I looked in the mirror. There I was, a second time, wearing the bone corset. I had laced it a bit tighter. I could not breathe.
The word “normal” is defined as “conforming to a usual or typical standard.” Let it be said that I have never considered myself normal. The word “normal” and its synonyms – average, mediocre, usual – were unacceptable to me, so they became the sea level I built my mountain upon.
Instead, I turned to the word “perfect.” Before anyone blinked, I was into thin air, and the stakes were high. No one could convince me to take heed of the pressure at such heights. Many argue that perfection is an unattainable state.
To me, this was a challenge. As a girl who lived in her head, I thought that perfection must exist if the idea itself was so prevalent in the commercials during my mother's shows and in the beautiful books I read, and everywhere I looked. A White Woman joined me on the mountain. “Not good enough,” she whispered. “You can do better.” She told me we were friends. I believed her.
The White Women and I built a cottage on the peak of the mountain during the summer of my twelfth year. She had the pale features of an albino feline, skeletal fingers, and a body hidden under silver robes. Within the cottage were all the thick, leather-bound books I (we) would ever need, composition notebooks, and the constant scent of vanilla candles. Each day brought the two of us closer, until we became inseparable.
As much as I enjoyed the presence of my silver friend, I regularly came down to sea level to visit my golden friends. I had many, but I struggled to relate to their desire for clothes, boys, and material objects.
•
•
•
Autumn was inevitable. With the changing of leaves came the changing of schools and mandatory appearances at sea level.
“You are always welcome here,” the White Woman promised, with a sad note in her voice. She had a link to my thoughts and knew I did not want to leave her. Weeks past. I began to regret leaving the cozy cottage on the cold mountain.
“Why don't you come down?” I asked.
“When the air is bitter and you begin to pursue perfection, I will join you,” she said.
She handed me a beautiful corset. Stark white and stiff, it appeared to be a network of dainty bones sewn together. I promised to wear it under my clothes every day and at night as I dreamed.
On the first day of November, 2011, it was imperative to stay at sea level for four days to attend a seventh grade field trip.
“Two months into school,” the White Woman said, “and still you have made few friends. Why?” I didn't have a answer, but I did know that it was too hard to deviate from my immediate group of friends in pursuit of new ones, never mind members of the opposite sex. Looking back, my fear took me as I was (am) the quiet-reading-smart-girl. Looking back, the White Woman knew this.
During that trip, the schedule called for us to be fed three times a day; without fail the teachers herded us to the dining hall.
“Can you please pass the meat?” was the question I would have directed at the bald-headed teacher, if the words were to pass the back of my throat. Our mismatched group was about to eat dinner. I adjusted the bone corset under my T-shirt. I had been wearing it for a month.
The regular treks to and from the cottage, in combination with gym class each day and other activities, required exertion – exertion taken out on my shrinking body. I was 90.5 pounds. The bone corset was slowly becoming looser on my frame.
“I'll fix that,” the White Woman whispered between my ears. Although I had missed her, my hands began to shake at the sound of her voice in my skull. In that instant, she became real.
With her nimble, bony fingers, I could feel the White Woman on my back. I turned around, pretending to get something out of my pocket (the pretending started here). Her spectral being was not visible, yet she was real, existing, touching. The digits of her hands wrapped around the corset's laces, and she gradually pulled them tighter. I felt her fingers leave, the laces tied, the bone corset cutting off my breath.
The White Woman had finally joined me at sea level.
By the end of the trip, I had hardly eaten anything since the bone corset had been tightened. The same questions and statements were thrown at me in rapid succession: “Are you a vegetarian?” “Aren't you hungry?” “Aren't you feeling well?”
At this point, the comments sat uneasily in my empty pink stomach. The White Woman, appearing at increasingly frequent intervals, responded with smiles. She taught me to love each concerned glance and every dizzying stomach growl.
Sleeping through my English class, I was now 88.0 pounds. Singing the solos in each choir concert, I was 86.2 pounds. When I reached 85.0 pounds, my body was disproportionately fat as well as disgustingly small. At 83.0 pounds, I was the girl who did not eat lunch. Walking home from school, I was the gap between my thighs, but I was never skinny. The White Woman made it her life's objective to tighten the corset every time I stepped on the scale and measured my sins to be a pound less, or a pound more, or maintained; how could I ever feel skinny?
