In Spite of All the Damage

On hunger, boyfriends, hospitals and that New York Times article.

Five days ago I met a ghost.

My boyfriend and I were driving through Booneville, heading home from a long day of doctors appointments and furniture shopping. Booneville is less of a town and more a miniscule gathering of toppled storefronts and empty clearings that frequently host right-wing rallies and methy state fairs. Last summer fair they had to shut down three of the rides two days in because the employees tasked with operating the machines had overdosed under the bleachers the night prior. The candy-colored spinning bowls were fenced off with a collection of haphazardly stacked plastic chairs. The bleachers were still at full capacity, the bodies had been hauled away long before the benches filled with rodeo fans. I chewed a stale churro and watched a teenage boy in a cartoonishly oversized belt buckle get violently sloshed off a freckled gray horse. 

We passed the post office and the abandoned taco truck that’s been living in the neighboring parking lot for six months, collecting graffitied initials and losing tires. We passed the single-room church with its fractured slab of stained glass above the door, doing nothing to alleviate the building's already menacing aura. The rusted shopping cart and heap of crushed Budweiser cans piled beneath the splintered staircase placed the holy structure somewhere between a tailgate party and a scene from an apocalypse film. The faded decal on the side of the cart says that it once belonged to a cheap department store, normal enough except for the fact that the nearest mall is over two hours away. 

The settlement continued to shrink in our rearview mirror, I assumed, since our view outside the back window was entirely obstructed. The green velvet loveseat I insisted we transport home turned out to be slightly larger than expected. Eyeballing measurements has never been my strong suit, so Steed had to push his seat forward in a way that wasn’t ideal for his 6’5” frame. We pulled over a lot to stretch and smoke. Well, he smoked while I gazed longingly at the lit cigarette and cursed out my lungs for not keeping up their end of the bargain and allowing me this one self-destructive luxury. 

We got back in the car, our legs shook loose and shoes only slightly pocked with mud and urine splashes. There was Boygenius blasting through the speakers, not a single other vehicle on the road nor structure in sight, and the sky was still light enough to alert us to any rogue deer or family of turkeys suddenly desperate to cross that yellow line. Then, the previously dormant dashboard touch screen turned a jarring, violent red. “COLLISION WARNING” flashed across the finger-print coated glass and the car automatically slowed, preparing us for impact. No deer. No turkeys. No tumble weeds or giant eagles carrying unconscious hobbits or spontaneous rockslides or hitchhikers or deflated hot air balloons plummeting towards the concrete. Just miles of empty road.  

After the initial startled gasps, and his arm immediately extending across my torso like a well-practiced soccer mom, we launched into the possible causes of this malfunction. Being the horror fans that we both are, a wendigo or wraith seemed like a much more likely culprit than just some 2017 Ford wires getting crossed. Fifteen minutes later it happened again, then once more when we hit the coast. Each time the car seized and flared up, attempting to defend itself against some invisible threat. 

I should have been frightened, but unexplainable complications haven’t felt so foreign to me lately. 

In the late days of summer, I began waking up to a tightness in my chest.  I chalked it up as a bodily consequence of last night's bad behavior. I must’ve gone overboard with the cigarettes and fervent dive-bar debates. Time to slam some ginger tea and mind my business for a few days, just until I’m good as new and ready for another round of small-town debauchery. Eventually the tightness came and stayed. On February 19th, I collapsed. 

The first 48 hours in the hospital were spent in lock down, my X-Rays looking eerily similar to that of a Tuberculosis patient, causing me and my family to be ushered into a small, sterile room at the end of a gray, flickering hallway. It was quickly concluded that whatever I had, whatever this thing was that had wormed its way through my respiratory system, was too big for the small coastal clinic to tackle. It was five in the morning when the ambulance arrived to escort me to a larger, more well-equipped facility three hours east. One of the paramedics had a forearm tattoo of an eagle tangling with a snake, desperately masculine and vaguely political in a way I have become very familiar with since moving to a fishing and logging town. He sat in the back with me, periodically checking my vitals and chewing spearmint gum. I never saw the driver. 

