Make it Personal: Casey Robinson

I watched a movie when I was twelve where a teenage girl made herself throw up.  It worked for her, so I practiced one night.

“It’s not so bad,” I told myself, “as long as you try not to breathe in until it’s all over”.

My assumption was that breathing in causes the taste buds to wake up and allows the palate to absorb the flavor of vomit that still tastes a lot like the most recent meal.  It was easy to get used to. I taught myself how to empty my stomach without making a single sound, that way I wouldn’t have to skip lunch at school—those long middle school days made me awfully hungry, and I was pretty dizzy by the end of the day after not eating for seven hours, eight if you count the bus ride home.  I learned though, that it doesn’t matter how quiet you are, middle school girls are nosy, and one cannot spend too much time in the bathroom without someone coming in to see what is going on.

“What are you doing in there?”  Erin asked—at least it was one of my friends, and not one of those judgmental bitches that was too perfect to look at.

“Nothing”.  I lied, “today’s lunch made me sick, that’s all”.

Weeks passed before she noticed the scratches—teeth marks—on the knuckles of my hands.

“What happened to your hands?”

I could tell that she was growing more curious.

“Cat scratches, we have like ten cats”.  At least the second part was true.

“And they only scratch you on your hands?”

“I guess”.

Ugh! “Go away!” I wanted to say to her, but I didn’t.  Looking back now, I wonder if I wanted her to rescue me.

Finally, after the scratches turned into blisters and bled constantly, I let my inquisitive friend in on my secret.

“Please don’t tell anyone”.  I begged her.

“Why are you doing this, you are going to hurt yourself”.

“I don’t care, I just don’t want to look like this—I want to look like everyone else”.

“I don’t look like everyone else”, she reminded me.

I didn’t care what she looked like, all I knew was that I couldn’t look in the mirror until I knew that all I would see would be my skinny body—my pretty body.

“I have already lost so much weight!”  I told her.  “If I can just do this for a few more months, I will be so pretty!—Please don’t tell”.

She was reluctant; but, she agreed.

A couple of months passed and Erin became so worried about me that it made her furious, we stopped talking.  I disgusted her.  It was okay though; I was making new friends, now that I was pretty like them—well, almost pretty.

I realized that I would never be as pretty as them, while sitting in homeroom one morning.  It was spirit day at school and all of my new, glamorous friends had planned to wear French braided pigtails with ribbons in them that day.  I thought that included me too.

“You don’t have the right hair for braids,” the beautiful athletic one said, nastily.  They all laughed.

I guess I didn’t realize that braids required a certain type of hair.  So I took the braids out of my hair and left it in its plain, lifeless form.  I considered going to the salon and changing it, but I knew my parents couldn’t afford that.

One morning, we all heard about a girl in our class who had jumped in front of a moving car and was severely injured.  She was trying to kill herself.  I understood why.  When our teacher asked us to sign a card for her, I was somewhat horrified that my name was the only one written, apart from the teacher.  Her close call with death didn’t seem to worry them at all; they didn’t care if she died.

“Would they care if I died?” I thought to myself.  My guess was, probably not.

Throwing up had become part of my life.  It became my first addiction.  At some point, it became less about trying to impress them, and more about filling a compulsive need to purge.  I couldn’t go one meal without doing it.  There were times that I would eat just so that I could throw it all back up.  Eventually, everything that I had always heard about bulimia became dangerously relevant to me.

“Is that blood?” I thought to myself one night after purging that evening’s dinner.

It was.  I ignored it.

My throat burned constantly; ice chips helped to take the edge off.

I was tired all the time; falling asleep felt a lot like what I would assume dying would feel like, and waking up in the mornings was the hardest part of the day.  I was pale, too skinny, and my body ached.

I knew that my life was in danger, but I didn’t care.

One night around the end of seventh grade, ironically, while we were eating dinner at home, my mom received an anonymous phone call.  The moment that my mom put the phone down, I could feel the walls closing in.  She knew—since my drastic weight loss apparently wasn’t her first clue.  I assumed that Erin was the one who called, but she never confirmed it.

“Why?” My mom asked me.

“Because it have to”.   That was the truth.  I didn’t know any other way to explain it.

The conversation ended, and she watched me like a hawk that night.  The next morning, I found myself in the backseat of our station wagon, headed to the first of many outpatient therapy sessions.

Weekly therapy sessions were ineffective, to say the least.  I continued purging until the end of eighth grade—this time, no one knew.  Of course, I had to take breaks for a couple of days when the bleeding would come back.  Eventually, the sight of blood became comforting.  I wanted to stop, but it wasn’t that simple.  Around the end of eighth grade, I found a new addiction.   Ultimately, it was the association of blood with comfort that helped me to drift away from bulimia.  Unfortunately, the same association led me to discover the world of cutting, which is another story for another time.