An Insecure Excerpt

Ickies. Sorry I was such a frowny face yesterday. But we all have those days, yes? So today, rather than wallow in the miserable, I thought I’d share a couple things I am grateful for:

1. …I am setting up a meeting with a counselor at the U of U in a day or two because this broad is finally going back to school to finish her degree! Do we understand how B I G this is???
I think it’s time to make something of myself. Don’t you?  And I am so very excited to go for yet another dream of mine...
2. …and, just to tickle you, here is a small, small portion of the book I am writing: I know a lot of you are interested, so I thought I’d post it here. Let me know what you think, ‘mkay? (Note, most of this is factual (BUT NOT ALL, and names and certain dates have been changed to protect others privacy.) And and a big big BUT: this is majorly a rough draft, so there is a good chance that most of what I am posting will be revised again and again and again and again…this is already my 4th draft…If you'd like, lemme know what you think:
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[Insert date:] the day I walked into the [treatment center] for my assessment – that is, an appointment with a therapist who asks extensive questions about my oh so scintillating past and my eating disorder behaviors to see if I actually do, in fact, need to have inpatient treatment for my anorexia.

I was nervous. I remember I was wearing some pink capri’s with little lavender flowers on them and a pink shirt that was a girls size ten. At 5’11”, I looked like an overgrown, gawky, eleven year old boy. I’ve seen that shirt since and am in awe of how I even fit my arms into the sleeves. My girls size twelve capris hung loosely on my butt, and as I sat in the lobby awaiting a therapist I knew nothing about except that her name was *Beth, I remember feeling fat. I picked at my manicured nails which had grown out and needed a fill. My mom was sitting next to me pretending to read a magazine, and as she watched me nervously jiggle my leg up and down, she asked,

“Do you want me to go in there with you?”
“No, I think I’ll be okay on my own.”

If I had any opportunity to lie (see, the lies: they’re already coming) in my assessment and get out of inpatient treatment, then I was going to do it. Hell yeah! My mother being in the office would provide me with no opportunity to work on my drama skills.

I looked at my watch. I was impatient. This Beth was fifteen minutes late. I remember thinking her delay was so unprofessional, and now, looking back, I smile to myself. I didn’t yet know that Beth would proceed to be late for EVERY SINGLE SESSION we would ever have. And that was just Beth: sweet, distracted, can’t-be-punctual-to-save-her-life Beth.

The door opened. There she stood. She was wearing a yellow shirt with jeans, and her long blonde hair was in a braid. This wasn’t what I was expecting. I was expecting some old fat lady with an old lady fro ‘do who would be wearing a suit and holding a briefcase or something. Anything but this cool looking person that had the kindest eyes I had ever seen.

“Meg? You ready?”
I smiled and stood up. I was trying as hard as I could to appear normal, sane, not-crazy. After all, I had decided, you needed to be certifiably mad to land yourself in a treatment center for eating disorders, and I. WAS. NOT. CRAZY. And I wasn’t too thin, either. Shit. Was the entire world blind?

Beth led me down the hallway to her office. As I walked down the corridor, I noticed hanging on the walls masks made of paper mache. I looked around me, horrified. These were the scariest, most depressing things I’d ever seen. They were all painted with black or dark colors with words all in capital letters like PAIN and FEAR and FAT and SHAME. How LAME, I decided. Expressing my emotions – positive or negative – especially in a creative way was something I was not familiar with. Where were the flowers and rainbows? The pink and yellow paint? Where the hell were my parents potentially thinking of putting me? You really DID have to be crazy to be in a place like this. Black paint and low self-esteem? Shit, dude.


We stepped into her office, and I was grateful to get away from the rows of masks leering at me. I looked around me. I was in a small office that was, undoubtedly, the messiest, most cluttered place I had ever been. Again, my idea of an all business, no-nonsense woman looking down her nose at me (thinking I was fat, no doubt) asking me questions in her spacious, sparsely furnished office was shattered. This woman obviously wasn’t an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist, and I liked that.


I sat down on the sofa. I checked myself: sit up straight, keep hands in my lap. I wanted to shake my foot (my anxiety was through the roof) but I knew better than to do so in front of her. I was sane, well put together. I needed her to see my façade. Suck in my stomach. Smile. Will the tummy not to growl with hunger.
She looked at me and smiled, asked me how I was doing.
“I! Was! Great! Thanks for asking!”
She just looks at me.  Smiles a sad smile.

