Not being bulimic is, itself, kind of a spiritual exercise. And in the process of living almost a year without bulimia, I've come to realize that the level of anxiety that I experience when I'm no longer regularly bingeing and purging is itself a kind of problem. For example:
My husband, upon finding that my shoes are not on and the baby is not ready to go shopping for the groceries we need: "Are you ready? Let's go!"
Me: "Hold on.... okay, well, it says here only 11,000 people sustain spinal cord injuries each year."
Husband: "Seriously? Is that what you've been doing?"
Me, furtively Googling "population of the USA": "Maybe. Do you have a calculator? On your phone?"
So far in 2012, I have tripped from fear of SIDS to fear of shaken baby syndrome to fear of Lou Gherig's disease to fear of my parents dying to fear of my own death to fear that there is no God. I spend therapy sessions on this, and then, because I both have some kind of anxiety problem and am acutely aware of this problem lately, I spend therapy sessions worrying that I only even believe in God because my anxiety problem is otherwise totally unmanageable.
My therapist, I think, doesn't really think about God. Of course, I don't know, because she is a good therapist and because I didn't choose an explicitly Christian therapist, but I'm thinking probably not. She says what everyone ends up telling me, which is -- we can't ever really know. You have to be able to live with that, because you don't have another option.
Occasionally, this puts me in an impossible situation, because the brand of faith I was raised with took for granted that you know. Of course you know, and since we're saved by believing in Jesus, the only real unforgivable sin is not to know. This sucked for me, because I really wanted to be good, and I tried so hard to be good, but the very specific things I was supposed to know/believe were so hard. Years later, reading John, I'd come across the part where everyone kind of throws up their hands, all, "This is a hard saying! Who can accept it?" And I'd be like, exactly.
And then, on the other hand, there's this really hip reductionist worldview that's all, You know why this is so hard to understand? Because it's made up! Really, things are as they seem: you live and you die, and that's it. Should your spine snap, should you lose something irreplaceable, should you get sick, well, game over.
And the same part of me that repeatedly assumes the worst, then sets about proving it to myself over and over, freaking loves this. It's the antidote to the culture of my childhood church and school that wanted to attribute a meaning to everything: here's what Heaven is like, and here's who goes there, and here's a primer for making sense of the book of Revelations and connecting it to current world events, and let's draw pictures of our guardian angels.
I'm not trying to make fun of these things -- just to suggest why it might feel like relief, sometimes, to strip the whole world to something bare and material and nihilistic. It might even, I think, be an awesome way for people who are essentially as soft as I am -- white, middle class college kids and twenty-somethings who critique the 1% in one breath and the buying of non-locally-sourced beer in the next -- to feel dark and hard and bad-ass.
I excelled at this kind of dark-hardness, creating a life-threatening situation for myself in an environment that could have just been comprised of feeling left out, Tori Amos, and AP English. A chunk of my recovery has been about realizing that it does not erase my privilege that I spent an appreciable portion of my teens and twenties coming to terms with that privilege. Believing that things, in their essence, are so essentially shitty that you can somehow contextualize in the same "human experience" both your life and that of a raped and murdered child, or that child's mother, doesn't imply that you are stronger than all those weak people who "need to believe" that the world is good and has meaning.
I know a little about this "giving life meaning." I created a system of meaning entirely around eating fewer than 500 calories a day, and I followed it devoutly, fiercely, and I would say now that, however invulnerable it made me feel, however "legitimate" the process by which I developed it, that system of meaning is not as good as, say, Christianity or Islam.
That whole existential creating-of-meaning and all truths being arbitrary and therefore equally legitimate -- I understand that some people experience it as true and liberating, but in my experience things only appeared that way when I was at my most impoverished. And as I get better, as I see my life through something less thick and consuming than my eating disorder, God becomes more and more apparent to me. This is not to say I understand Him, or It, any better, or that I can now think the right things about Him or the Bible or Creation. It is to say, though, that I'm able to see clearly the following things:
- To the degree that I do good things, that I am useful to others or valuable in and of myself -- none of that is intrinsic to me. Now, I don't really go around doing good things; for every good intention I have, I seem to end up spending an unnecessary half hour reading blog posts. However, I believe there is value in me that I cannot attribute to any quality, effort, or achievement of my own. I love my husband and child, I do my best at work, I try to help people and I no longer am bulimic -- and none of that feels at all connected to my will, to who I am. That's not brainwashing or low self esteem talking: it's just my experience.
- To the degree that I fuck up, however, I feel those mistakes and failures stemming directly from my will, my fear, my weakness. I don't hate or blame myself for this; I just acknowledge that I am very small and imperfect and that I function one way when I listen to myself and another way when I listen to God as I understand Him.
- I feel certain that whatever my experience when I pray, I'm not accessing some better part of myself. I appreciate that others who used to be religious found this to be the case -- that what they thought was God was actually them. That is not my experience.
- I imagine there are lots of ways to manage my anxiety, to stay not-bulimic, that don't rely on God. If I was only operating out of fear, I could choose one of those. I could even do what it seems other people who doubt end up doing, embracing the absence of a higher power as liberating. But the concept that there is nothing beyond myself does not provoke anxiety half as violently as it contradicts my experience of my life, of who I am and where and how I'm living. If I feel sure of nothing else sometimes, I feel certain that there is something larger than myself, better than myself -- so much so that the idea that I am limited and weak seems, not demeaning or threatening, but true, natural, and fine.
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