The Monster We Made
April 2016
“What does it feel like when you dance?”
“I read once, I don’t know who said it, but somebody said that they knew that in another life they would have flown, so in this life they dance. That is why I dance, it gives me wings, it makes me free. I know that sounds cheesy, but for dancers we have to know why we dance, what fuels us. For some it is the desire for perfection, for others the lack of control in other parts of their lives. I guess for me it is a little bit of everything. It makes me feel like I am in charge of my destiny. It feels like DNA, as if somehow it was encrypted and knit into my very existence. It’s a rhythm, a heartbeat, a place I can always return and that will always be waiting for me.”
This is Lily. Lily is almost 19 years old, she was born and raised in Vallejo, CA to the daughter of a piano teacher and drummer/chef/EMT driver. Vallejo is a hard place to grow up, but she has a thick skin and a loving family. She is an Irish step dancer. She has calluses on her feet and stands up straight, but on the inside she is crumbling. Lily, strong, independent, quirky Lily is trying so hard to hold everything, keep everything under control, that she is now under control of a force much stronger.
This is not a story about Lily, nor is it a story of dancing. This is a story about control. Or rather a lack of control. What does it feel like to have no control? To feel like you’re drowning but never go under. To feel like you’re choking but your sight never goes black. To feel that if you ever loosen your grasp, everything will spill over and you’ll collapse.
Here are the facts: eating disorders are abnormal eating habits that can threaten your health and life. They include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating. One in every two hundred women have an eating disorder. They cause a reduction of bone density, muscle loss, severe dehydration, fatigue, dry hair, brittle nails, acid reflux, and tooth decay. These are the things the Internet and health teachers in High School tell us about eating disorders. We think only scarily skinny girls, victims of the fashion industry, and Kate Moss wannabe’s fall prey to such things as throwing up after every meal.
We never think it could be our strong, dancing cousin, our brilliant best friend, or our wise, caring mothers. We certainly never think it could be ourselves. We think there have to be physical signs of such things as slow starvation. We think, “it’s not bad until I can see my hip bones. Right now I’m fine. I’m just on a diet”. But slowly, day after day, each skipped meal, each counted calorie and sleepless night, adds up and the thing we were trying to control now has a firm grasp around our necks. What we were trying to control now controls us – a monster we created.
This is how it happened for Lily. In the 7th grade she did a report on Eating Disorders. She researched all the causes and effects, but something didn’t add up. She knew this was a bad thing, that’s what the facts told her, but the women in her family, in my family, who we were told suffered from this disease seemed to lead perfectly healthy lives. It couldn’t be that bad if these women were still fine even if they are dealing with these “problems”. Sure, Grandma might pretend to eat a cookie while actually spitting it out in the trash, but she is 76 and perfectly healthy. She’s always been that way, that’s just how the women in our family are.
The seed was planted.
In the 8th grade, Lily joined a new dance school. She was ready to be on a champion path. The school was very solo focused and competitive. No one talked to each other, each girl was a threat to each other’s success. There were no friends there. The teachers were very judgmental of the dancers’ physical bodies—seemingly forgetting that puberty is a really hard time and most girls of that age still are holding on to baby fat. Lily, at the ripe age of 13 and the lithe weight of 124 pounds, realized that she needed to change her body.
“There is this girl, this dancer, Olivia Griffin, she is in ‘River Dance’ and ‘The Lord of the Dance’. I wanted, no I needed, to wear her size solo dress. I needed to dance, and look, just like her. I felt guilty after every meal. I tried to only eat what was necessary to have enough energy to dance. By sophomore year of High School I was so worn out, I had lost the feeling of why I dance, so I quit.”