We dove right into the questions. Beth asks me things like, Tell me about your family, how is school going, what are your hobbies, how long have you been having eating problems? It’s huge, I have nine siblings. School’s great, I get straight A’s. I like to read and write. And play sports. And model. I don’t really have eating problems per se, I just need to watch my diet because I model. You understand, of course. It was working. I appeared calm, cool, collected. Maybe I was a little too skinny, but once she realized how very fine, how very stable I was, my weight would be overlooked. Perhaps I had a fast metabolism; perhaps it was genetics, whatever.

Just so long as she believed the lie.

Beth asked me about the sports I liked to play. I told her how much I loved volleyball, and she enthusiastically told me that her daughter loved it too. We started talking about the sport, about what position I played and how long I had played. I found myself relaxing despite myself. My previous experience with a therapist had not been good or even mediocre and I found myself thinking that I could actually talk to her. I mean really talk. Woah. Weirdness, here. Stop. Put up the wall again. This woman is not your friend.

She looked at her watch. We had already gone fifteen minutes past the hour. Again, this was something I was not familiar with. The therapist I had been seeing out-patient set a clock that dinged when the sixty minutes was up. I’m serious. It really mothereffing dinged, though I didn’t mind. I was always hoping I’d hear the ding long before I actually did, cuz therapy S-U-C-K-E-D. Music to my ears, baby. She was a fifty-something woman who was short. I mean really short. As in, oh, about a foot shorter than me.
This gave me a serious inferiority complex. Can you take somebody seriously whose legs are so short that they swing in her office chair? Really?
She wore plaid one-size-fits-all dresses and moon-boots. And old grandma shawls.
This is not a lie.
She also drew fat people on her white-board, with round little tummies and arms and a round smile.
This freaked me out to no end. Everyone draws stick-figures when trying to represent a person. I was anorexic. She drew fat people. It was just weird. And her glasses were big and made of plastic.
And really, I could keep going.

But Beth, well, she seemed cool. I seemed important enough to be kept past the hour even though she had other appointments. She didn’t seem even a little odd and she certainly didn’t seem like someone who would draw fat people on a white-board, no kidding.

“Oops! I’ve gotten so caught up in talking to you I’m forgetting to ask you questions.” She for reals seemed to get side-tracked easily, but in a good way. I was having fun talking to her. “Let’s keep going. …Okay, have you ever been abused? Physically? Sexually?”
I smile. “What an odd question to ask someone whom you’ve never met before.”
“Okay….,” she says slowly. “Is there anything else you want to tell me? Any other eating disorder behaviors that we haven’t covered?”

I pause. There is something, but no. What the hizell am I thinking? Why would I tell her this? Why would I tell her something that would more than likely help lock me up? She looks at me, waiting. Those eyes, so kind. Deep breath.

“Yeah, there is something.” I proceed to tell her about how much I had been abusing Ipecac (everyday, I couldn’t stop) and that it was making my heart beat erratically. I often couldn’t stay conscious after ingesting it. She seems so concerned about it, so worried. I am not used to this. To me it wasn’t a big deal.

My mom is called back to her office and Beth tells her that I need inpatient treatment immediately, that the Ipecac coupled with my extremely emaciated BMI was putting my life in jeopardy. That one truth, that slip-of-the-tongue fact about my Ipecac use, well, that one reality more than likely was the last nail in the coffin putting me into treatment, and going into treatment was what started all the lies, the problems, the how-to-stay-sicker list I would keep in my head. In other words, telling the truth brought on the lies.

This I call the Great Irony of My Life.

My mom sighs. She already knows this truth: that her daughter will die without help. “Okay. We’ll do it.”

My admit day was set for the following week, on [insert date]. I had a week to prepare, a week to say goodbye to my friends and family and teachers. I would be missing high school graduation, missing speaking at my seminary graduation, missing the end-of-the-year parties, missing my boyfriend going into the MTC to begin serving an LDS mission.

My life was about to change. I thought for the better. How could it not be? I was supposed to be getting help, gaining weight, recovering from anorexia. {Insert treatment center] was supposed to make me alllll better, give me some bad ass bandaid that was strong and could keep all the pain at bay.  How wrong I was. It was all about to get much, much worse.
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Bah!  Momma feels insecure about sharing this...(and sorry this post was so long; I rarely post long ones because I know they get boring.  It's TOTES okay if you didn't finish it!)