a tree, not a piano
Last year, I wrote this paper for an English class. Since then, I've relapsed, been hospitalized, and had to start over--including retaking the English class and writing the personal essay. I've reworked it some & seen it through the eyes of someone who isn't drowning in eating disorder thoughts. It's a new kind of view for me.
A Tree, Not a Piano
A black and white photograph of a little girl looking into her grandfather’s face with an inquisitive look of awe hangs on an otherwise blank wall, a quiet reminder of humanity in a room of sterile white. The woman looking up at me, a near replica of the child in the frame, wears an expression of sympathy that suggests an over familiarity I’m not comfortable with.
Dr. Julie O’Toole, a badge on her chest reads, not that I need a nametag to tell me who she is. The abrupt woman who lives up to the fiery cliché of her red hair has become a staple in my life, a weekly presence I can’t outrun despite several dismal attempts to escape spattered throughout the last seven months.
We met last October, me a shrinking soul cage sputtering on empty and she the overbearing doctor who wanted to save me from everything I wanted. Though the photograph has been moved from one wall to the other, and the painting I like to think of as Moses’ Burning Bush that once hung beside it has been relocated, nothing has changed. On that first morning, she had flashed a look of pity in my direction before condemning me to the hospital for weeks of near seclusion. This time her verdict was different, though no less devastating.
“We’re sending you to Remuda Ranch for forty-five days,” she informs me without her characteristic abruptness, her mouth moving independently from the words I hear. “You’ve exhausted the options; if you don’t get better down there, no one will be able to help you. Anorexia will kill you.” She almost looks apologetic despite having had this same conversation with countless other patients before me. “They want you there the morning after your graduation.”
Remuda Ranch. Forty-five days. Graduation. The words disconnect from their meanings as they bounce about disjointedly. The stretch of silence hanging between us throbs in my ears as loud as any siren blaring nearby. O’Toole wasn’t sending me on vacation; she was sending me to be healed from a disease I believe I don’t have.
She continues to talk into the empty space, but I’ve stopped listening, trying to find a way to fit this new piece into the puzzle I’ve already created of my life plan, but it won’t fit no matter how hard I try to make it, so I grudgingly surrender to the circumstance I can’t change.
After the room falls empty a second time, I continue to sit in silence, the numbness that has become my bulletproof vest settling over me to protect from the pain I have learned to ignore. She leaves me to brood over the decisions she has made without my consent. I want to kick and scream and cry, but I don’t. My legs hang over the side of the examining table lifelessly, and I drown in my impotency, resigned and angry and enervated.
The week before graduation blurs past like a flash from someone else’s memory, something I am present for but not participating in. When I walk across the stage to collect my diploma, the satisfaction that I have earned for my accomplishment feels hollow beneath the glaring fluorescent lights of my future.
Ten of us go to Red Robin that night and sit around a giant table spilling over with raucous laughter. We take dozens of snapshots, each capturing the glow of joy that everyone assumes is so genuine. The pictures arrive in the mail eleven days after I arrive in Wickenburg, Arizona, the first contact from home I’ve received since I got here. Going through the photos reminds me that I don’t miss home as much as I should. By my thirtieth day in treatment, I start to replace what was with what is: fifteen other women like myself in various levels of battle.
Anna is my first Remuda friend, barely eighteen and not yet calloused from hospitalizations and treatment centers. We sit around one of the circular tables in our dining room before mealtimes each day, cards flying as we each attempt to be the first to reach Nertz. The pounding of palms against wood grows louder as more piles of cards are strewn across the table in a chaos only we can decipher. Anna usually beats me, and I’ve become notorious for cries of “No, Anna!” when we play. She starts turning off her hearing aid so she doesn’t hear me.
On Saturdays, we play all day, feigning normalcy in a bubble where normal doesn’t exist. Others start to play with us until the chairs around the table each have occupants. Anna still wins.
We laugh a lot, and we raise our voices and get rowdy. If I were at home, I’d never do this, but that’s what makes our time around the table so healing. Around the table, I’m not the anorectic or the example or the perfect child; I’m only myself, and she’s enough.
After HM Snack, we put the cards away and sit around the tables with foam cups of tea cupped between our hands. Though it’s not cold, the warmth of the too-sweet tea feels safe as it wraps itself around me. A bag of apple-cinnamon bobs in my cup, turning the clear water into a murky brown that looks like apple cider. My tea sits forgotten as I listen to Patti talk about her son Zack. He’s getting ready to leave for college in the fall like I am, and this summer he’s going on the road trips and adventures I’d planned on doing before O’Toole sent me here instead. His letters allow me to live vicariously through a person I’ve never met. I wonder whether he knows the impact he has made in the life of a perfect stranger.
