It’s around 9 p.m. on my 25th birthday and I’m sitting on a curb illuminated by a street light in my childhood neighborhood. I’m hunched over my knees, fingers pressed against my temples, tears streaming down my face as I rock back and forth trying to calm my heart— now racing at a dangerous and familiar speed. The space between each gasp for air is growing shorter, and I put on my hood as if it would make me disappear.
A woman walking her dog notices me— and suddenly I’m aware of the odd image I’ve created. “Are you OK?” she says, keeping her distance. “Yes, I’m fine thank you,” I say. She hesitates, and keeps walking.
I rest my chin on my arms, and look up hoping to see a star or two— anything to ground me to the earth and give me some perspective. No such luck tonight in Los Angeles. Then I remember a conversation I’d had a week earlier, with an 86-year-old Catholic priest.
I’d been reporting a story for my journalism class at USC, where I am a graduate student, and had wandered into my neighborhood church— primarily to escape a rainstorm, but also to see if I could find an interesting story. A priest greeted me in the empty pews, and I asked him how his parish was coping with the COVID-19 restrictions on social gatherings that kept people from attending church. After a long and winding conversation about his childhood in Ireland, his decision to become a priest, and his views on the present moment, he looked at me and said: “When everything is going well, we don’t really question, ‘Are these things sustainable?’ And then things fall apart. So, is there a lesson to be learned from that?”
I looked down at my hands, clenched so tightly that my fingernails left marks on my palms. I’m sweating and freezing simultaneously, as my body tries to regulate itself. There is a cold ring around my heart and I feel empty. I collapse onto the sidewalk.
It’s the first week of self-isolation, and the fourth time something like this has happened over seven days. This isn’t sustainable.
This is my 10th year in recovery from an eating disorder. Anorexia. The origins of it are unimportant, as I’ve come to understand that those who suffer all battle similar demons. What is important is how I’ve dealt with it over the years. I started in therapy, with daily visits to a nutritionist. She taught me how to eat chips and tacos without feeling guilt, which backfired when I reached a “healthy” weight, and began restricting even more. I also saw a therapist who, after a few months, said that perhaps the only way I’d ever feel good about my body is if I were to be hugged by a man— so I could feel how small I was.
I moved to Boston for college and things spiraled. I gained weight, restricted, lost weight, binged after parties and late nights, and fell into deep depressions, only to be revived by the temporary relief provided by rigid diets, workout routines and “positive mindsets.” I filled a black leather journal with rules and restrictions, which became my bible: No eating out, no dinner with friends, work out twice a day. I thought I would find peace with my body once I found the “cure” to my own brain. I spent every day of college trying to find it, but never did.
Post-college I flirted with other strategies. But at the end of the day, or week, or month, no matter how militant my approach, I collapsed— reverting back to old habits, thought processes and structures that gave me back control. It was like applying and ripping off the same Band-Aid on the same wound, over and over again.
Falling back into old habits can feel good— offering a sense of familiarity, of comfort, of safety. Sometimes of ecstasy. For me, restriction feels like home. If I feel distressed at night, I can restrict in the morning— instant control. I rely on behaviors and patterns that, though proven faulty 10 times over, provide immediate relief. But this way of coping is temporary. I inescapably come crashing down.
I’ve injected myself with doses of hope for 10 years, and just like the highs certain drugs can offer, the comedown and withdrawals inevitably follow.
I thought I might have been through the thick of it. But self-isolation because of the COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be one of the most trying periods of my recovery yet. The crumbling of structure and loss of control shocked my system into a state of panic — ripping my modes of restriction to shreds. The demons chatting up storms in my head grew twice as loud, and I’ve been left making enemies with my mirror and having stand-offs with my kitchen.
I wouldn’t say that I’m religious. I wouldn’t say I’m not. I was raised Jewish, and explored my spirituality through travel, books, writing, and meditation. I can’t recall ever stepping foot in a Catholic church, much less conversing at length with a priest. But his words came to the forefront of my mind and lingered as I sat on the street curb on my 25th birthday and thought about how to proceed. “Are these things sustainable?” That word — “sustainable” — rang in my ear. Something clicked.
When I think of sustainability, I think of an ecosystem untouched by human hands. I think of a desert or a rainforest— self-regenerating, constantly evolving and adapting as a means for preservation and longevity. But I’d never considered sustainability in the context of my own body. All of my efforts to find peace with my body targeted the present moment.
In the month since my 25th birthday, the world has shifted in perhaps the most drastic way we will ever witness. But I’ve also come to a new and developing understanding of what it means to treat my body as an ecosystem that needs (and deserves) to be nurtured, so that it can be sustained. The priest was right. My entire external and internal framework had to fall apart for me to question it— and to address it.
Last week I called Father Peter of St. Lawrence Martyr to express my gratitude. I told him I’d been thinking about the concept of sustainability in terms of my relationship with my body, and the welcome change it has brought into my life. “Ah, that’s very good,” he said, without hesitation. “Because everything around us tells us we should be dissatisfied…But in fact, our bodies are pretty well put-together. We just need to care for them— to tend to them.’”
He gave the example of a flower: It is there because of its own sake. And in its simple existence, it is beautiful. And all we can do is stand before it, gaze upon it, and let it speak to us. We must see it as living in its own right; If we seek to control it, we destroy it.
He left me with a question: Can we come up with a language not of power, not of exploitation, but of tenderness?
It might take me a lifetime to fully realize such a language, but each day I find a bit more tenderness than the day before. Sustainability is not a tactic, or another mode of control. It’s a lifelong commitment to preserving the self mentally, physically, and yes, spiritually. It’s not about control, it’s about tending to what is.