and face the window. We lay out all of my broken pieces and begin arranging them into some sort of picture, like a stain-glass window pattern or an emerging constellation in a sky full of scattered stars.

I sit with my therapist in an attic and face the window. Sometimes, snow is falling outside. Sometimes, it’s just the dark. But sometimes, I can see the stars.