By the time I finally remember my tea, it has turned lukewarm, and I want to spit it out like the church in Revelation, but I don’t, because it is the last tea I get until breakfast tomorrow morning. I watch Patti as I drink, her emaciated hands dancing animatedly as she shares memories of the children she left behind.
Patti reminds me of my mom though she’s nothing like her. My own mother often seems bigger than life, the neon orange in a box of pastel crayons, but Patti has a quiet contemplativeness that feels safe even though I know she’s here for the same reason I am.
When our small group goes on the ropes course, Patti and I go together, her fear of heights coupled with my fear of relinquishing the idol that is anorexia. Neither of us wants to let go, but once we’re soaring through the air, supported only by our harnesses, it doesn’t really matter.
Sitting around the table later that night, Patti thanks me for making the climb to the top with her. This time, I haven’t forgotten my tea, and I nod as I lift the hot cup to my lips and inhale the warmth of frosty winter days spent beside the woodstove.
“This whole recovery thing,” she tells me, her feeding tube swaying as she brushes it off her shoulder with her empty hand, “doesn’t happen the way everyone thinks it does.” She lifts her cup to her mouth but doesn’t drink, looking at me through the thick steam. Her eyes are hazel, I notice, like mine, and I wonder whether her kids know how lucky they are to have her as their mother. I’m sure they don’t, for I am a child with a mother as well.
I wait for her to explain, and she does, tilting her head to the side to watch me. “Recovery’s like that tree we climbed today. It doesn’t matter how you climb it as long as you get to the top eventually. Piano’s have to be crafted perfectly to work, but there’s no perfect way to climb a tree.”
Sitting at home around a different table by myself, I remember Patti’s wisdom that has taken twenty-five years of illness and recovery and relapse for her to learn.
I’ve had my share of scraped knees and falls to the forest floor, but they don’t happen as often as before, and, when they do, I know I don’t have to stay there, because Patti was right.
It’s a tree, not a piano.
In other news...allow me to summarize. I just got home from a spectacular weekend at the beach with my family & Joel. I wish I could stay there for a very very long time. Pictures to come.
A Tree, Not a Piano
A black and white photograph of a little girl looking into her grandfather’s face with an inquisitive look of awe hangs on an otherwise blank wall, a quiet reminder of humanity in a room of sterile white. The woman looking up at me, a near replica of the child in the frame, wears an expression of sympathy that suggests an over familiarity I’m not comfortable with.
Dr. Julie O’Toole, a badge on her chest reads, not that I need a nametag to tell me who she is. The abrupt woman who lives up to the fiery cliché of her red hair has become a staple in my life, a weekly presence I can’t outrun despite several dismal attempts to escape spattered throughout the last seven months.
We met last October, me a shrinking soul cage sputtering on empty and she the overbearing doctor who wanted to save me from everything I wanted. Though the photograph has been moved from one wall to the other, and the painting I like to think of as Moses’ Burning Bush that once hung beside it has been relocated, nothing has changed. On that first morning, she had flashed a look of pity in my direction before condemning me to the hospital for weeks of near seclusion. This time her verdict was different, though no less devastating.
“We’re sending you to Remuda Ranch for forty-five days,” she informs me without her characteristic abruptness, her mouth moving independently from the words I hear. “You’ve exhausted the options; if you don’t get better down there, no one will be able to help you. Anorexia will kill you.” She almost looks apologetic despite having had this same conversation with countless other patients before me. “They want you there the morning after your graduation.”
Remuda Ranch. Forty-five days. Graduation. The words disconnect from their meanings as they bounce about disjointedly. The stretch of silence hanging between us throbs in my ears as loud as any siren blaring nearby. O’Toole wasn’t sending me on vacation; she was sending me to be healed from a disease I believe I don’t have.
She continues to talk into the empty space, but I’ve stopped listening, trying to find a way to fit this new piece into the puzzle I’ve already created of my life plan, but it won’t fit no matter how hard I try to make it, so I grudgingly surrender to the circumstance I can’t change.