“Just five more pounds,” she would sometimes croon, other times screech.
The White Woman's secret? There was no winning. Fitting into the bone corset was a moving target, and I was on a hamster wheel trying to chase it.
Rarely did I ramble up the mountain to visit the White Woman. There was no need: we had fused together. My (our) mind was a deathly tango of the bones she wanted and the perfection I desired. My mouth, teeth gritted, had become a manipulated outlet for her lies, and my legs were her favorite messengers. Despite what my parents said and the pamphlets read, this deadly dance was my favorite pastime. It was a never-ending playdate with my dearest, closest, only friend.
“Why don't they understand what I want? The only thing I want,” I complained.
“You spend a lot of time with me,” the White Woman replied. “Jealousy takes hold, as expected.”
I will never forget the sound of my parents crying on the bed they never shared, over a display of papers, phone numbers, and printouts. They did not know what was wrong with me and blamed themselves behind closed doors. I felt guilty at 78.5 pounds, but there was no stopping now.
Upon reaching 75.0 pounds of fat and flesh in January, I was congratulated by being admitted to the feeding factory (the hospital) for a three-month hiatus. They asked me limitless questions, and I told them I was simply pursuing perfect. A nurse jab-jab-jabbed me for blood and pressed stethoscopes to my bare chest, stenciling my heartbeats into thick notebooks. I could feel the bone corset being peeled off, but I – somehow – felt other bones on the outlines of my body. The White Woman watched from the office window, cackling.
Diagnosis: anorexia nervosa. Happy New Year.
Visitors were allowed (after they washed their hands) into the clean-smelling Eating Disorder Unit; the nurses and techs sanctioned everyone – except the White Woman.
Although she was barred from visiting, the White Woman peeked through the spider ferns by the west window and ensured her screams echoed through my mind from the instant I woke until my last breath of consciousness at night. Therapy sessions and group activities informed me that she was an entity separate from me, yet I knew she was an extension of my brain, banging her drums and telling the truth when no one else would: “You're fat, my dear. Disgustingly so. Don't ever forget it.”
During my first sentence at the hospital, I mastered the art of becoming “the perfect patient,” trying to recover, eating my meals, doing my homework, taking suggestions, asking for help, giving advice, nodding my head, stretching my grotesque outer skin. At 94.5 pounds, the outpatient staff deemed me healthy enough to be discharged. I was given a few phone numbers, a packet filled with magic incantations, and round doses of empty in orange child-proof containers.
On the highest shelf in my room are two notebooks I filled with thoughts, descriptions, and emotions during this impossibly long winter. In the attic I have stored the thick blue binder holding the record of each day's calories (transgressions) and group lessons. It is unnecessary to reference their stiff pages when I so easily remember these experiences and the other strange little winter-girls in the ward with me.
Upon my homecoming, I had lush long hair, and the bone corset was stowed in my closet.
I behaved myself for a few months.
Just as my therapist and psychiatrist had warned, the White Woman was hidden in almost every fathomable location: between the bran cereals at the supermarket, under my father's bed, next to me on the roaring yellow school bus, and so forth. The index finger of her left hand would always point in the direction of the closeted corset like the prayer of a Muslim toward Mecca. At 90.0 pounds, I was well aware of how tight the bone corset would be laced and the unlimited journeys I would be forced to bear, the White Woman breathing down my back with her words of both encouragement and disgust. Despite all the reprogramming of my mind over the past three months, I still believed her.
Formally I was approached by the lion-faced woman in silver robes: she held out her left hand, and I my right. Rather than a handshake, she laced her fingers through mine, and we walked to my closet, our steps in unison. We crawled in and pulled out the bone corset. It was not dusty (bones like these do not age), and the laces looked as if they had never been tied.
The word “relapse” is employed when one falls back to a former state, a way of life often detrimental, after seeming to have made a recovery. Holding hands with the White Woman and donning the bone corset was interpreted in this way, but how could I relapse when I had yet to successfully exorcise the ghost?
