Buechner makes some really valid and interesting connections about anorexia...
Nothing for breakfast. A diet
soda for lunch. Maybe a little lettuce with low-calorie dressing for
supper. Or once in a while, when everybody has gone to bed, a binge on
ice cream, which you get rid of in the bathroom later. Relentless
exercise. Obsession with food, cooking great quantities of it for
everybody except yourself. In time you come to look like a victim of
Dachau — the sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, the marionette arms and
calfless legs. If you are a woman, you stop menstruating. If you are
told your life itself is in jeopardy, it makes no difference, because
not even dying is as fearsome as getting fat, a view that the combined
industries of fashion, dietetic food, and advertising all endorse. In
every respect but this, you may be as sane as everybody else. In this,
you are mad as a hatter.
Anorexia seems to be a
modern disease, but old phrases like pining away and wasting away
suggest it may have been around unnamed for a long time. Nobody seems to
know what it's all about, though there are endless theories. Young
anorexics want to strike free of parental control, they say, and where
does it assume a more elemental form than in "Take a bite for Mummy, a
bite for Daddy"? So that is where they draw the battle line. The more
desperately they are urged to eat, the more desperately they resist.
Their bodies are their last citadel, and they are prepared to defend
them literally to the death. Yet on the other side of it, of course,
they desperately need Mummy and Daddy and are scared stiff of the very
independence they are fighting to achieve.
The craving to be free
and independent. The craving to be taken care of and safe. The magic of
the sickness is that it meets both these cravings at once. By not eating
you take your stand against the world that is telling you what to do.
By not eating you make your body so much smaller, lighter, weaker that
in effect it becomes a child's body again, and the world flocks to your
rescue. Is something like this at the heart of it?
Most anorexics are young women. Feeling that a
male-dominated world has given them no models for what full womanhood
means, do they believe that the golden key to that Wonderland garden is
to make themselves as little as Alice had to in order to pass through
the tiny curtained door? Who can say for sure?
But at least one thing
is sure. By starving themselves, anorexics are speaking symbolically,
and by trying above all else to make them start eating again, their
families are in their own fashion speaking back the same way. Far
beneath the issue of food there are, on both sides, unspoken issues of
love, trust, fear, loss, separation. Father and mother, brother and
sister, they are all of them afflicted together, acting out in pantomime
a complex, subterranean drama whose nature they are at best only dimly
aware of. And so, one way or another, are we all.
"So then, putting away
falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are
members one of one another," says the author of Ephesians (4:25), and
that is the heart of the matter.
"I need you." "I need
to be myself." "I am afraid." "I am angry." "I am in pain." "Hear me."
"Help me." "Let me try to help you." "Let us love one another." If we
would only speak the truth to one another — parents and children,
friends and enemies, husbands and wives, strangers and lovers — we would
no longer have to act out our deepest feelings in symbols that none of
us understand.
In our sickness,
stubbornness, pride, we starve ourselves for what we hunger for above
all else. "Speaking the truth in love" is another phrase from Ephesians
(4:15). It is the only cure for the anorexia that afflicts us all.
- Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words
