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| Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash |
And the World Goes ‘Round
by Shannon Frost Greenstein
“Is it an amusement park ride with horses?”
“No, it’s not a carousel.”
“Is it an orange vegetable?”
“No, it’s not a carrot.”
I brace myself to bite into a cherry tomato as my roommate pipes up, “…it is a structure in the woods?”
It is obviously not a cabin, but now I have eaten the cherry tomato, and it is taking every ounce of my willpower to chew.
“Mm nmm,” I manage, my eyes squinched shut, my tastebuds wailing, every muscle in my body primed to jump right out of my skin if only my epidermis were removed. I crush the tomato with my molars as many times as I can bear—which is hardly any at all—then finally give up and drink half my water glass in a single swallow to wash the pulpy mess down my throat.
The radio is playing Pharrell Williams. The winter sun shines weakly through a wall of windows. Snow coats the trees outside.
“Is iiiiiiittt…,” a girl across the table draws out, “…a container for coffee?”
That mystifies me for a moment, while I wipe water from my lips and shudder at the memory of the tomato. I wrack my brain, then come back triumphantly with, “No, it’s not a carafe!”
Word games are one of the only things that make mealtimes palatable, and we have been playing “Stump the Teacher” for a solid four or five days by this point. It is less a distraction than an impetus; it is less recreation than fortitude.
“Oh!” cries another young woman, our resident Resident, her eyes lighting up as tends to happen with Christmas decorations or particularly small kittens. “Is it Carbinoxamine??”
The stunned silence which descends upon our table is surprisingly loud, even in the midst of the normal lunchtime cacophony of chatter and silverware and encouragement and tears. It lasts for the span of about three seconds, before laughter and exclamations of exasperation fill our corner of the dining hall.
“It is… not?... Carbin…oxen…amine?” I answer hesitantly.
My roommate admonishes, “No obscure med school references allowed!”
The laughter is necessary; we are all in so much pain.
We are a group of women—teens and college students and grown adults and retirees—all of us frozen in time and engaged in a less-than-enthusiastic sabbatical from our normal lives. Our ages and ethnicities and backgrounds and religious affiliations are as varied as with any cross section of the human population, but we alone understand each other better than anyone else could possibly try, because we are all suffering from eating disorders and none of us can handle them alone anymore.
We are currently in residential treatment at the Renfrew Center for Eating Disorders. Residential treatment is an intensive, 24/7 level of care, reserved for patients in mortal peril who have ventured too far into the dominion of disordered eating to return on their own. We are here, they keep telling us, because our lives have become unmanageable; because the eating disorders we are using to cope with trauma or loss or existential pain are no longer working as they once did. Science has proven residential care to be an effective form of treatment, but residential care is also the complete loss of personal autonomy. We are told what to do, when to sleep, where to go, how to eat… and such real-world luxuries as exercise and caffeine and unlocked doors can only be earned, and are just as easily lost.
“It’s for diabetes!” the woman exclaims. “It’s not that obscure!”
She is a doctor, as my roommate is a student, as the woman next door is a professor who rooms with a grandmother, as I am a writer and a wife and a former ballerina desperately hoping to carry a child in a body that can no longer preserve heat or grow hair. We could not be more different and we are all exactly the same, a living illustration of the little-known truth that eating disorders do not discriminate.
“Well, it’s not Carbinoxamine, either,” I say, stabbing a wilted leaf of lettuce with my fork like I want to hurt it. “And y’all are really far away from guessing correctly.”
Contrary to stereotypes, eating disorders are not just the real estate of privileged, young, white, cishet girls. They are more complicated, conniving, and convoluted than anyone who has never born witness to one can possibly imagine. To borrow a metaphor from Dr. Carolyn Costin—to explain why some people develop eating disorders and some do not—it helps to imagine a firearm.
The gun itself is the genetic predisposition for these conditions, the faulty nucleotides that cling to a family tree and get passed down the line. The bullet is a society that abhors women and venerates weight loss, mis-equating thin with healthy. The trigger is environmental—the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate, extreme stress or childhood abuse or the invisible ripples of trauma—and eating disorders develop when that pistol is actually fired.
“Ten minutes left, girls,” announces one of the dozen counselors on duty, all of whom circle the dining hall like an infantry at every meal.
The radio changes to Beyonce. The sun passes behind a blanket of clouds. The wind gusts, throwing dead leaves and particulate matter noisily against the windows.
Mealtimes at the Renfrew Center are highly structured; we are not allowed to wear shoes. We are observed from multiple angles, by multiple people, the entire time we are in the dining hall. Calories are measured and macronutrients are logged and anything that isn’t consumed is just transposed into another meal supplement to drink later down the line. Residential treatment is designed to remove all obligations from a patient’s life—to reduce all possible stressors and barriers, to focus on survival alone as the one thing that matters—and thus our only responsibility is relearning how to eat.
Unable to face the prospect of my last cherry tomato, I switch to the bland sweet potatoes and grimace at the texture. My stomach feels distended and hard; I would very much like to stop eating now. But stopping eating is what got me here – because of the pain of abuse, because of the misery of mental illness, because of infidelity and low self-esteem and an inclination for self-harm, all of which hurt less when you stop eating, all of which seem less chaotic when you have something to control, all of which are anesthetized by the biophysical consequences of starvation, when your brain shuts down your emotional center to conserve energy, when being less than yesterday becomes more important than waking up tomorrow at all – and I have therefore lost the privilege of deciding these things for myself.