That spring, treks were not made to and from the mountain (the pressure was thick enough on sea level). I received a B- on my English final because I fell asleep, the White Woman cooing in my ears with her haunting lullaby. We did not speak for a few days after. I cried because I was the only child who had heard her.
I looked in the mirror. There I was, a second time, wearing the bone corset. I had laced it a bit tighter. I could not breathe. The bones were on the verge of breaking, the corset collapsing inward. No matter how hard the White Woman pulled with her fingers, the bones would go no tighter, nor would they touch my skin.
I was 68.0 pounds of imaginary girl.
Waking up one August morning, I looked in the mirror. Before me was the lion-faced witch who spoke my every word, commanded my every movement, and promised me things I had already owned only to sacrifice in her secret ceremonials. I took off my clothes, the bone corset included, only to look and see two White Women in the mirror. She had taken off her silver robes, and I had taken off my skin: twins.
The second time I was admitted to the hospital, I made the choice to go. Good timing: my 13-year-old heart was devouring itself.
Forty-nine days, 31 of which without the comfort of seeing the sun, no outpatient. It was then that I met the long-haired-elven-pink princess, the photographer-poet roommate, and the professionally-ill-forever child; it was then that I was not the perfect patient.
A war was being waged on the grounds of my mind. The White Woman won many, if not all, of the early battles; I paid my punishments in bed rest, one-on-ones, secret situps, and incompletes. Throughout my years of pursuing perfection, I had believed that mistakes were committed by a failure, yet in those 49 days, I made more mistakes and gained more than weight as a result. I gained knowledge, learning the sort of lessons that little girls often do not. I became the golden sunshine welcomed after a long winter. I became an old book, cracked at the spine, ready to be opened on a rainy day.
Some may say I was “normal” again. I don't argue, for at some point in their life – whether today, or their last dying breath – they'll learn. I remain that old book.
Always shall I be that book, for anyone, as so many have been cracked-open books for me to learn from.
I still fight the White Woman, but in places other than my mind and rarely on a daily basis. I got off the hamster wheel. Sometimes, when I sleep, I dream.
The bone corset is in the back of my closet, rotting.
The word “normal” is defined as “conforming to a usual or typical standard.” Let it be said that I have never considered myself normal. The word “normal” and its synonyms – average, mediocre, usual – were unacceptable to me, so they became the sea level I built my mountain upon.
Instead, I turned to the word “perfect.” Before anyone blinked, I was into thin air, and the stakes were high. No one could convince me to take heed of the pressure at such heights. Many argue that perfection is an unattainable state.
To me, this was a challenge. As a girl who lived in her head, I thought that perfection must exist if the idea itself was so prevalent in the commercials during my mother's shows and in the beautiful books I read, and everywhere I looked. A White Woman joined me on the mountain. “Not good enough,” she whispered. “You can do better.” She told me we were friends. I believed her.
The White Women and I built a cottage on the peak of the mountain during the summer of my twelfth year. She had the pale features of an albino feline, skeletal fingers, and a body hidden under silver robes. Within the cottage were all the thick, leather-bound books I (we) would ever need, composition notebooks, and the constant scent of vanilla candles. Each day brought the two of us closer, until we became inseparable.
As much as I enjoyed the presence of my silver friend, I regularly came down to sea level to visit my golden friends. I had many, but I struggled to relate to their desire for clothes, boys, and material objects.
•
•
•
Autumn was inevitable. With the changing of leaves came the changing of schools and mandatory appearances at sea level.
“You are always welcome here,” the White Woman promised, with a sad note in her voice. She had a link to my thoughts and knew I did not want to leave her. Weeks past. I began to regret leaving the cozy cottage on the cold mountain.
“Why don't you come down?” I asked.
“When the air is bitter and you begin to pursue perfection, I will join you,” she said.
She handed me a beautiful corset. Stark white and stiff, it appeared to be a network of dainty bones sewn together. I promised to wear it under my clothes every day and at night as I dreamed.
On the first day of November, 2011, it was imperative to stay at sea level for four days to attend a seventh grade field trip.