After the room falls empty a second time, I continue to sit in silence, the numbness that has become my bulletproof vest settling over me to protect from the pain I have learned to ignore. She leaves me to brood over the decisions she has made without my consent. I want to kick and scream and cry, but I don’t. My legs hang over the side of the examining table lifelessly, and I drown in my impotency, resigned and angry and enervated.
The week before graduation blurs past like a flash from someone else’s memory, something I am present for but not participating in. When I walk across the stage to collect my diploma, the satisfaction that I have earned for my accomplishment feels hollow beneath the glaring fluorescent lights of my future.
Ten of us go to Red Robin that night and sit around a giant table spilling over with raucous laughter. We take dozens of snapshots, each capturing the glow of joy that everyone assumes is so genuine. The pictures arrive in the mail eleven days after I arrive in Wickenburg, Arizona, the first contact from home I’ve received since I got here. Going through the photos reminds me that I don’t miss home as much as I should. By my thirtieth day in treatment, I start to replace what was with what is: fifteen other women like myself in various levels of battle.
Anna is my first Remuda friend, barely eighteen and not yet calloused from hospitalizations and treatment centers. We sit around one of the circular tables in our dining room before mealtimes each day, cards flying as we each attempt to be the first to reach Nertz. The pounding of palms against wood grows louder as more piles of cards are strewn across the table in a chaos only we can decipher. Anna usually beats me, and I’ve become notorious for cries of “No, Anna!” when we play. She starts turning off her hearing aid so she doesn’t hear me.
On Saturdays, we play all day, feigning normalcy in a bubble where normal doesn’t exist. Others start to play with us until the chairs around the table each have occupants. Anna still wins.
We laugh a lot, and we raise our voices and get rowdy. If I were at home, I’d never do this, but that’s what makes our time around the table so healing. Around the table, I’m not the anorectic or the example or the perfect child; I’m only myself, and she’s enough.
After HM Snack, we put the cards away and sit around the tables with foam cups of tea cupped between our hands. Though it’s not cold, the warmth of the too-sweet tea feels safe as it wraps itself around me. A bag of apple-cinnamon bobs in my cup, turning the clear water into a murky brown that looks like apple cider. My tea sits forgotten as I listen to Patti talk about her son Zack. He’s getting ready to leave for college in the fall like I am, and this summer he’s going on the road trips and adventures I’d planned on doing before O’Toole sent me here instead. His letters allow me to live vicariously through a person I’ve never met. I wonder whether he knows the impact he has made in the life of a perfect stranger.
By the time I finally remember my tea, it has turned lukewarm, and I want to spit it out like the church in Revelation, but I don’t, because it is the last tea I get until breakfast tomorrow morning. I watch Patti as I drink, her emaciated hands dancing animatedly as she shares memories of the children she left behind.
Patti reminds me of my mom though she’s nothing like her. My own mother often seems bigger than life, the neon orange in a box of pastel crayons, but Patti has a quiet contemplativeness that feels safe even though I know she’s here for the same reason I am.
When our small group goes on the ropes course, Patti and I go together, her fear of heights coupled with my fear of relinquishing the idol that is anorexia. Neither of us wants to let go, but once we’re soaring through the air, supported only by our harnesses, it doesn’t really matter.
Sitting around the table later that night, Patti thanks me for making the climb to the top with her. This time, I haven’t forgotten my tea, and I nod as I lift the hot cup to my lips and inhale the warmth of frosty winter days spent beside the woodstove.
“This whole recovery thing,” she tells me, her feeding tube swaying as she brushes it off her shoulder with her empty hand, “doesn’t happen the way everyone thinks it does.” She lifts her cup to her mouth but doesn’t drink, looking at me through the thick steam. Her eyes are hazel, I notice, like mine, and I wonder whether her kids know how lucky they are to have her as their mother. I’m sure they don’t, for I am a child with a mother as well.
I wait for her to explain, and she does, tilting her head to the side to watch me. “Recovery’s like that tree we climbed today. It doesn’t matter how you climb it as long as you get to the top eventually. Piano’s have to be crafted perfectly to work, but there’s no perfect way to climb a tree.”
Sitting at home around a different table by myself, I remember Patti’s wisdom that has taken twenty-five years of illness and recovery and relapse for her to learn.
I’ve had my share of scraped knees and falls to the forest floor, but they don’t happen as often as before, and, when they do, I know I don’t have to stay there, because Patti was right.
It’s a tree, not a piano.
In other news...allow me to summarize. I just got home from a spectacular weekend at the beach with my family & Joel. I wish I could stay there for a very very long time. Pictures to come.