On November 4th, 1999, I will celebrate the one-year anniversary of being free of the physical grip of bulimia nervosa. Nearly a year ago, I decided to quit the habit cold turkey; like a compulsive nicotine junkie who finally realizes their lungs are about to collapse into shriveled pockets of toxic black taffy if they continue to indulge in two or three packs a day. The junkie will probably experience headaches, nausea, and extreme irritability for several weeks, until their body learns to function normally again without nicotine. I don’t believe however, that my body will ever adjust to functioning without daily starving, or binging and purging, because my mind won’t let it. The funk is in me as long as I live.

I use the term “funk” synonymously with “eating disorder“ primarily because I refuse to think of myself as eating disordered. I hate the sound of it. I’ve heard it murmured in secretive whispers to my parents by too many somber psychologists. I’ve heard my own voice scream it through hot tears that reddened sucked-in cheeks. I’ve seen it written all over my reflection, plastered to bony hips and stretched across a chronically empty stomach, etched on every single rib as one by one they found their way out of the fat to strain against my skin. I’ve seen it floating in the toilet like partially digested Alpha-Bits suspended in half a gallon of chocolate non-fat frozen yogurt; watched it swirl away to dance through the sewage pipes with the rest of the shit that people don’t want in their systems. I’ve seen it on the yellowed fingertips that caressed the back of my throat two, sometimes three times a day for two years. The funk haunts me. It owns me.

The funk breathes out of every cigarette I systematically pump through my lungs and reminds me that I started smoking as a way to stop eating. It is there when I skip breakfast before going to classes, substituting energy-giving carbohydrates and proteins with coffee, non-dairy creamer, and three blue packets of artificial sweetener. It is there as well when I return from class later in the evening and trudge up the stairs of my apartment with a numbing hunger headache. It hisses obscenities at me when I swallow the last bite of a tuna salad sandwich while mentally adhered to a Seinfeld re-run. If I’m really feeling it inside me, I may saturate my occipital lobes with the siliconed figures on Baywatch, letting the funk live vicariously through them. Regardless, I religiously occupy my mind with television or the back and side panels of a cereal box whenever I eat because the funk hates food. I must divert its attention elsewhere so that it doesn’t send me apprehensively sneaking into the bathroom and flicking on the fan so that my roommates can’t hear the muffled gags and coughs.

Other times, I sit alone in the grass on campus so it can devour the skin and bones that reside beneath the $80 blue jeans of former homecoming queens, head cheerleaders, and those voted most attractive by their senior class. I have to feed it these images because it no longer finds the qualities it needs in my reflection. There is a soft layer of flesh that encompasses my thighs and pads my butt. My collarbone no longer looks as if it is about to puncture through parchment-like skin. I can no longer squeeze my breasts into the size 32-A miracle bras that used to hang on my frame, rendered useless with nothing to support.

Contrary to what the posters in the University women’s restrooms tell you, the funk doesn’t hang around me because I think I’m fat. I know that I appear tall and slender to most people I encounter. I know that I am outwardly an attractive individual, but the funk knows that internally I’m not quite tall enough, not quite thin enough, not quite quick enough, smart enough, or talented enough. I am just not enough. My obsessive perfectionism is the lifeblood of the funk. It is the part of me that stays up until 4 am studying for a test I know I will pass without even opening the book, that practices the same six measures of Bach’s prelude in C minor for forty-five minutes, that makes certain there isn’t a single crumb of deep fried onion-blossom clinging to the gloss of the hardwood floors beneath my tables at the end of the night.

The funk tells me to snort cocaine and swallow tiny pellets of PCP, to inject my veins with opiates so that I can look like one of Calvin Klein’s starving beauties. So I tell the funk to shut the hell up and stay away from my eggshell self-esteem as I suck the periwinkle haze from my meticulously hand-blown glass pipe. It is forced into the farthest corner of my psyche as the euphoria sweeps through my senses, only to return when the buzz is gone, or when I awake, whichever comes first. I am left with the reality, sitting alone on the exhausted mauve carpet of my bedroom, that the funk has fallen demonically in love with me; and perhaps I return its sick notion of intimacy, for I cannot imagine life without it.

© Lyndie (20)

Lyndie is now 27 years old and a high school English teacher.

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