"when I see those photos, I know I’m indulging a flimsy romanticization of my eating disorder"
a guest essay from "A Grain of Salt" newsletter writer Kate Raphael
hello hello!
This week I’m so honored to share a guest essay from Kate Raphael. Kate is a writer based in Boston, Massachusetts. She writes a Substack newsletter, A Grain of Salt, featuring essays on identity and recovery. Her previous work has appeared in The Sunday Long Read, Catapult Magazine, and Well + Good. You can find her on Twitter @KateRaphael1.
"when I see those photos, I know I’m indulging a flimsy romanticization of my eating disorder"
guest essay by Kate Raphael
The other day I caught myself scrolling through photos from the weeks I spent in Boulder, Colorado in July 2020. I paused at a shot of me walking away from the camera after soaking my legs in a creek. My shorts were baggy around my thighs, my veins bulging out of my forearms. I looked closely at the pixels that made up my limbs—tanned and long and lanky, skeletal at the joints. I didn’t look healthy or like I do now; I didn’t look like a human body.
I get stuck on photos like this one a lot. What draws me in is also what’s so unsettling: in looking not quite human, I imagine myself exempt from human limitations. And under this view, my eating disorder is a superpower, something that makes me extraordinary.
On paper those weeks in Boulder were surreal and blissful. I was pretending to escape the pandemic for a month, relishing the tail end of my paid vacation before I stumbled through months of unemployment, climbing through gorgeous running trails and then dipping into valleys of wildflowers. I didn’t feel earthbound; I’d escaped human problems, a human body. I’d ascended into a running paradise where I was fast and invincible.
When I look at this fantasy now, when I see those photos, I know I’m indulging a flimsy romanticization of my eating disorder. I miss that tiny body. I miss feeling so in control of every bodily urge—denying hunger, and then, later, not feeling hunger. I know it was false control and an unsustainable size. But even in recovery, the idea of being untouchable by humanness and inhabiting a superior body that offers escape, is powerful and seductive.
Of course, photos record only a single snapshot in time. So much is not captured in the frame: shame, secrecy, long-term health repercussions I knew about but wouldn’t entertain, the isolation that resulted from needing to protect my disorder. None of that is visible in a two dimensional photo, which documents only what I had to give up in the name of recovery.
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I recently finished Empty, Susan Burton’s memoir chronicling her decades-long struggle with multiple eating disorders. This was my second attempt at reading it—I first picked it up last summer after I’d heard Burton discuss her experience with EDs, which she’d kept secret for decades, on This American Life. Her story resonated, but I couldn’t get through the book. It was exquisite and honest, written so close to the bone, and too close to my own experiences. But in the last month, I felt “sturdier” in my recovery, a word Burton borrows from iCarly star Jennette McCurdy and which the two discussed on the radio. And so I dove into the memoir.
Reading Empty elicited that nostalgic photo album feeling, as if I was flipping through pictures of myself. I share so much of my life with Susan Burton: the obvious mental illness, but also the conflict with my mother (in part around drinking), devotion to running and compulsion for mileage, our stoner identities and love for Boulder, passion for writing and desire to be recognized for it, our undergraduate college experiences at Yale.
A large portion of the book details Burton’s years at Yale, taking the reader to the places where she’d ritually eat (Claire’s Corner Copia, Ashley’s Ice Cream, Yorkside) and the places she’d ritually run (up Hillhouse Ave, the top of East Rock, where you can look out from a cliff face to see all of New Haven). In these chapters I felt a kinship with Burton, an understanding of the landscape she’d inhabited and who she was. I have been to that place, too! I thought, almost giddily. We are the same!
And through the whole book, Burton records her thoughts from the depths of her eating disorders: the way she wanted her stomach to fold in half, the way a feeling of emptiness allowed space for everything else in her life, the way she came to see her anorexic state as what she was “supposed” to look like—the real her—while a bigger version of her body, that was the aberration. Burton’s disordered thoughts were snapshots of my mind. I have been to that place, too. I thought again.
It was sobering to read an account of someone’s eating disorders that so precisely articulated my own thoughts. Our stories are not the same; we are distinct people with distinct experiences. But there’s a common trap, perhaps more aptly, a symptom, of eating disorders where we think we are the only ones experiencing what we are experiencing. Ironically, this exceptionalism is typical among those who suffer from EDs. Burton and I both thought our eating disorders made us special, distinguished us from everyone else (in both exceptional and shameful ways). The fact that we have so much in common, the fact that I see this portrait of a young woman who, from some angles, could be me, is humbling (I am not special), disconcerting (there are so many of us), and comforting (herein lies solidarity).
I still look at old photos of myself sometimes. I see that picture from Boulder and I miss the body and the power and the weeks of escaping human problems. But the fact of any photograph is that it’s time past. I can visit that moment in time, but it’s futile to try and live there. My life did not exist in that sun-soaked Boulder photo. The worst parts of my eating disorder happened outside that frame (all the things I did and hid from the friends I was on the trip with), and the best parts of my life now happen outside the frame.
In the photo from Colorado that I can’t stop looking at, I’m walking away from the camera. I know where I was going (back to our car), but I like to imagine that I have somewhere better to be. Somewhere sturdier, fuller, brighter. Maybe I’m headed there now.
P.S.
If you loved reading Kate’s essay, and want to share your own experiences with eating disorder recovery, body image struggles, diet culture, etc. with the readers of weightless, send me a note at juliegall95@gmail.com.