Not long before she quit dance, Lily had come home one day to find her house had been robbed. The house was a wreck, all electronics were gone, and if Lily and her little brother had not had to change plans at the last minute, they would have been home to witness it all. She began to crack. She didn’t feel safe in her own home. Soon she began to fear her own mind and body. She began to develop terrible anxiety, which soon turned into eating habits. It was occasional at first, but soon became a daily routine. Something stressful would happen and flick a switch in Lily’s brain. She would begin to worry and a stomachache would develop. Nothing would help, except for bread. A lot of bread. Every day the same pattern.
About a year and a half after the patterns of anxiety and binging began, Lily decided to start dancing again and joined a new school. This one was a much more inclusive group, focused on form and dancing more than waist size. The anxiety began to slip away, but the eating habits remained. Before this time she had only purged a few times, only if she had eaten a lot before dance and didn’t want to get sick in class. But the happier she seemed to get and as her life appeared to return to some “normalcy”, the problem got worse. She began working at a winery in Saint Helena, not too far from Vallejo. She was dancing and working, doing the things she loved. On all accounts she should have been happy. But the happiness was strange to her and she needed to feel normal – her kind of normal. For her, and for many who deal with such things, normalcy has to include having a problem. Something that, maybe, makes us feel unique. Or maybe we feel that the happiness is temporary and we fear its end. We feel a need to sabotage the happiness, so that nothing else can. It is in our power. It’s just another pattern.
Just as Lily was beginning to feel that power and control, it was all stripped away. A boy working in the wine tasting room in the winery asked Lily on a date. She had never gone on a date before and so said yes. He wanted more than she could give and he wouldn’t take her “no” for an answer, or rather he didn’t ask her at all. At the end of the night she was left alone, feeling lost and confused. She felt disgusted in herself. She felt dirty. She was not comfortable in her own skin.
She needed to cleanse herself. Every day after that, after eating she would “get rid of it all”, purging herself of the food and the disgust. What had before been a way to feel control, became something she couldn’t control. It comes to a point where you don’t even know you’re doing it, it just happens. Where in the past you may have had to force it, it is now natural. It just becomes another part of the pattern.
There are different kinds of purging styles and mentalities. There are those who eat one Oreo and then purge and others who eat a whole row of Oreos and purge. Then there are those who purge on an empty stomach or after drinking water. No matter the style, it always follows a pattern. That pattern starts years before the problem manifests itself. Lily’s problem began with that report in 7th grade, but didn’t become a real physical hazard until now. It has always been a physiological hazard though.
On the outside, Lily looks perfectly fine. According to her nutritionist though, Lily is more at risk than an Anorexic who is six feet tall and 90 pounds. The physical act of purging is so destructive to the body. The recurrent cycle of binging and purging causes extreme dehydration and a loss of potassium, sodium, and chloride. These chemical imbalances and dehydration means the body is lacking in electrolytes. Electrolytes are minerals in the blood that carry electric charge, meaning they affect the acidity of the blood and muscle function. Without this important charge, the heart begins to struggle and can begin to beat irregularly—leading to an arrhythmia. Lily’s heart is struggling.
Suddenly this “problem” doesn’t seem so insignificant. It doesn’t seem so frivolous. This is not just about a girl who thinks she needs to lose a few pounds. This is a matter of life and death. However, when she finally decided to ask for help and support from those who love her, Lily’s mother said nothing but, “well you don’t look sick”.
It’s hard to hear your daughter is sick. It’s hard to hear that your daughter has a problem, because what if it is your fault? How could have she gotten to this point? How did you never notice? Was it something you said? It’s hard not to blame yourself. And to some extent, the blame is well founded. But the problem isn’t always in something you said or did, it just runs in your blood.
