A Story of Recovery:
Personality of Extremes
Like most people, I always thought I was very different.
Unlike other families in my white, suburban world, my father was an alcoholic and didn’t live with us; my mother was the breadwinner. We moved frequently, following her academic career, and lived in school-owned properties rather than in a home of our own. My sisters and I stopped attending public school after eighth grade and spent our high school years living in dormitories, surrounded by Vanderbilts, Duponts, and Rockefellers, girls from lower Connecticut, and from the western suburbs of Boston. In spite of our well-endowed education, we had little money. Our mother became influential in the world of private schools and colleges and a national advocate for girls. We were raised with high expectations of our lives as women, in the midst of her adoring students and colleagues.
I was always conscious of the need to perform, to measure up to the likes of my mother and to the girls who filled her life. And even though she would frequently state that comparisons are odious, I more frequently felt that I didn’t and couldn’t measure up. I compared myself to everyone.
In adolescence, my weight became my deepest source of insecurity. Always athletic and lively, I nevertheless loved to eat. I found solace in stealing away with handfuls of goodies just to think and relax. Sweets and snacks accompanied late night exam-cramming, and major events were described by the food they involved. Occasional celebratory trips with my mother to Friendly’s for dinner always ended with her grinning and suggesting we each pick out our favorite dessert. And as we spooned in the last mouthful, she would admonish us both, “We shouldn’t have done that!” She, of course, was tall and slender. I was 5’5” and approaching 165 pounds.
I learned in college how to balance smoking, track, and dieting, and found the nervous energy associated with sex a powerful antidote to my frenzied food consumption. I had also learned that being different protected me from the feared banality of being normal— and fat. I was a radical feminist and angry anti-war activist. I sought out urban hotspots and situations rife with racial tension. I eschewed the Ivy League men and ran with the outspoken ones in the SDS and Black Panthers. I identified with the outsiders and the oppressed. And, if asked at the time, I would have said that none of this had anything to do with being an addict, or with signs of fear, doubt, or insecurity. I was aggressive, ambitious, darkly humorous, and wild.
At the very least, I wanted was a revolution to put things right in the world. The CIA’s involvement in Chile, Nixon’s deception over Watergate, the horror of Viet Nam, injustice against women and gays, and the heritage of American slavery, filled my thoughts. Meanwhile, I began to get used to my personality of extremes—of excess and ferocious control. I could pull productive all-nighters and survive on madly restrictive diets. I thought my dramatic mood swings were simply an expression of the politically dramatic times in which I lived. Upon graduation, I was awarded a fellowship to study political theatre that took me overseas, and there I became involved in an even more hectic existence of left-wing political activism while working in the theatre. I married an actor in the Trotskyist party I had joined and we were blessed with two healthy, beautiful children. I tore out of the marriage after four years and into years as a single mother: acting and writing plays, organizing political events, and spouting the Party line. Cigarettes took the place of many meals, and I fed my children on cheap, instant comfort food.
I loved my children and they loved me. I wrote plays for their schools and ran a children’s theatre workshop in the local housing project. But I could also be short-tempered and exhausted. And my eating started to get worse. Finally quitting cigarette smoking when I met my second husband, my addictive tendencies were restricted to activism and food. Now in my late 30’s, I had lost the capacity to drop a stone (14 pounds) in a fortnight (two weeks) as I’d always been able to do in the past. For my wedding, I had to work for several months to get down to 136 pounds, and I remained there for maybe a week. The moment the wedding was over, the impulsive hunger drove me to more and more secretive eating and anxiety over my weight.
My children, new husband, and I moved back to the States into an apartment in a suburb of Boston. There, the inner demons of self-loathing and frustration began to take over. I was no longer saving the world by making a revolution; even worse, I was beginning to spend money on myself, my children, and our home—just like the self-indulgent, middle-class I’d sought to escape. The more stable and routine my life became, the greater the need for a drug. I would turn every event into a food fest. Our home became the location for annual Fourth of July picnics and Boxing Day Open Houses. Even my monthly book group turned into a spiraling food fest, where each hostess raised the bar on what goodies to offer the group for our evening meeting. While working full-time, raising teenagers, and doing the occasional stint as a waitress at banquets, I also started studying for a Masters degree. Besides genuinely enjoying the study, I also needed to be seen to excel, to be special, vexing over keeping a 4.0 average. The sheer exhaustion of my hectic schedule gave me an excuse for frequent visits to the school vending machines.
Eventually, my son returned to London, my daughter left for college, and my husband and I were without children for the first time in our marriage. I was also beginning to suffer from severe depression, wondering if I was bi-polar, as I swooned from enormously productive highs to deadly lows. Inside the home, I was moody, angry, difficult, and in despair. Outside of the house, I’d revert to being the entertainer and workaholic. And the food began to terrify me—everywhere I looked, I saw something I craved. I’d binge, then run for eight miles; sneak food, then go for long bike rides.
Finally, my soft-spoken husband moved out, and within three months, we had mediated the end to our marriage. I was deeply shamed, knowing that he had finally discovered what I knew to be true about myself: I was a mean and dishonest woman, and he’d had enough.
Suddenly living on my own in a small condo in the city, when the working day was finished, I hid out in private food events. Engaged in a book, or gazing endlessly at some late night TV program, I would find myself on the third plateful of dinner, wondering how all of this food had happened. I didn’t ask myself why. I didn’t even recognize I had a problem—just that being alone with the food was all I wanted in the day, and it terrified me.
Only when I started dating an alcoholic, and began to drink in order to eat less, did I wonder if something serious was afoot. Still, I had 53 years of denial and performance art under my belt, and though unhappy with myself, I couldn’t have sought recovery on my own.
Instead, recovery found me. They say that God works through people, and though this former Marxist would never have embraced such terminology, I can gratefully acknowledge a power greater than myself, working through another person. A new friend invited me out to dinner one evening, and while I watched her eat a healthy dinner with apparent calm, and she watched me struggle to do the same, I shared for the first time in my life that I had compulsive feelings toward food. It was a mildly self-deprecating throw-away comment. I never meant to open up the conversation of a lifetime. But my new friend—and now, for five years my FA sponsor—spoke of her own disease of “fear, doubt, and insecurity.”
Since that conversation, much has changed in my life. The mother who had so wowed and intimidated me in my youth became frail and confused, and recently died, well loved and deeply missed. I am a grandmother myself now, living happily with a sane and loving man. Together, we enjoy our grown children, family, friends, and neighbors. I have learned to weigh and measure my food and my life—an ongoing education that doesn’t require any 4.0 average. And the only revolution I ever made was going from “different” to “one of many”—one of many grateful recovering food addicts in FA.