First Person

Issue date:
February 20-22, 1998

I starved myself for 14 years. Eventually, at 52 pounds ...I faced a scary choice:

Eat or die

Hornbacher has struggled with bulimia and anorexia for 14 years. She is the winner of a White Award for Best Freelance Story of 1993 -- a story that grew into a new book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. Now 23, she doesn't discuss her weight, as part of her ongoing recovery. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband.

"I struggle daily with food," says author Marya Hornbacher.

became bulimic at age 9, anorexic at 15. At 16, I walked into the revolving door of hospitalizations that "career" eating-disordered people get stuck in. I still manage to get out only for brief periods. In 1993, I hit bottom at 52 pounds and was given a week to live. Faced with a choice -- eat or die -- I ate. It was not as easy a choice as one might expect. In fact, it was the most difficult one I've ever made.

I keep having to make it, every day.

Today I appear, to our skewed cultural eye, relatively "healthy." My body doesn't know that. What it knows is that I've been starving it for nearly 15 years, careening from bulimia to anorexia and back again. In the back of my mind, I understood "thinness" as a synonym for "control," "control" for "respect" -- respect I thought would finally let me feel worthwhile. As I wasted my life in search of something that doesn't exist -- that "perfect" body, "perfect" self -- my body ate itself away. And now it doesn't work.

MY LIFELONG STRUGGLE

I battle this illness both in the hospital and out ... and in again. I've been hospitalized seven times.

I am 23; my body thinks it's far older than that. My bones are brittle, my heart weak and erratic, my esophagus and stomach riddled with ulcers, my reproductive system shot, my immune system useless. But I'm alive.

Tipper Gore, spokeswoman for Eating Disorders Awareness Week, which starts Monday, "has known people who have suffered from eating disorders and is aware of the toll it can take." Free anonymous screenings are available at 1,000 sites nationwide (colleges, hospitals, malls), sponsored by the National Mental Illness Screening Program, along with Eating Disorders Awareness and Prevention Inc. To find a screening near you, call 1-800-969-6642 or go to the Web site www.nmisp.org. -- C.G.S.

I'm alive. That, for me, is a daily surprise and delight. Having lived so long in the dark, cold place that is profound obsession, the small pleasures of living have incredible meaning for me. And though this is a constant struggle, though my eating disorder is still at my back, I am better able now to sense it and fend it off.

An eating disorder, while also an addiction, is in some ways a simple way of avoiding the pain of regular life. Every emotion, every struggle, is reduced to a war between you and food.

To bring myself back from the edge, I had to question the belief that self and image are one and the same. I had to decide whether I would continue my frantic quest for "thinness," or find something more important to do with my time.

This is an ongoing process. I struggle daily with food, with my image in the mirror. But four years ago, I didn't even put up a fight. Now, more often than not, I win: I eat, I work, I live my life.

I began to get well, I think, when I realized that I had been living a lie. I was living for "thinness," as so many millions of people -- so many of them women -- are. It's no way to live.

Though I sometimes fall back, and though I am constantly reminded of just how powerful the forces of this disease can be, I am nevertheless learning, finally, to live.

For more information, call the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders at 847-831-3438 or the American Anorexia/Bulimia Association at 212-575-6200. The Web site of the National Institute of Mental Health has an eating disorders area: www.nimh.nih.gov /publicat/eatdis.htm.
-- Cesar G. Soriano and Michele Hatty