Grace Under Pressure

I took a step over the summer of 2010 in rejecting my love affair with anorexia. For most of my adult life, I've envied the skinniest girls, the ones with their ribs and their collarbones protruding. I've had the fantasy of returning to my lowest weight of 92 pounds at my height of five feet, six inches. Visiting the pro-ana (short for anorexic) websites, I caressed the photos of starving girls with my eyes, chastising myself for not having the discipline to appear as they do. I've imprisoned myself in a cell without bars for the last two-plus decades; enduring a sentence imposed by my warped psyche, eating miniscule amounts of food, and exercising in snow, sleet, rain, or shine.

I've starved. I found innovative ways to purge that has resulted in multiple trips to the emergency room. I envied those who were very ill, though in my distorted mind, I was incapable of seeing how ill they—and I—were. Mistaking as fat the excess skin that I pinched between my thumb and forefinger, I was unable to see that I was slowly wasting away. I couldn't visualize my organs shrinking as my body fed off them. Nor could I see that my bones were thinning, or the inevitable fractures in my future. My starved brain could not concentrate except to obsess about calorie counts and fat grams.

When I became too thin, lost too much fat, my curves disappeared and my period ceased. My breasts shrank to the smallest they had ever been, which delighted me. My waist became indistinguishable from my hips. I ceased to be a woman in many ways; a skeleton from any angle is sexless.

For decades I struggled with my sexuality. In high school and college in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was a serious athlete, and many of my teammates were gay. They were my best friends, and I began to wonder if I was gay as well. Finding myself living in a world of confusion with no one to talk to about these painful and conflicting feelings, I turned to drugs—marijuana, and then

cocaine. The drugs were an attempt to nu