Tomorrow I will start over, I thought. Tomorrow I will buy more sardines and more cereal and get back on my diet. — Robert Radin, Noche Triste
A few years ago, I chose to be sick for a while. The accompanying diagnosis was a formality. I’d spent the months in the lead-up to the diagnosis cycling rice crackers, pickles, and toothpaste, waking up in the afternoons to bluish-purple fingernails and low heart-rate notifications from a smartwatch, and staying up past dawn watching strangers eat copious amounts of processed food in a vicarious attempt to satisfy my own hunger. I’d spent the weeks in the lead-up to the diagnosis wandering a humid Baltimore on my own at midnight, wearing a heavy backpack, trying to burn calories I hadn’t consumed. I’d spent the days in the lead-up to the diagnosis stripping down to my socks and weighing myself one, two, three times per day, hoping I’d be thin enough to attend an upcoming consultation at an academic eating disorder program. I’d spent the hours in the lead-up to the diagnosis rehearsing facial expressions in a small mirror, preparing to feign concern when a psychiatrist would soon confirm that I’d done everything right.
The other details are less interesting—I had a brief inpatient stay for stabilization and have since recovered rather uneventfully in admitting that self-deprivation is boring—but the point is that, back then, there was a belief that I was improving myself by shrinking, that a formal diagnosis was an achievement. And not in an abstract, esteem-seeking way. Between staring down at the digital scale in my bedroom and staring up at the vital signs monitor in the emergency room, I genuinely felt I’d become measurably healthier to the extent that my constricted physical measurements separated me from others: I interpreted my severe bradycardia as high cardiac efficiency. I interpreted my mild underweight as marginally-improved endurance capacity. I was a runner. I was on my university’s cross-country team. In that context, anorexia neared me to a nebulous ideal of the lean, ascetic endurance athlete—the one who didn’t eat, but instead fueled. The one whose protruding collarbones and sharp elbows evidenced a preternatural commitment to whittling away that which was deemed non-vital. That was true for a while, maybe through the prodrome of the anorexia. It wasn’t true later on, but I guess I managed to convince myself it was.
I think about the things that have changed since then. I notice I’ve changed physically. It looks like the scars on my left forearm have faded a little bit. When I undress in the bathroom, I try to focus on the floor. My abdomen is softer. I’m fatter. I’m bigger, because I’ve changed mentally as well. Those scars seem smaller today. They don’t itch as often. I can hide them now, because I’ve grown past conspicuous mortification. I’m not proud of them anymore. I still want to shrink. Sometimes there might not be anything I want more than to shrink, to be miserable and to know I’m the thinnest guy in a locker room, to be so myopic that knowing I’m the thinnest guy in a locker room is worth being miserable. But I’m bigger now, and maybe I’m lazier too, because I’m not shrinking yet.
I recently read Noche Triste, a brief reflection on a singular male experience of anorexia. I admittedly read it because I wanted to build the courage to become sick again, and while that didn’t work, some of what the author shared resonated with me:
Self-starvation is a performance with a paradox, because the same thing that makes you visible makes you invisible.
Tried to Walk 