Rage

Hi, my name is Stephanie.  I'm a bulimic and purging anorexic.  Hi, Stephanie, the room responds, a range of inharmonious intonations sing sanctimoniously around me.  This is how my declarations begin at my ABA meeting, which stands for Anorexics and Bulimics Anonymous.  The OA meetings, Overeaters Anon, hold a different classification entirely: I'm a compulsive overeater, stopping short of the rest of my title to be safe.  The myriad of proclamations itself is confusing, causing me to question who I am.  Is that why I'm here?  I take a deep breath.  My smile weakens, my lip quivers, my fingers rattle as I reach for my water bottle, my grasp relentless in its need to hold on.  I have found it's easier for me to direct my speech to the object in my hands, my concentration focusing in on the words spilling from within.  Eye contact distracts me from saying what I am feeling, becoming too concerned that I'm not offering my speech to each listener equally.  So my water bottle is my audience.  

Honesty sucks.  I've discovered in the past 24 hours that I'm still angry with my mom, the resentment like an unlit match, flaring up as soon as it strikes the phosphorous strip.  It's such a cantankerous issue, especially with the words available for all to read.  I avoided family therapy at Ridgeview for fear of dragging my parents through the muck of my disorder yet again.  My idealist mentality superseded my mental health. I don't want to crawl back into my pitted hell, drawing the curtains from the emotional pain of not only myself, but of the one person I want to love me most.  I need to objectify my recovery; the stones that are weighing me down need to be removed gently, cascading to the bottom as I levitate to the surface, not thrown vehemently at the people who watched me drown.  I want the storm to break between my mother and me, for my father to arrest his blame for what I've adopted, and for me to write without hesitation of insulting my parents I hold so dear.

I have come to the realization how progressive my ED state truly is.  Very few bulimics I have met binge and purge as often or as long as I do, and I am left to wonder why.  I have not suffered from sexual molestation, physical violence, or emotionally scarring boyfriends.  I suffer from a childhood riddled with an emotionally vacant mother, an infinitely loving father incapable of combatting my mothers' anger, stretches of my own rage masked with reticence that lasted weeks at a time, a violation of my privacy connected to her fear of acceptance.  It's interesting how my mothers' insatiable fear of not being loved by her own child enflamed my desire to be loved by her.  I thrived under the attention of my friends' mothers, lingering in my friend Emily's kitchen with her mom for hours, perfecting my skills as a daughter under roofs not my own.  Back at home I stomped up the carpeted stairs, blasting my steps under me for emphasis, slamming the door shut to make sure my mom heard my silence loud and clear.