“Two months into school,” the White Woman said, “and still you have made few friends. Why?” I didn't have a answer, but I did know that it was too hard to deviate from my immediate group of friends in pursuit of new ones, never mind members of the opposite sex. Looking back, my fear took me as I was (am) the quiet-reading-smart-girl. Looking back, the White Woman knew this.
During that trip, the schedule called for us to be fed three times a day; without fail the teachers herded us to the dining hall.
“Can you please pass the meat?” was the question I would have directed at the bald-headed teacher, if the words were to pass the back of my throat. Our mismatched group was about to eat dinner. I adjusted the bone corset under my T-shirt. I had been wearing it for a month.
The regular treks to and from the cottage, in combination with gym class each day and other activities, required exertion – exertion taken out on my shrinking body. I was 90.5 pounds. The bone corset was slowly becoming looser on my frame.
“I'll fix that,” the White Woman whispered between my ears. Although I had missed her, my hands began to shake at the sound of her voice in my skull. In that instant, she became real.
With her nimble, bony fingers, I could feel the White Woman on my back. I turned around, pretending to get something out of my pocket (the pretending started here). Her spectral being was not visible, yet she was real, existing, touching. The digits of her hands wrapped around the corset's laces, and she gradually pulled them tighter. I felt her fingers leave, the laces tied, the bone corset cutting off my breath.
The White Woman had finally joined me at sea level.
By the end of the trip, I had hardly eaten anything since the bone corset had been tightened. The same questions and statements were thrown at me in rapid succession: “Are you a vegetarian?” “Aren't you hungry?” “Aren't you feeling well?”
At this point, the comments sat uneasily in my empty pink stomach. The White Woman, appearing at increasingly frequent intervals, responded with smiles. She taught me to love each concerned glance and every dizzying stomach growl.
Sleeping through my English class, I was now 88.0 pounds. Singing the solos in each choir concert, I was 86.2 pounds. When I reached 85.0 pounds, my body was disproportionately fat as well as disgustingly small. At 83.0 pounds, I was the girl who did not eat lunch. Walking home from school, I was the gap between my thighs, but I was never skinny. The White Woman made it her life's objective to tighten the corset every time I stepped on the scale and measured my sins to be a pound less, or a pound more, or maintained; how could I ever feel skinny?
“Just five more pounds,” she would sometimes croon, other times screech.
The White Woman's secret? There was no winning. Fitting into the bone corset was a moving target, and I was on a hamster wheel trying to chase it.
Rarely did I ramble up the mountain to visit the White Woman. There was no need: we had fused together. My (our) mind was a deathly tango of the bones she wanted and the perfection I desired. My mouth, teeth gritted, had become a manipulated outlet for her lies, and my legs were her favorite messengers. Despite what my parents said and the pamphlets read, this deadly dance was my favorite pastime. It was a never-ending playdate with my dearest, closest, only friend.
“Why don't they understand what I want? The only thing I want,” I complained.
“You spend a lot of time with me,” the White Woman replied. “Jealousy takes hold, as expected.”
I will never forget the sound of my parents crying on the bed they never shared, over a display of papers, phone numbers, and printouts. They did not know what was wrong with me and blamed themselves behind closed doors. I felt guilty at 78.5 pounds, but there was no stopping now.
Upon reaching 75.0 pounds of fat and flesh in January, I was congratulated by being admitted to the feeding factory (the hospital) for a three-month hiatus. They asked me limitless questions, and I told them I was simply pursuing perfect. A nurse jab-jab-jabbed me for blood and pressed stethoscopes to my bare chest, stenciling my heartbeats into thick notebooks. I could feel the bone corset being peeled off, but I – somehow – felt other bones on the outlines of my body. The White Woman watched from the office window, cackling.
Diagnosis: anorexia nervosa. Happy New Year.
Visitors were allowed (after they washed their hands) into the clean-smelling Eating Disorder Unit; the nurses and techs sanctioned everyone – except the White Woman.
Although she was barred from visiting, the White Woman peeked through the spider ferns by the west window and ensured her screams echoed through my mind from the instant I woke until my last breath of consciousness at night. Therapy sessions and group activities informed me that she was an entity separate from me, yet I knew she was an extension of my brain, banging her drums and telling the truth when no one else would: “You're fat, my dear. Disgustingly so. Don't ever forget it.”