“Is it…” begins my roommate, still hell-bent on winning this round of Stump the Teacher, still searching for the word I am cloistering in my brain and hoping she will not pinpoint as “carcinogenic”. Then a new song begins.
“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh,” I hear the iconic intro, my ears perking up at the familiar notes, my forebrain quickly running through its archives to correctly identify the song. The voice is a tenor; the key is D Major.
I am a hairsbreadth from recognizing the title when I notice the upbeat counselor who just informed us of the time. Her eyes are wide with panic; her face is frantic with foresight. For a millisecond, she is frozen in space, glued to the floor, a woodland creature gone tharn in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.
The she is sprinting, and I mean sprinting, to the unassuming box against the wall, her checkered Vans slipping on the linoleum floor, her outstretched fingers grabbing for the volume knob, for the power button, for the plug or the power strip or literally anything she can find to stem the soundwaves emitting from the radio, because Freddie Mercury is about to inform a room full of women with Anorexia or Bulimia or Orthorexia or Binge-Eating Disorder that fat-bottomed girls make the rocking world go ‘round, and there is enough collective body dysmorphia in this dining hall to choke a horse.
I burst out laughing.
My husband is a musician and Queen is very highly regarded in our household; I’m well acquainted with the lyrics that are about to drop. I listen as Freddie Mercury requests to lay down by that red firelight, I watch as the counselor finally succeeds in silencing the radio, and I continue to laugh, because the irony is real and I am, oh, so very tired.
“What?” several voices at the table question, as my laughter is verging on unhinged, as I am clearly enjoying the counselor’s noticeable stress with no small amount of schadenfreude.
“This song!” I sputter. But the radio is off, and my tablemates are more familiar with Taylor Swift than Queen, and “fat” is a four-letter word here at the Renfrew Center, never uttered lest it grant the eating disorders we are all fighting even more ammunition. There is no good to be had in sharing this moment of dark humor, even though it is the first thing to bring me true joy in the eight long weeks since I arrived at this facility.
I shake my head and swallow my cackles, brought back to reality when I spot the clock. Now there are only five minutes remaining in the lunch hour, and I still have another cherry tomato to eat. The counselor, recovered enough also to notice the time, calls out a melodious warning to the room at large, encouraging us all to finish. None of us really care about finishing, of course; but none of us really have the bandwidth to deal with meal supplements, either.
In truth, none of us really want to relearn how to eat. None of us really want to be weight-restored. None of us, to be perfectly clear, really want to be here at the Renfrew Center at all. But our lives have become unmanageable; and every moment is a struggle; and at the end of the day in a fight with an eating disorder, only one party gets to win. So, together, we keep eating food we don’t like, and we keep talking about things we’d rather forget, and we keep feeling the discomfort of our emotions instead of numbing them away. Many of us will be here for months. Some of us will find recovery. Others will relapse. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness (excluding Substance-Use Disorder), and not everyone here will ultimately survive.
But whether we heal or we lose, the rocking world goes ‘round… and right now, we have all made the commitment to stick around, to try, to stay present in this life and go ‘round right along with it. Residential treatment is the hardest, most courageous path any of us could have taken, chosen in spite of the eating disorder’s assurances that we are all fine, that we are all fat, that we don’t need any help and we aren’t at all unhappy. We have all come to this table to be redeemed; it is the work that absolves us.
I sigh deeply and regard the tomato. Putting food in my body still feels counter-intuitive; I still long to see my bones through my skin. I am coasting on the hope that this will all be worth it in the end, because recovering from an eating disorder is simply agonizing in real time, each and every step of the way.
They really better make the world go round, I grumble silently, and stuff the tomato into my mouth.
Next to me, my roommate sees my face and reaches out to squeeze my hand. We share a flash of pained empathy, a moment of comradery in the face of tomatoes and self-loathing and weight gain and reclamation. She eats the last cucumber on her own plate and smiles.
“Is it a sweater that buttons down the front?”
“NO, it’s not a cardigan!” I counter gleefully, the bell which signifies the end of the meal also netting me another Stump-the-Teacher victory. The table stands as one, emptying our trays, reuniting with our shoes, heading to weigh-ins or group therapy or EMDR, an approximation of life until any of us is capable of anything more psychically strenuous.
I climb the stairs towards my therapist’s shoebox of an office, pausing by the window to gaze out at the real world below, the deciduous vista immobile and gray beneath a leaden sky. I think about the allure of my hipbones and the glamour of my ribs; about my husband back at home and the baby we hope to conceive; about the empowerment of self-denial and the grief of loss. I think about word games and friendship and the daffodils outside about to emerge from the snow… and then I find enough energy deep in my core to hope that Freddie Mercury might just have it right after all.
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Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) resides in Philadelphia with her soulmate, offspring, and no less than two cats at any given time. She is the author of “Through the Lens of Time,” a forthcoming fiction collection with Thirty West Publishing, and “The Wendigo of Wall Street,” a novella with Emerge Literary Press. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her words appear in McSweeney’s, Pithead Chapel, Nimrod Journal, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. She comes up when you Google her. Insta: @zarathustra_speaks; Bluesky & Twitter: @shannonfrostgre; shannonfrostgreenstein.com
