This Is How by Augusten Burroughs Read Free Book Online Page B

figure.
    My instinct told me this was very bad medicine.
    This disease magnifies the significance of each calorie. A calorie diary would serve only to show the girl how much she had already consumed. How could she be anything but mortified by the figure—even if a normal eater were to look at her list and be appalled by its sparsity?
    I know if I were an anorexic girl and wrote down all the crap I ate during the day and then looked at the total, I would feel so fat and depressed that I would want to immediately diet.
    A calorie count on paper would seem like tangible evidence that everything was spiraling wildly out of control.
    I asked this young woman how it made her feel, having to keep a calorie journal when she was in the hospital. She said, “It made me decide not to eat another thing.”
    She decided. At the heart of the illness resides a desire for control.
    I tracked back in my own past to a time when I felt that my whole life was totally insane and out of control. I could feel that feeling as fresh as if it were happening all over again. It’s a feeling that almost resides in the bladder: you have to take action now.
    Anorexia most commonly affects young women under twenty-five, an age most young people are still under the influence and guiding hand of home or college.
    The medical treatment itself, with its highly structured inpatient setting based around mealtimes, therapy appointments, examinations, calorie counting, and supervision, would make a person without control issues feel rather powerless.
    But there’s more to it than control. When I asked my anorexic friend what she felt when she looked at the scale and saw that she’d lost weight, she said it made her happy. When I asked why, she told me because she wanted to be smaller.
    Her choice of words was fascinating. Not thinner, smaller. Thinner means, not as thick. Smaller means, not as much you.
    Anorexia is, of course, a disease where one wastes literally away. One shrinks until one dies.
    One vanishes.
    Control, but more. Something else.
    Or maybe not something else.
    Maybe anorexia—with its extreme obsessive focus, its never-altering lockdown on one thing: losing weight—maybe these exist in reply to what is a neurological processing disorder with respect to boundaries, authority, sense of self.
    Anorexia seems to act as a powerful magnifying lens. I don’t know in which or how many ways, but perhaps what a nonanorexic experiences as guidance or advice or somebody else’s opinion is warped for the anorexic. Maybe something as simple as, “But first go upstairs and do your homework” is experienced almost physically—as a powerful and oppressive manipulation of behavior.
    In the same way that my sensory processing disorder makes the little tag on the neck of a T-shirt feel like the flap from acardboard box—and it must be ripped away instantly, even if such sudden, desperate yanking leaves behind a hole.
    With this connection made, I suddenly knew exactly what I would do if I had a daughter and she was anorexic and none of the prescribed medical and psychotherapeutic treatments had worked. And she wasn’t already bedridden and very near death. She’d have to still be mobile for this to work.
    I would kick her out of the house.
    I would give her a credit card and an ATM card attached to a bank account that held the money I’d saved for her college, along with anything else I had planned on giving her.
    I would tell her I loved her. Then I would tell her I was finished raising her. That she would have to take over from now on.
    I would explain that I was no longer going to be part of her treatment. I was no longer going to be part of her life. She could be a part of mine, if she wanted and if she made all the effort. But she was free to make no effort at all; I had accepted the loss. I no longer wanted anything from her or for her.
    I would say these things even if saying them brought me four inches away from death by heartbreak.
    But an