Part I

In the beginning, it was just me and my parent’s dining room table. It was time for reparations. After almost a decade of living hundreds of kilometers away, my parent’s dining room table was not exactly where I had expected to dedicate weeks, and then months of my time, but it quickly became my centre stage. I had spent the last six years under the rigid control of what had become an all-encompassing eating disorder, and my parent’s glass-top eight-person dinner table (the same table I had blown out my first birthday candles at) would become the place where pain and obsession were converted into creativity, via one at-home sewing machine, and one serger.

I’m lucky I was able to step outside of my life and move back in with my parents to face my sickness head-on. I had no distractions, no worries about how my rent or bills would be paid (thank you subletter). I was lucky that I was able to leave my job for an indefinite period of time and return to work whenever I was ready. I know some people aren’t so lucky. I know this mainly through the people I’ve met along the way, the ones that were kicked out of ED programming for missing too many days, because they had unbending work or parenting to do. I’m lucky I was rescued, 14 hours away, and driven home, so I could try yet another iteration of programming. And I’m lucky that my parents allowed me to stay two months longer than planned when I needed extra time. Even at my lowest moments, privilege smoldered.

Up until the time at the table, I was tying up the final strings of my writing degree. Now, I don’t want to say that I have regrets about completing my undergrad. It felt good to be good at something. It felt good to be challenged, and I often miss the type of learning that happens in a classroom, but by my fourth year, I knew I wouldn’t pick up a pen and write for a very long time.

You see, the issue was this: after my writing degree, I had written down everything I cared about. I had told all my stories. It was a miracle that I found four years of stories within myself, what with my short and mediocre existence. Some of my peers had rolled straight from highschool into university, and these people really had nothing to say. Albeit their metaphors were nice, but there really is no story without action. I knew I would have to create reasons to write before writing again. And here I am six years later, with a tiny itch in my hands.

Six years ago, when I was rescued and driven home, I had packed my sewing machines (a simple Janome table machine and one serger) because I knew I wouldn’t be up to much. Rehabilitation, albeit necessary, can be painfully dull, and for me, the need to expend creative energy is constant. I wanted to do something drastically different than writing, like garment construction, I just wasn’t sure how or for what reason. I also wanted to be an observer of literature (read) until I was ready to pick up a pen again (or, more commonly, a laptop). I distinctly remember devouring Ottessa Moshfegh’s, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” on the drive home and thinking it was my time for rest and rehabilitation. I was hungry (literally, all the time) for change, and I could feel the prospect of recovery nearing as we got closer to our destination. At that moment, spirits were high, and the gift of ignorance lay heavy in the air. Neither me nor my mom could have prepared ourselves for what would greet us at home.

But before I get into all that, I want to tell you what I was prepared for. The ED program I joined started out as a group therapy for all walks of disordered eating: anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and so on. After getting to know the clinical therapist that led the group, we could decide how we wanted to individualize our treatment plan. For me, it would be weekly meetings with a specialized therapist and nutritionist. My parents, bless them, would participate in group therapy to teach them how to support loved ones with eating disorders. Now, it’s not that me or my dad are particularly sadistic (less so him), but I have to admit that there was a sense of hope in those group therapy sessions for both of us: it lay in the simple fact that other people were, undoubtedly, more fucked up than I was.

An eating disorder can look a lot like addiction, it becomes the centrepiece of your day and quickly surpasses all regulatory functions: sleeping, socializing, romantic and other relationships, leaving the house, and obviously, eating. Every neural pathway reroutes from its typical journey and heads towards this tight knot deep in your frontal cortex that carefully holds onto this one, terrible idea: your weight is your worth. I had spent 5 years carving out the roadways that led to that brain knot. The trenches were deep, but there were still a couple pathways delivering messages that said, “look up, the sun is in the sky”. It was obvious that a lot of people in my group therapy did not receive that message anymore. I often wonder if they ever did, or how long it took for their hope to sputter out. My dad noticed this too, a lot of the parents had dedicated so much time and money to an endless loop of hospitalization, treatment, sickness, and so on. Not years, but decades. As uncomfortable as it is to admit, being that close to people (women) who were much more stuck than I was, made me feel less stuck. What could be worse was right in front of me, and it was not me. I realized something about myself: moving into the light would always be concurrent with moving away from the dark.

After two days of driving, we were home. My dad was in a jovial mood when we arrived. Now, it’s not that my dad was typically in a bad mood, because that is simply not true, but this mood was particularly good. I based this inference off of two things: eye contact and question asking. Again, my dad did both of those things quite regularly, but it was typical for him to let his eyes drift, eventually, to my mom. He sometimes even asked questions through her, as if she were his vessel for communication–the effect of being married for 37 years. but no, these questions were pointed at me, eye to eye, soul to soul.

I remember it was dinner time, which meant wine in my household. At that time, my dad had been working with wine for almost 45 years, and had a sommelier’s palate. And although my mom didn’t share the same appreciation for nuance, she knew good wines from bad wines, and she most definitely knew the good ones that my dad had stashed in the basement, and so when my dad pulled out a bottle of Chateau Palmer and proceeded to open it, the shock in her voice was palpable when she asked him what the occasion was.

Sometimes, good things are bad news. It is fair to say that I had flagged both the wine and good mood as red. I wanted Kim Crawford. But the final pin dropped after dinner, when our bellies were full and the wine was drunk and my dad said, “I need to tell you guys something.”

I’m not sure what was worse: hearing that my dad had cancer or seeing my mom hear, for the first time, that the love of her life had cancer. My mom is a stoic person-–she is not big on big emotions. But at that moment, she crumbled. It was the first time I had seen defeat in her eyes. She turned to my dad and said, “I can’t do this without you.” I knew then how insignificant my presence at the table was, there was only them. They may have been two separate people, but they shared one soul. And that sentiment, which I know to be true, meant my mom had become sick too.

This made three sick people under one roof and an astonishing plot twist. Now, as I mentioned before, it is not so much that I am a sadist, and if I could reverse the course of events of that evening, I would, but there was a great sense of relief in knowing that I was no longer the focal point of sickness. What could be worse was right in front of me, and it was not me. I was plot B. I could make myself useful to the characters in plot A. I like being useful. There is a fierce caregiver somewhere in me that could move plot A towards a better ending. And I grasped onto this narrative with both hands 💠

In The Beginning

Part I