Doctor Loftin finishes making note of my weight in her records, and looks up. “I think it’s time for a reassessment of your goals. Tell me your goals, Lacey.”
“They haven’t changed. Maintain my weight. Never go back to the ward.” The Dawnstead Anorexia Inpatient Ward was where I landed myself just over a year ago when my anorexia was at its worst. I lost so much weight in four months that I couldn’t walk, and I temporarily lost my sight and hearing. Everyone around me was terrified, from my roommate who found me collapsed at the bottom of the stairs to my parents when they rushed to the hospital where I’d been admitted. It should have been the most frightening experience of my life, but I felt nothing. You can’t feel anything when you’re starving. My anorexia silenced everything. The memory of not having to feel pain, sadness and fear is an alluring one.
I spent five months on the ward, slowly gaining the weight back. I was getting better, but all the shame and unworthiness came back as I ate. That’s something people don’t tell you about recovery. It makes you feel much, much worse than the actual disease. Suddenly you have the calories to think and your old tricks, the ones you used to pacify your anorexic half, aren’t allowed anymore. So you eat while she screams and screams at you, and you fantasize about tearing the flesh from your bones with your nails because your head is full of agony.
Slowly, it got easier. My treatment taught me how to painfully unstitch that other Lacey from my psyche and admit that I was ill. I could distance myself from her and put her away in that box. I reached a healthy weight and maintained it, and I became an intensive outpatient for four months. That was reduced to weekly therapy and weigh-ins with Doctor Loftin. The therapy will probably never end. Not for years, anyway, and only then if I don’t relapse.
I’m not going to relapse. This week was just a blip.
So far, I’m one of the lucky ones. A lot of people with anorexia backslide and have to become inpatients over and over again. I’m determined to never, ever let that happen. Structuring my life carefully is the way I cope now, not restricting calories. Structure is my deity.
“How does Mr. Blomqvist fit in with these goals?” Doctor Loftin asks.
I look at her sharply. I’m always searching for hidden meaning in her questions because she never tells me outright what she’s thinking. Is she implying that he’s somehow counter to my goals?
“What we have together is straightforward. I have an hour with him every day after our work is finished. It’s something just for me. Just for us.”
It’s heavenly saying us. I’ve never been an us before, even temporarily.
Doctor Loftin’s silence feels like judgment. I hate her silences so much. Does an hour with him sound weird? I wish she’d just tell me what she’s thinking.
I haul a cushion into my lap and start working at a loose thread, scowling down at it like it’s done me a personal injury. “Are you telling me not to do this? Are you implying I’m making a mistake?”
“I’m trying to help you to gain some perspective on something new and important in your life that’s affecting your recovery.”
Oh, she definitely thinks I’m making a mistake. Hearing Mr. Blomqvist be medicalized like this makes my temper ratchet up to a thirteen. The words start spilling uncontrollably out of my mouth. “It wasn’t even Mr. Blomqvist who made me lose a pound. It was worrying about telling you about him. Other people get the luxury of making mistakes in private, but because I’ve got disease everything I do gets trawled out here in front of you. It’s not fair.”
“Do you think sleeping with your boss is a mistake?”
I squeeze my eyes shut for a second. I walked right into that one. I was dreading this all week, and now I’ve done exactly what I feared and made a mess of this. I’m twenty-four, and I have the dating experience of a thirteen-year-old.
I throw the cushion to the other end of the couch, wishing it was a vase I was hurling at a wall. “No. I phrased that wrong. I think he’s very good for me, actually.”
“Masking difficult feelings with sex can—”
“We don’t have sex, actually. He hits me.”
Doctor Loftin hesitates, and then closes her mouth. I know I’m only making it worse, speaking of my relationship with Mr. Blomqvist like I’m too immature to know what I’m talking about, let alone doing. Wanting to shock her rather than communicate. But the unfairness of it all is so wretched. Why can’t I just be normal and choose what I want for myself? Why does everything I do have to be a symptom of my anorexia instead of something precious that’s mine?