The next fourteen days were spent in a milky green hospital gown. I have few memories of the first week, the combination of sleep deprivation, unrelenting pain and unpronounceable medications kept me somewhat comatose. Apparently, when I was delivered back to my room after my first Bronchoscopy (an invasive procedure where fluid is pumped and then sucked from your lungs through a tube that has been fed down your throat), I slurred out a handful of apologies to the nurses and my family members before passing out.

Half-conscious and coughing up golf balls of mucus, but nonetheless repentant for the state of my hair and radiating body odor. I am, after all, a woman.

I could be on deaths fucking door and still riddled with guilt over that second slice of cake I had yesterday. Bleeding out on the pavement while worrying if my tone was off when I thanked the mail man and if I should have rounded out that email to my coworker with “no worries if not!”

I wrote the following in my journal three days after the procedure. My handwriting proved nearly illegible, and my relationship to spelling and grammar continues to be one of great violence and neglect, but the sentiment behind my rambling holds:  

The worst thing about this whole ordeal, or at least the pain’s biggest competitor, is the helplessness. I wake up panting and out of breath, tongue like the Sahara because of course dry mouth is one of the many beloved side effects of Prednisone. I’m lying in a pool of my own blood because of course now would be the perfect time for my period to start. I need water and an inhaler and the toilet. My mom is asleep in the chair to my right, my boyfriend is snoring on the floor, bare legs spilling off the flimsy, rat-chewed camping pad and onto the frigid tile. I’m so relieved that they are finally getting some rest, and I hate to wake them up with a laundry list of tasks when the sun is barely in the sky, so I hold it. I do the breathing exercise that the patronizing nurse with the strong, acidic perfume showed me. I gum and gather my saliva on my tongue. I remind myself of the other fifty incidents in which I got my period at an inconvenient time and muscled through it. I last ten minutes, ten measly fucking minutes before I’m shaking my mother’s blanketed forearm and frantically pointing towards the bathroom door. 

I’m afraid that this juvenile, slack state will become my baseline.

By the second week I had made some improvements, but my lungs were still furious with me. Every morning still began at 6A.M with a bloodletting and a high dose of steroids. The days were still littered with bouts of excruciating pain, asthmatic episodes and shots of blood thinner to the flesh around my stomach. The bruises took weeks to fade, Steed jokingly tracing the remnants of one in the shower a few days ago. 

We found ways to entertain ourselves. I, under medical orders, saved my bowel movements for the nurses to examine. I reported on the texture, the shade of brown, the length and width and ease with which it exited. Steed explained the Dune novels to Mom and I in great detail, and eventually I caved and agreed to watch the film. We balanced my laptop on the cafeteria cart and held hands. I liked the outfits and the music and the worms and wished it was forty-five minutes shorter. 

Estranged family members caught wind of my predicament and sent lengthy emails to my mother, proclaiming that my ailment was clearly a punishment for getting vaccinated. They suggested pivoting to an all carnivore diet, donating to RFK’s campaign and reading all the “research” they’ve compiled.

Steed and I kept a list of  all the colorful nurses and hospital staff we encountered, assigning them nicknames and contemplating possible origin stories. 

There was “Dahmer,” who,  after seeing my praying mantis tattoo, enthusiastically shared that he was in fact a breeder of the majestic insect. He said that he keeps a jar beside his bed full of their molted exoskeletons. I wonder how that goes over with his Hinge dates. 

Then there was “Calypso,” a tall, gray-haired woman from Oregon. She had a thick voice and large, strong hands and after she was done taking my temperature she’d put them on my chest and whisper words of encouragement to my lungs. I would run away with her in a heartbeat if she offered. 

“Octavia” had a bedazzled septum ring and a wooden Om pendant hanging off a strip of leather wrapped high and tight around her neck. I had a strong feeling that in another timeline we met at some Northern California music festival. I could see us side by side in a field somewhere, slowly cooking under the July sun, fanning our hairy armpits while she taught me how to properly operate a pair of metallic poi balls. 

“McConaughey,” while wrapping my IV with tape and a plastic bag in preparation for my sponge bath, shared that he used to make beats in his room with his buddies in college, and that one of the tunes ended up being in the epic FOX series Prison Break. He said he made a few grand off of it, but had since retired from his musical leanings. He took really long lunch breaks and always returned speaking a little slower, eyes a little redder and wearing a lot of freshly applied cologne. 

