Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia Read Online Free

much. I wanted to be held very tight so I would not break. Even now, when people lean down to touch me, or hug me, or put a hand on my shoulder, I hold my breath. I turn my face. I want to cry.
    I remember the body from the outside in. It makes me sad when I think about it, to hate that body so much. It was just a typical little girl body, round and healthy, given to climbing, nakedness, the hungers of the flesh. I remember wanting. And I remember being at once afraid and ashamed that I wanted. I felt like yearning was specific to me, and the guilt that it brought was mine alone.
    Somehow, I learned before I could articulate it that the body—my body—was dangerous. The body was dark and possibly dank, and maybe dirty. And silent, the body was silent, not to be spoken of. I did not trust it. It seemed treacherous. I watched it with a wary eye.
    I will learn, later, that this is called “objectification consciousness.”
    There will be copious research on the habit of women with eating disorders perceiving themselves through other eyes, as if there were some Great Observer looking over their shoulder. Looking, in particular, at their bodies and finding, more and more often as they get older, countless flaws.
    I remember my entire life as a progression of mirrors. My world, as a child, was defined by mirrors, storefront windows, hoods of cars. My face always peered back at me, anxious, checking for a hair out of place, searching for anything that was different, shorts hiked up or shirt untucked, butt too round or thighs too soft, belly sucked in hard. I started holding my breath to keep my stomach concave when I was five, and at times, even now, I catch myself doing it. My mother, as I scuttled along sideways beside her like a crab, staring into every reflective surface, would sniff and say, Oh, Marya. You're so vain.
    That, I think, was inaccurate. I was not seeking my image in the mirror out of vain pride. On the contrary, my vigilance was something else—both a need to see that I appeared, on the surface at least, acceptable, and a need for reassurance that I was still there .
    I was about four when I first fell into the mirror. I sat in front of my mother's bathroom mirror singing and playing dress up by myself, digging through my mother's huge magical box of stage makeup that sighed a musty perfumed breath when you opened its brass latch.
    I painted my face with elaborate greens and blues on the eyes, bright streaks of red on the cheeks, garish orange lipstick, and then I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time. I suddenly felt a split in my brain: I didn't recognize her. I divided into two: the self in my head and the girl in the mirror. It was a strange, not unpleasant feeling of disorientation, dissociation. I began to return to the mirror often, to see if I could get that feeling back. If I sat very still and thought: Not me-not me-not me over and over, I could retrieve the feeling of being two girls, staring at each other through the glass of the mirror.
    I didn't know then that I would eventually have that feeling all the time. Ego and image. Body and brain. The “mirror phase” of child development took on new meaning for me. “Mirror phase”
    essentially describes my life.
    Mirrors began to appear everywhere. I was four, maybe five years old, in dance class. The studio, up above Main Street, was lined with mirrors that reflected Saturday morning sun, a hoard of dainty little girls in baby blue leotards, and me. I had on a brand-new blue leotard, not baby blue, but bright blue. I stuck out like an electric blue thumb, my ballet bun always coming undone. I was standing at the barre, looking at my body repeated and repeated and repeated, me in my blue leotard standing there, suddenly horrified, trapped in the many-mirrored room.
    I am not a waif. Not now, not then. I'm solid. Athletic. A meso-morph: little fat, lot of muscle. I can kick a ball pretty casually from one end of a soccer field to the other,