During my first sentence at the hospital, I mastered the art of becoming “the perfect patient,” trying to recover, eating my meals, doing my homework, taking suggestions, asking for help, giving advice, nodding my head, stretching my grotesque outer skin. At 94.5 pounds, the outpatient staff deemed me healthy enough to be discharged. I was given a few phone numbers, a packet filled with magic incantations, and round doses of empty in orange child-proof containers.
On the highest shelf in my room are two notebooks I filled with thoughts, descriptions, and emotions during this impossibly long winter. In the attic I have stored the thick blue binder holding the record of each day's calories (transgressions) and group lessons. It is unnecessary to reference their stiff pages when I so easily remember these experiences and the other strange little winter-girls in the ward with me.
Upon my homecoming, I had lush long hair, and the bone corset was stowed in my closet.
I behaved myself for a few months.
Just as my therapist and psychiatrist had warned, the White Woman was hidden in almost every fathomable location: between the bran cereals at the supermarket, under my father's bed, next to me on the roaring yellow school bus, and so forth. The index finger of her left hand would always point in the direction of the closeted corset like the prayer of a Muslim toward Mecca. At 90.0 pounds, I was well aware of how tight the bone corset would be laced and the unlimited journeys I would be forced to bear, the White Woman breathing down my back with her words of both encouragement and disgust. Despite all the reprogramming of my mind over the past three months, I still believed her.
Formally I was approached by the lion-faced woman in silver robes: she held out her left hand, and I my right. Rather than a handshake, she laced her fingers through mine, and we walked to my closet, our steps in unison. We crawled in and pulled out the bone corset. It was not dusty (bones like these do not age), and the laces looked as if they had never been tied.
The word “relapse” is employed when one falls back to a former state, a way of life often detrimental, after seeming to have made a recovery. Holding hands with the White Woman and donning the bone corset was interpreted in this way, but how could I relapse when I had yet to successfully exorcise the ghost?
That spring, treks were not made to and from the mountain (the pressure was thick enough on sea level). I received a B- on my English final because I fell asleep, the White Woman cooing in my ears with her haunting lullaby. We did not speak for a few days after. I cried because I was the only child who had heard her.
I looked in the mirror. There I was, a second time, wearing the bone corset. I had laced it a bit tighter. I could not breathe. The bones were on the verge of breaking, the corset collapsing inward. No matter how hard the White Woman pulled with her fingers, the bones would go no tighter, nor would they touch my skin.
I was 68.0 pounds of imaginary girl.
Waking up one August morning, I looked in the mirror. Before me was the lion-faced witch who spoke my every word, commanded my every movement, and promised me things I had already owned only to sacrifice in her secret ceremonials. I took off my clothes, the bone corset included, only to look and see two White Women in the mirror. She had taken off her silver robes, and I had taken off my skin: twins.
The second time I was admitted to the hospital, I made the choice to go. Good timing: my 13-year-old heart was devouring itself.
Forty-nine days, 31 of which without the comfort of seeing the sun, no outpatient. It was then that I met the long-haired-elven-pink princess, the photographer-poet roommate, and the professionally-ill-forever child; it was then that I was not the perfect patient.
A war was being waged on the grounds of my mind. The White Woman won many, if not all, of the early battles; I paid my punishments in bed rest, one-on-ones, secret situps, and incompletes. Throughout my years of pursuing perfection, I had believed that mistakes were committed by a failure, yet in those 49 days, I made more mistakes and gained more than weight as a result. I gained knowledge, learning the sort of lessons that little girls often do not. I became the golden sunshine welcomed after a long winter. I became an old book, cracked at the spine, ready to be opened on a rainy day.
Some may say I was “normal” again. I don't argue, for at some point in their life – whether today, or their last dying breath – they'll learn. I remain that old book.
Always shall I be that book, for anyone, as so many have been cracked-open books for me to learn from.
I still fight the White Woman, but in places other than my mind and rarely on a daily basis. I got off the hamster wheel. Sometimes, when I sleep, I dream.
The bone corset is in the back of my closet, rotting.
This piece has been published in Teen Ink’s monthly print magazine.
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