Eventually I was blessed with a diagnosis. The doctors called it Hypersensitivity Pneumonitis, which is Latin for “if you want this inhale you’re gonna have to work for it, bitch.” The numerous CT scans taken of my chest cavity signaled that the inflammation in my lungs had been building for months, long before my final dramatic fall to the living room floor. 

It’s vague, and the doctors who were previously “fascinated” with my case, a handful of them buzzing in and out of my room daily with hypotheses and chicken-scratched notebooks, now seemed bored and unimpressed with my pedestrian respiratory failure. “Common among livestock farmers and people who work around molds and heavy metals,” a lab coat mumbled to me before shutting the door on our already rushed and unenlightening check-in. 

Good news, there is a cure. Bad news, I would have a high dose of steroids and antibiotics coursing through my body for the next five months. I spent hours, back rigid and upright in the hospital bed, pouring over the informational packet detailing the side effects of my new medications. I observed as my vanity was pushed into harsh and honest lighting. My boyfriend said that my priorities were fucked, and stared in horror as I snot-cried over all the ways in which these life-saving pills could alter my appearance. Many of the side effects of long-term Prednisone use are objectively worse than others, but who cares about potential loss of bone density or kidney failure when “acne and fat transfer to the face and neck” is on the table? 

I never claimed to be a role model. 

Seven days into my hospital stint, a New York Times article was published about my eating disorder. I knew it was happening. The journalist, who I had spent several months corresponding with, seemed honest and enthusiastic, like she genuinely understood the complexity of the disease and wanted to give me a safe, well-respected container to courageously spill my guts into. 

Then I read the story. 

I won't go as far to say the facts were inaccurate. The details written were technically correct, but meaty chunks of what I considered to be pretty relevant backstory and vital context had been replaced with whining and clipped soundbites. I sounded vapid and shallow. Self-aggrandizing and juvenile. Not to mention my perfectly placed Amy Dunne reference had been redacted. As a reformed Cool Girl, I am obligated to mention the monologue whenever the opportunity arises. 

Reading the article from the narrow slab of my hospital bed, surrounded by a steady stream of beeping and “rate your pain on a scale of one to ten” conversations, wasn’t ideal. It felt like someone had ripped my fresh stitches open and poured a gallon of salt straight in.

I think it’s fair to say that one of the most universal fears is being misunderstood. Having your words or your actions be swallowed in a way you didn’t expect, be grabbed from your well-intending hands and warped into something that was not what you meant. I’ve carried this fear on my now acne-ridden shoulders for most of my life, adult and not. I remember being nine years old, sitting in class, knowing the answer to the question on the board, and acutely aware of the risk I would be running if I were to raise my hand and launch into an analysis that didn't land with my judgemental, sticky-fingered classmates. As I write this I am coming to the conclusion that elementary schoolers are much more frightening than the thousands of readers who skim the NYT Op-ed section. 

There’s not a whole lot to do in the hospital. The WiFi was spotty at best, Mom and Steed had to take turns hovering in the tight corner beside the sink if they wanted to send an email or scroll tik-tok without constant interruption. The television in the room had a handful of channels, something that would have felt decadent, that is if I were a golf fan or a weather buff or a fluent Spanish speaker. On one particularly desperate afternoon I did allow myself to be pulled in by a few episodes of Pawn Stars, a fascinating docuseries where balding men argue over the price of the ugliest broach you have ever seen. But it was a short lived affair, and I quickly returned to my twelfth read of the article, as if I hadn’t already memorized every rotten word. 

This is what I wish had been written. 

Rarely has there been a moment where I felt that my body and I were on the same team. As the great feminist writer Melissa Febos put it in her gutting and vital collection of essays Girlhood: 

By the time I was thirteen, I had divorced my body. Like a bitter divorced parent, I accepted that our collaboration was mandatory. Despite my sympathy for other animals, I was sociopathic in my cruelty towards this one. When she disobeyed me — in her hunger, in her clumsiness — I was punitive and withholding. I scrutinized and criticized and denigrated her ceaselessly, even in my dreams. Not before or since have I felt such animosity towards another being. 

