tangible measures, revisited

The first woman I interviewed talked about touchstones. About the comfort of walls, the comfort of always knowing where you are, the parameters of the space, familiar and contained. Even if it’s not much space, even as it limits you, at least you know if you reach your arm out, there will be something solid you can touch and rely on. She imagined herself within a body of water, starting in a pond, then realizing she actually had a lake, then realizing she could have the ocean, and how terrifying that was, to be boundless, to have endless possibilities. Beautiful, but terrifying. How it was incredible, realizing how big her world could be, to realize her power, her talent, how much she had to give– but also how hard, how painful.

She talked about how she was not surprised that she relapsed just before the artistic breakthrough that turned her lake into the ocean; her eating disorder was a touchstone, a familiar wall, an out she could rely on. That it was almost as if she had to remind herself that the option was still there before she could accept moving into something greater.

Here we come back to eating disorders– old coping skills– as tangible measures, the inner and outer markings on the body, and I’ve been finding it useful lately to think of these markings, these measures as touchstones. Reassuring walls always within an arms reach when you need them.

My eating disorder is deeply intertwined with my history of trauma, much of which I couldn’t remember until shortly after my twenty-first birthday. It is how I’ve always coped with it and the resultant PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), mostly unconsciously, but somehow not eating makes it bearable, makes it possible to deal with. Coming back to struggles between real and not-real, I have trouble keeping my trauma real. Not in terms of re-experiencing or thinking about it constantly, or even regularly, but in internalizing and letting myself believe that some of it happened at all; the difficulty of repressed memories is the disjunction between what you thought was your life up until that point and this new information that changes everything; figuring out how to situate and integrate it into your conception of your history and experience. So I have trouble, holding on to the reality, feeling certain. And a therapist pointed out that I have used my weight as a touchstone for that, just I’ve used my weight as a marker of the reality of eating disorder– that a certain weight has become the marker of its truth–and the process of loss, the physical deteriorations that accompany it, they are the tangible measures that make it easier to keep the real real. Of course, comforting as a touchstone may be, it is still a wall, a barrier between you and what you could have, could be; it is the limit of the space you can occupy.

And this therapist, she asked me, if this certain weight is the touchstone that allows you believe your experiences are real, how will it be possible get to a place of health and healing? Because so long as that is the marker, the reassurance you rely on, you can never get all that far away from it, you got to be able to drop back as needed when you need a reminder, validation.

She had a point. And it’s a question I am grappling with, expecting I will be for a while– and I think part of the answer is in finding new measures, tangibles that don’t lie in what confines us. If we can find tangibles that exist outside the walls, our reaching could be out of our lakes into the ocean, islands within a world of possibilities. I don’t know how to do this yet, how to enact that sort of transformation, but I want to.

And I think maybe this could open up a new space and dialogue through which to conceive of health and recovery. Marking recovery by something more than meal plans and weight maintenance, finding ways to locate ourselves in the body and mark our experience besides bio-medical protocols and self-destruction. A way of situating ourselves and our healing in something more holistic and personal. This is a space I have been looking for for years. So please, help me make this space, create this dialogue. I need it, and I don’t think I’m the only one. And I think it could be so much bigger than eating disorders, I think its implications could be further reaching, about healing and claiming space and trusting ourselves, about asserting that we have within us what we need to heal ourselves, and that we can find it if we make the room, have others to help us look.

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