It is in our DNA and we cannot escape it. We are often told that eating disorders are all in our head, it’s just a psychological thing. True, it is psychological. In the same way depression, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia are all psychological and just “in your head”. This in no way lessens the severity of the disease. And whereas in the past eating disorders were solely blamed on insecurities and pressures of society, it has now come to light that they can be written in our genetic code. According to Stephanie Zone, Lily’s psychiatrist in Vallejo CA, “genetics are a huge part to blame, not just because you see it in your family members and are thus influenced, but because you are genetically predisposed.” There are certain gene mutations that significantly increase the risks of developing anorexia nervosa or bulimia and these mutations run in families. This genetic predisposition interacts with the culture to bring about the eating disorders. It’s just a big melting pot of self destruction. The CEO of the National Eating Disorder Association Lynn Grefe explains it thus, “you’re born with the gun, and society–your cultural and environmental circumstance–pulls the trigger.”
We have a perfectly happy, functional family. At least, we pretend we are a perfectly happy, functional family. But just like every family, we have our secrets. There’s a photo on Grandma’s wall of our tall Germanic family—two grandparents, four children, their four spouses, and eight grandchildren—all smiling and waving. You’d never guess from that photo what problems lay underneath. There are so many things unsaid, whispered between the grownups, guessed at amongst the children, and blatantly lied about. There is some deep-seated unhappiness there. Something that makes us have a need for control, something that makes us feel like we are drowning.
Maybe it all began with Mör Mör, Grandma’s mom, a tall, beautiful, stern Swedish woman. We don’t talk about her much. I’ve only seen one picture of her, on her wedding day. She was quiet and shy. There is a stigma amongst the Swedish that thinness is a sign of status and self control. Mör Mör was always very thin. She would tell her daughter, “Susan, you probably shouldn’t have seconds”. She restricted herself and her daughters. When Grandma was 12, her mother disappeared for about a year and a half. She was told it was because of “nerves” or something. In the past Eating Disorders were not really acknowledged and were just considered “hysteria”. They were a reaction to women being bored or melancholy or sexually repressed. These women were usually sent to a home to be treated for this hysteria.
When Mör Mör came back, she was never really the same.
As Grandma grew up, the habits taught to her by her mother manifested deeply into her psychological makeup. She then taught those habits to her daughters. And whether or not they even realized it, those habits were then passed on to us, Lily and I. I remember being at a family reunion. I think I was 8 or 9. I was looking at myself in a long mirror, patting down my puffy red dress. Grandma came over to me and patted me on the head, “don’t worry sweetie, you’ll thin out eventually”.
Statements like these were normal. Just a daily part of conversation. Size and food always at the forefront of our minds.
Last time I had lunch with my Grandma she mentioned how I had finally grown into my face, you could see my cheekbones and collar bones, I have finally thinned out apparently. She sat there picking at a tuna sandwich. I think she maybe ate one bit before professing to be full. She just wasn’t hungry. Her medication made her mouth hurt. Nothing tasted good. She was 95 pounds last I checked.
I remember staying at my aunt’s house when I was young. She would go to the bathroom after every meal. She would be in there a long time, usually with the shower running—drowning out any sounds. She used to tell her daughter to wear a one-piece bathing suit, that way her tummy wouldn’t stick out.
Then there is my sister. She used to sit in the pantry eating spoonfuls of sugar, I guess to help the medicine to go down, in some sardonic way. She was “big boned”. She sought control in a different way. But really it’s all the same.
Such a perfect family. Such a functional family. Just smile and pretend it’s all okay, at least we are all together still.
How can there be so much hidden pain in one family? So much secret pain and so many hidden problems? Things we dare not speak of lest it hints at any weak link in the familial chain.
We don’t talk about the problems, we only talk of the successes. Lily’s dance troupe won second place at world’s last year, but no one mentions how she has been in and out of the hospital for the last two months. We all know the problem exists. It’s part of the family. We see the patterns in every person and every generation, but we don’t do anything about it.
Because if we talk about it, we lose control of it. What little control we even have left of it. Giving it a name, saying those two words out loud, makes it real. And even though it might make us better, we don’t know. And we can’t risk it; we can’t risk losing the control.
So instead, we sit back and we smile. We ignore Grandma’s uneaten sandwiches and nod when someone says how good we are looking. And we watch Lily dance, watch her grow wings. Maybe we can feel that way too.