I’ve never had a “healthy” relationship with food. Food has always sat in my mind as something to be earned or exiled, dispensed as reward for some acknowledged success or sanctioned as punishment for some repeated offense. If I aced an exam in college, I would allow myself a thicker, longer, middle-of-the-loaf slice of toast the next morning. If I embarrassed myself at a party in high school, I’d be foregoing lunch for a while, just until I learned my lesson. 

I didn’t invent this brutal system of shame and score-keeping all on my own. It was inherited, this poison. I got it from my mother, wrapped in a seductive linen exterior of early-2000’s wellness fads, home-brewed kombucha and Yoga retreats. I did my first juice cleanse when I was ten years old, with her encouragement. It wasn’t her fault, this obsession with thinness. She was the third wife of some hot-shot lawyer, twenty-five years his junior and freshly transplanted to his close-knit, conservative lakeside town. My mother’s fear of being misunderstood and chronic need to be liked gripped her just as violently as mine always has. 

She, too, learned her self-loathing.

My great-grandmother Rivella, a prolific painter and sculptor, a world traveler who collected statement jewelry and always sported a chic, close-cropped Olivia Benson haircut, liked her body the best when she was dying of cancer. She said so. 

Poison flows downstream.

Now that we have established who is truly at fault for all my neuroses (I want to trust that my sarcasm will translate smoothly across the page, but given recent events I feel I must clarify that The Patriarchy™ is the guilty party here, not my talented but troubled matriarchs), let me attempt to explain myself.  

In 2020 I bailed on U.C Berkeley, moved to my grandmother's farm in southern Oregon, and gained a good amount of weight. I am unable to provide you with the exact number of pounds I gathered during that globally and personally turbulent time, but it was significant. And I was happy. The celibacy pledge I had undertaken the previous year had steeled me for this sudden change in form. I speak in detail about years of chastity in my StyleLikeU episode. Spark notes version: at nineteen, after a collection of sexual encounters that ranged from disappointing to violating, I decided to swear off sex and dating until I had learned how to say things like “no” and “get the fuck off of me.” 

An unintended but welcomed side effect of abstinence was that I was no longer so concerned with what I ate and where on my hips it would land. I wasn’t going to be naked around anybody for a very long time, and as a result, I found myself enjoying a lot of burritos and sweet potato fries and glasses of my grandmother's unmatched sangria. As lockdown continued and I attempted to adjust to this new routine, I put on more pounds. And I held it well. I found new ways to style my favorite clothes that now fit a bit different. I started dressing in brighter colors and louder prints, an act of protest against the racks and racks of beige I was met with when searching for my size in the store. 

My modeling career continued at a slow but steadyish pace. I even shot a handful of lingerie and swimwear commercials, one of which played on Hulu for a solid month and made for a really uncomfortable thirty seconds when visiting my now-estranged extended family. To be clear, it wasn’t the jump scare of my tits on the flat screen during movie night that caused the drift, more their sudden affection for a collection of ideologically reprehensible politicians and the ugly habit of starting every sentence with “I’ve done my own research and…” You get it. 

Point is, my body grew and I was fine with it. Eventually, though, I became aware of things that I used to be able to do that no longer came easily in this new form. I was out of breath often, struggling to keep up with my 75-year-old grandmother on the weekly hikes she would drag me on. My sleep schedule was inconsistent and unfulfilling. I was always suffering from some new rash or skin reaction due to the fact that I had decided to just ignore my diagnosed lactose intolerance. 

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when I decided that I wanted to “get healthier,” but I can say that it started out pure and well-intentioned. I swear it did. It slid, of course, and I took it too far. Or, I should say, I let it take me too far. Melissa Febos also writes, in reference to her youth spent battling eating disorders and a heroin addiction, “you choose it, until it chooses you.”  

