Secrets and Lies

A quiet weekend – I was supposed to see two friends in the evenings, but both got sick. One, frankly, I was relieved about. She’s not a close friend, but she’d invited me round for “wine and nibbles,” and I wasn’t sure how I’d handle it, since she is the type that likes a boozy midweek lunch (and in fact, I’d had one with her last summer, which stretched on longer than I would have liked.)

Saturday I had the first of what will be 8 Saturday sessions in this program. The first hour was a lecture about denial, which I didn’t find particularly useful, only because I’ve certainly been admitting I’ve had a problem for several years now, and that, in general, the only time I’ve ever managed not to binge is if I restrict instead. If there has been denial, I think it’s really only been in that I thought I could handle this without resorting to stronger measures. But who knows? Maybe – probably – I’ll discover more denial as I get farther in.

The second hour involved this exercise where you have to tell other people in the group their barriers to recovery (using a list) and what their strengths are, and of course, they do it for you. A bit difficult to do in the first week, since nobody really knows anyone else. I was pleased to have gotten one of my strengths was that I was friendly and open. One of my barriers was that I am self-pitying, which, hmmm, I’m honestly not sure is the right word for what the guy was trying to say – the choice of this, he said, was based on my comment in one of the groups about being ashamed of having an eating disorder; of wishing I could just claim I was an alcoholic, because really, an eating disorder sounds so unbelievably lame sometimes. Like I’m being chased by some cartoon slice of cake or something. (For sure I abuse alcohol sometimes, but I don’t think I’m an addict. I’ve never craved alcohol the way I’ve craved cake, that’s for sure. And I can put limits on it the way I’ve never been able to with food.)

I’m a bit impatient to get more into the sharing of stories, which, given that my favorite OA meetings are always the ones where someone tells his or her life story, isn’t a surprise. I’ve caught some very occasional glimpses, and it’s hard to resist pulling out a notebook and writing things down, because the details are so telling: the woman who’d put on a face mask so her husband couldn’t kiss her when she came home and smell the alcohol on her breath; another one who takes cabs on really hot days because she can’t bear to wear summer clothes and being on the tube fully covered would be unbearable. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m not writing a story here; that in some way, my constant analysis and the picking out of details is what keeps me not present, in the same way I use food to remove myself from the moment. This morning at an OA meeting (we’re required to attend at least one 12-step meeting a week) I listened to a woman share about standing at the bottom of a beautiful mountain only concerned about the size of her thighs, and I thought back to all the places I’ve been that I mostly remember through the prism of whether I was bingeing or restricting at the time. For example: Beijing (restricting), Venice film festival 2005 (binged so much the clothes I had with me didn’t fit at the end of the week and a half and I had to buy things from some Italian supermarket), Cambodia (restricting; grateful when Friend Bearing Chocolate was ill because it meant I could eat exactly as I pleased.)

I have to do some writing – actually, quite a bit of writing – before tomorrow’s session, about some of the worst episodes of this illness and the consequences of my behavior. Five episodes, at least half a page apiece. A couple of them have appeared on this blog, some quite nakedly, others more obliquely. For the most part, I struggle to pick out episodes, though, only because some I don’t remember in sufficient detail and didn’t cause sufficient harm – just the constant drip-drip-drip that eventually makes the sink overflow. I know I lied all the time to be able to eat/not eat/exercise. I refused dinner invitations (and lunch invitations and breakfast invitations) because I didn’t want to face eating at a restaurant, or because I was hoping that was the one day I’d be able to start a diet, or because it was the first week of a diet and I didn’t want to chance it. I lied to friends passing through town because I didn’t want them to see me at the weight I was at. It’s excruciating to write these things, but – so goes the theory, I think – less so than keeping them hidden.