“I read once, I don’t know who said it, but somebody said that they knew that in another life they would have flown, so in this life they dance. That is why I dance, it gives me wings, it makes me free. I know that sounds cheesy, but for dancers we have to know why we dance, what fuels us. For some it is the desire for perfection, for others the lack of control in other parts of their lives. I guess for me it is a little bit of everything. It makes me feel like I am in charge of my destiny. It feels like DNA, as if somehow it was encrypted and knit into my very existence. It’s a rhythm, a heartbeat, a place I can always return and that will always be waiting for me.”
This is Lily. Lily is almost 19 years old, she was born and raised in Vallejo, CA to the daughter of a piano teacher and drummer/chef/EMT driver. Vallejo is a hard place to grow up, but she has a thick skin and a loving family. She is an Irish step dancer. She has calluses on her feet and stands up straight, but on the inside she is crumbling. Lily, strong, independent, quirky Lily is trying so hard to hold everything, keep everything under control, that she is now under control of a force much stronger.
This is not a story about Lily, nor is it a story of dancing. This is a story about control. Or rather a lack of control. What does it feel like to have no control? To feel like you’re drowning but never go under. To feel like you’re choking but your sight never goes black. To feel that if you ever loosen your grasp, everything will spill over and you’ll collapse.
Here are the facts: eating disorders are abnormal eating habits that can threaten your health and life. They include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating. One in every two hundred women have an eating disorder. They cause a reduction of bone density, muscle loss, severe dehydration, fatigue, dry hair, brittle nails, acid reflux, and tooth decay. These are the things the Internet and health teachers in High School tell us about eating disorders. We think only scarily skinny girls, victims of the fashion industry, and Kate Moss wannabe’s fall prey to such things as throwing up after every meal.
We never think it could be our strong, dancing cousin, our brilliant best friend, or our wise, caring mothers. We certainly never think it could be ourselves. We think there have to be physical signs of such things as slow starvation. We think, “it’s not bad until I can see my hip bones. Right now I’m fine. I’m just on a diet”. But slowly, day after day, each skipped meal, each counted calorie and sleepless night, adds up and the thing we were trying to control now has a firm grasp around our necks. What we were trying to control now controls us – a monster we created.
This is how it happened for Lily. In the 7th grade she did a report on Eating Disorders. She researched all the causes and effects, but something didn’t add up. She knew this was a bad thing, that’s what the facts told her, but the women in her family, in my family, who we were told suffered from this disease seemed to lead perfectly healthy lives. It couldn’t be that bad if these women were still fine even if they are dealing with these “problems”. Sure, Grandma might pretend to eat a cookie while actually spitting it out in the trash, but she is 76 and perfectly healthy. She’s always been that way, that’s just how the women in our family are.
The seed was planted.
In the 8th grade, Lily joined a new dance school. She was ready to be on a champion path. The school was very solo focused and competitive. No one talked to each other, each girl was a threat to each other’s success. There were no friends there. The teachers were very judgmental of the dancers’ physical bodies—seemingly forgetting that puberty is a really hard time and most girls of that age still are holding on to baby fat. Lily, at the ripe age of 13 and the lithe weight of 124 pounds, realized that she needed to change her body.
“There is this girl, this dancer, Olivia Griffin, she is in ‘River Dance’ and ‘The Lord of the Dance’. I wanted, no I needed, to wear her size solo dress. I needed to dance, and look, just like her. I felt guilty after every meal. I tried to only eat what was necessary to have enough energy to dance. By sophomore year of High School I was so worn out, I had lost the feeling of why I dance, so I quit.”
Not long before she quit dance, Lily had come home one day to find her house had been robbed. The house was a wreck, all electronics were gone, and if Lily and her little brother had not had to change plans at the last minute, they would have been home to witness it all. She began to crack. She didn’t feel safe in her own home. Soon she began to fear her own mind and body. She began to develop terrible anxiety, which soon turned into eating habits. It was occasional at first, but soon became a daily routine. Something stressful would happen and flick a switch in Lily’s brain. She would begin to worry and a stomachache would develop. Nothing would help, except for bread. A lot of bread. Every day the same pattern.