The daily walks I was taking, slow and sweet with Taylor Swift and Dijon singing in step with my legs, turned into manic forced-marches meant to work off last night's dinner. Morning cappuccinos with Grams on the deck turned into pitiful cups of black coffee and secret bathroom weigh-ins. I've done this dance many times. I start easing up on the constant calorie counting and restricting. I try to live in the moment, actually listen to what my friends are saying at dinner instead of fixating on the bread in the middle of the table. I gain weight but also remember what joy feels like, until something triggers a backslide. A failed exam or the dissolvement of a friendship or a foul comment from an ignorant family member, and I’m back in the trenches. 

 I craft all these worst-case scenarios, and prop them up on my bedside table to point at when I want to dodge accountability and be absolved of my guilt. “At least I’m not bulimic anymore! I mean, I could be a meth addict for fucks sake! It’s not like when that girl a grade above me had to drop out her junior year because her lack of lunch led to some kind of heart disease! I’m not that bad.”

Classic Dronme, always the exception. 

So I kept getting smaller and hungrier and more anxious and less passionate but I was finally fitting into my old Rag & Bone boyfriend jeans that I masochistically held on to from high school and men in bars were buying me drinks for the first time in my entire life and I told myself that this was the tradeoff. 

The gist of the NYT article was that I am a fraud. I am a fraud for losing weight and I am a coward for not addressing it on Instagram. I had gathered a following with the promise that I would be a beacon of fat acceptance and body positivity, and just as quickly as I rose to power, I abandoned my flock. And in doing so, the decline in mental wellbeing and statistical rise of eating disorders in young women is squarely on my shoulders. 

I never claimed to be a role model. 

When I was thin and nineteen, my “content” (ick) consisted of the things that occupied my daily life. Outfits, sanctimonious college-aged activism, passive aggressive captions aimed at boys who weren’t texting me back, real deep shit. When I was big and twenty-two, I kept doing what I had always done: post about my life. It was still clothing hauls, political rants and brooding Phoebe Bridgers lyrics.

Never once did I ever claim to be an authority on anything. I wasn’t interested in cementing myself as some healed messiah to be prostrated to. I was trying to get better, trying to get out from under this vicious cycle of starvation and binging and constant noise, but I never instructed anyone to do as I did. And when the noise resurfaced, I felt that to address it publicly would be to propel myself into a conversation that I was not yet prepared to have. I knew there were folks with questions, people genuinely concerned by my sudden change in appearance, but I also knew that I had no satisfying answers to give. 

How irresponsible, to speak when you have nothing to say. 

So I kept quiet, got good at flinging out synthetic “you’re so sweet! I’m totally fine, thank you for asking,” rebuttals when confronted in my DM’s about my new body. I’ll admit that I deleted a few comments, but only the ones that made me feel like a quivering thirteen-year-old again, hiding in the locker room and bleeding participation points because I had no explanation for why I was always fifteen minutes late to P.E. How was I supposed to explain to this ex-marine that I couldn’t bring myself to change into my school-issued workout gear until the entire room had been cleared? If you fear that someone in your life is suffering from an eating disorder, hurling accusations at them and calling it “empathy” is not my recommended approach. 

Forgive my defensiveness. ‘Roid rage is no joke. 

The ground is beginning to level. As I get further from my discharge date, and my lungs start to come back online, I find myself adjusting, albeit messily, to this new normal. Steed and I fill our weekends with long drives up the coast. I feed him day-old grocery store sushi while he takes the turns in the road with a confidence and ease that makes me want to have his children. I lay hungover on the lawn with my friend as she tells me about the cute thing her quiet, stoic boyfriend did last week. He pulled her out of bed and had her stand against the doorframe, marking her height on the very same wall where he and his brothers tracked their growth spurts with names and dates written in fading No.2 pencils. She and I conclude that it definitely “means something.” 

I’m back to picking at my skin and gleefully scrolling pinterest. I miss cigarettes and diet coke but I'm happy to be alive and would like to be for at least a while longer, so I adhere to my new doctor's rules of three square meals a day and no smoking. 

My relationship with my body continues to be a turbulent one, but the fact that she hasn’t given up on me yet shows how deep her loyalty runs. She wants us to win, and it’s about time I start pulling my weight around here. 

We’ll see. 

Dronme 

“You don’t have to make it bad just ‘cause you know how.” 

- Boygenius