I felt like an alcoholic.
Like people in AA that can never have a drink again because they just don’t trust themselves not to start up again. Mine was not an alcohol problem, but it was an addiction all the same. The skeleton in your closet will inevitably come out, and no matter how well you think you’ve psychologically prepared yourself to come to terms with your past, you probably haven’t.
I worked at a camp this summer, dealing with young teenagers. One girl?we’ll call her Amanda?had a bit of a “problem,” in that hushed-voices, don’t-let-her-know-we-know sort of way. Amanda was bulemic. Really bulemic. And her counselor had no idea what to say to this tall 14-year-old whose “problem” was bigger than she could handle. Unfortunately, I did. I had been there myself, not so long ago. I sprang to Amanda’s side as her confidant and mentor. I knew how it felt. I knew the guilt and the shame and the secrecy, as well as the self-satisfaction at being so good at hiding something so big from everybody.
I saw this as my chance to bring it all full-circle. To exorcise the demons that I had been able to completely conceal from everybody. I’d never told anyone, and no one had ever discovered me. I had won. I had come to a point where I was able to stop on my own, before anyone knew, so I could walk away from it as though no secrets had ever existed. I guess I was proud of that in some sick way, like “Ha ha, I beat the system.” And that’s what it feels like. It feels like you’re cheating, not playing by the same rules as everyone else. But damn, it feels good to win. Every time you’re bent over with two fingers ready to go, part of you is saying, “This is not good for you, you’re better than this, grow up, take the hit and keep the calories and just stop.” But another, much louder part, remembers all the people telling you how great you look. Every “I wish I could wear that!” makes it a little easier to forget for the interim how disgusting you feel afterwards. Every time some other girl asks, “How can you eat so much and be so skinny,” you feed off of the concealed jealousy you want to believe is there, and you justify this time, last time and probably next time. You don’t realize until later that the jealousy from others is mostly in your own head, since you desperately need to believe that everyone cares as much as you do. You need to make it worth all the damage.
I thought I was helping Amanda. We’d sit and cry in her bunk, and I noticed that it was mostly me talking, but somehow I was willing to ignore that as a signal that something was “off” in terms of who was helping whom. My boss pulled me aside at one point and demanded to know what was going on with “that girl,” and I stood firm on my moral high ground, telling myself, “He just doesn’t understand; he’s never been through this; it’s bigger than he realizes.” I was so smug over the fact that I was able to help this girl whom no one else could reach. I never considered that maybe it was a selfish thing, that it was my catharsis, passed off as her therapy.
I hadn’t thrown up in almost a year when Amanda came into my life. I had barely wanted to. I considered myself a real bulemia success story, a model for readers of Seventeen magazine everywhere. But talking to Amanda I was forced to remember and acknowledge how easy it all was, and how good it felt for the short term. And I slipped oh-so-quickly back into old habits and did it again. Crying. Dripping. Burning. It isn’t fun, especially when you know enough to know better. And all I could think was how easy it was to undo all the self-professed “progress.” I really felt like a recovering alcoholic, giving in to the infamous “just one last drink.”
I only did it that one time again, and I haven’t even wanted to since, but it was enough to shake me. I realized how volatile my inner peace really is, how little an emotional breakthrough can mean when you’re faced with the same old demons. And I can’t even express how much I regret the damage I must have done to Amanda. She’s 14; she’s confused; hell, she’s pretty messed up in general, and I ran in screaming “Everybody out of the way, I’ll save her!” But I didn’t save her; I just gave her a buddy to cry with. I couldn’t fix it; I still can’t; I don’t know what to tell a 14-year-old vomiting addict who thinks of me as her savior.
Be careful who you think you’re helping. You can’t “fix” anyone else; you can’t remove her mistakes, no matter how much you want to or need to. If what you take on is too big for you and you fail to realize it, you run the risk of getting sucked down into it, too. Addictions are hard to cure. Maybe they aren’t really ever cured, just abated, in recess, at bay. I don’t want to believe that, but I think it’s safer to see things this way than to think that any 12-step program will ever be able to completely normalize some parts of our lives. Normalcy requires an inner peace that most 14-year-olds, most every-year-olds, haven’t gotten yet. But now I’ve seen “bottom,” and I decided to get myself the hell out of there.