About a year and a half after the patterns of anxiety and binging began, Lily decided to start dancing again and joined a new school. This one was a much more inclusive group, focused on form and dancing more than waist size. The anxiety began to slip away, but the eating habits remained. Before this time she had only purged a few times, only if she had eaten a lot before dance and didn’t want to get sick in class. But the happier she seemed to get and as her life appeared to return to some “normalcy”, the problem got worse. She began working at a winery in Saint Helena, not too far from Vallejo. She was dancing and working, doing the things she loved. On all accounts she should have been happy. But the happiness was strange to her and she needed to feel normal – her kind of normal. For her, and for many who deal with such things, normalcy has to include having a problem. Something that, maybe, makes us feel unique. Or maybe we feel that the happiness is temporary and we fear its end. We feel a need to sabotage the happiness, so that nothing else can. It is in our power. It’s just another pattern.
Just as Lily was beginning to feel that power and control, it was all stripped away. A boy working in the wine tasting room in the winery asked Lily on a date. She had never gone on a date before and so said yes. He wanted more than she could give and he wouldn’t take her “no” for an answer, or rather he didn’t ask her at all. At the end of the night she was left alone, feeling lost and confused. She felt disgusted in herself. She felt dirty. She was not comfortable in her own skin.
She needed to cleanse herself. Every day after that, after eating she would “get rid of it all”, purging herself of the food and the disgust. What had before been a way to feel control, became something she couldn’t control. It comes to a point where you don’t even know you’re doing it, it just happens. Where in the past you may have had to force it, it is now natural. It just becomes another part of the pattern.
There are different kinds of purging styles and mentalities. There are those who eat one Oreo and then purge and others who eat a whole row of Oreos and purge. Then there are those who purge on an empty stomach or after drinking water. No matter the style, it always follows a pattern. That pattern starts years before the problem manifests itself. Lily’s problem began with that report in 7th grade, but didn’t become a real physical hazard until now. It has always been a physiological hazard though.
On the outside, Lily looks perfectly fine. According to her nutritionist though, Lily is more at risk than an Anorexic who is six feet tall and 90 pounds. The physical act of purging is so destructive to the body. The recurrent cycle of binging and purging causes extreme dehydration and a loss of potassium, sodium, and chloride. These chemical imbalances and dehydration means the body is lacking in electrolytes. Electrolytes are minerals in the blood that carry electric charge, meaning they affect the acidity of the blood and muscle function. Without this important charge, the heart begins to struggle and can begin to beat irregularly—leading to an arrhythmia. Lily’s heart is struggling.
Suddenly this “problem” doesn’t seem so insignificant. It doesn’t seem so frivolous. This is not just about a girl who thinks she needs to lose a few pounds. This is a matter of life and death. However, when she finally decided to ask for help and support from those who love her, Lily’s mother said nothing but, “well you don’t look sick”.
It’s hard to hear your daughter is sick. It’s hard to hear that your daughter has a problem, because what if it is your fault? How could have she gotten to this point? How did you never notice? Was it something you said? It’s hard not to blame yourself. And to some extent, the blame is well founded. But the problem isn’t always in something you said or did, it just runs in your blood.
It is in our DNA and we cannot escape it. We are often told that eating disorders are all in our head, it’s just a psychological thing. True, it is psychological. In the same way depression, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia are all psychological and just “in your head”. This in no way lessens the severity of the disease. And whereas in the past eating disorders were solely blamed on insecurities and pressures of society, it has now come to light that they can be written in our genetic code. According to Stephanie Zone, Lily’s psychiatrist in Vallejo CA, “genetics are a huge part to blame, not just because you see it in your family members and are thus influenced, but because you are genetically predisposed.” There are certain gene mutations that significantly increase the risks of developing anorexia nervosa or bulimia and these mutations run in families. This genetic predisposition interacts with the culture to bring about the eating disorders. It’s just a big melting pot of self destruction. The CEO of the National Eating Disorder Association Lynn Grefe explains it thus, “you’re born with the gun, and society–your cultural and environmental circumstance–pulls the trigger.”
