I started losing weight when I studied abroad in September of Paris in 2008. I dropped from 125 pounds to 103 when I returned home to California in December of 2008. I still don’t know why I think so fondly of Paris. In part, because I think of Paris externally, not internally. There is also magic in the city that cannot be denied. I was surrounded by art; my major was Art History and it connected me to that spiritual dimension.
During my anorexia in Paris I realized who my true friends were. They were the girls in my sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, that I was originally so intimidating. They didn’t say much, but they always included me. I met Tucker, one of my dearest friends and a person I feel I was supposed to meet on my creative journey. He had just spent the summer as a glass blower in Chicago. We took a trip to Interlaken together where we stayed in a hostel with a nude man and later para-sailed together. I lost those pictures when I lost my facebook and phone, but that a story for a later day.
My friends including Tucker knew there was something wrong with me, yet they never did anything intentionally harmful to remind me of it. I bonded with my sorority sisters as much as I could but I was in a full time relationship with my eating disorder and you cannot have a relationship with anyone else once that strikes. I would show up late to dinners and occasionally throw up in the bathroom. The two people who knew what was going on were Michelle and Katrina. Both whom I still consider my best friends today. They loved me through the hardest parts of my life, and still today when I have been freed from an eating disorder for over ten years.
An eating disorder is a difficult thing to explain. Someone once said to me, Gina, in an outpatient eating disorder program at Chicago that “you can’t explain it from the inside, and you can’t understand it from the outside.” This still rings true for me today. Other than the loss of who I thought were my best friends at Northwestern – I cannot attribute my loss of weight to anything other than the desire for attention.
Northwestern was the first time I had attention from boys, I got into the best sorority class, and was part of the coolest kids on campus. Three of those people in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences literally and figuratively turned their backs on me when I walked into my own college graduation. It was one of the most humiliating moments of my life on the day that would have been my proudest.
to look is not to see 