We have a perfectly happy, functional family. At least, we pretend we are a perfectly happy, functional family. But just like every family, we have our secrets. There’s a photo on Grandma’s wall of our tall Germanic family—two grandparents, four children, their four spouses, and eight grandchildren—all smiling and waving. You’d never guess from that photo what problems lay underneath. There are so many things unsaid, whispered between the grownups, guessed at amongst the children, and blatantly lied about. There is some deep-seated unhappiness there. Something that makes us have a need for control, something that makes us feel like we are drowning.
Maybe it all began with Mör Mör, Grandma’s mom, a tall, beautiful, stern Swedish woman. We don’t talk about her much. I’ve only seen one picture of her, on her wedding day. She was quiet and shy. There is a stigma amongst the Swedish that thinness is a sign of status and self control. Mör Mör was always very thin. She would tell her daughter, “Susan, you probably shouldn’t have seconds”. She restricted herself and her daughters. When Grandma was 12, her mother disappeared for about a year and a half. She was told it was because of “nerves” or something. In the past Eating Disorders were not really acknowledged and were just considered “hysteria”. They were a reaction to women being bored or melancholy or sexually repressed. These women were usually sent to a home to be treated for this hysteria.
When Mör Mör came back, she was never really the same.
As Grandma grew up, the habits taught to her by her mother manifested deeply into her psychological makeup. She then taught those habits to her daughters. And whether or not they even realized it, those habits were then passed on to us, Lily and I. I remember being at a family reunion. I think I was 8 or 9. I was looking at myself in a long mirror, patting down my puffy red dress. Grandma came over to me and patted me on the head, “don’t worry sweetie, you’ll thin out eventually”.
Statements like these were normal. Just a daily part of conversation. Size and food always at the forefront of our minds.
Last time I had lunch with my Grandma she mentioned how I had finally grown into my face, you could see my cheekbones and collar bones, I have finally thinned out apparently. She sat there picking at a tuna sandwich. I think she maybe ate one bit before professing to be full. She just wasn’t hungry. Her medication made her mouth hurt. Nothing tasted good. She was 95 pounds last I checked.
I remember staying at my aunt’s house when I was young. She would go to the bathroom after every meal. She would be in there a long time, usually with the shower running—drowning out any sounds. She used to tell her daughter to wear a one-piece bathing suit, that way her tummy wouldn’t stick out.
Then there is my sister. She used to sit in the pantry eating spoonfuls of sugar, I guess to help the medicine to go down, in some sardonic way. She was “big boned”. She sought control in a different way. But really it’s all the same.
Such a perfect family. Such a functional family. Just smile and pretend it’s all okay, at least we are all together still.
How can there be so much hidden pain in one family? So much secret pain and so many hidden problems? Things we dare not speak of lest it hints at any weak link in the familial chain.
We don’t talk about the problems, we only talk of the successes. Lily’s dance troupe won second place at world’s last year, but no one mentions how she has been in and out of the hospital for the last two months. We all know the problem exists. It’s part of the family. We see the patterns in every person and every generation, but we don’t do anything about it.
Because if we talk about it, we lose control of it. What little control we even have left of it. Giving it a name, saying those two words out loud, makes it real. And even though it might make us better, we don’t know. And we can’t risk it; we can’t risk losing the control.
So instead, we sit back and we smile. We ignore Grandma’s uneaten sandwiches and nod when someone says how good we are looking. And we watch Lily dance, watch her grow wings. Maybe we can feel that way too.