the drawer, and inside the statue was a place where she’d stash bills. She always made sure there were plenty of twenty-dollar bills there, so if I needed cash, I’d take twenty or forty out of Mary. Julia must have checked regularly, because the statue always held what I needed.
My friends and I traveled in packs, mostly, and we had fun. This part of life is when many teenagers start drinking. On a typical weekend, a group of us would go to Manhattan to the Limelight or the Palladium. Or when we stayed on Long Island, we’d go to Malibu in Lido Beach or to TR’s (for Teddy Roosevelt) in Williston Park. We’d go out around nine or ten and meet up with other friends. Sometimes one or more of the girls would bring along a boyfriend or an older brother. Then you’d just go and hang out, dance, and drink. If you weren’t driving, you’d drink until you were drunk. It certainly wasn’t sophisticated, but getting smashed didn’t seem out of the ordinary, at least among the people I knew. We’d sometimes make our way home at three or four in the morning.
From early on I assumed that I wasn’t going to have a romantic life. I just wrote it off. So when my friends talked about boys they liked, the ones they found attractive, and which ones they were going to pursue, it felt irrelevant to me. I had my own philosophy, my own set of goals. I was going to make something of myself. I was going to help people. I was going to have fun. But as far back as I can remember, I subscribed to the belief that you can’t have everything. I had friends, I was smart, and I did pretty well in school, and that was enough. I didn’t worry about my sexuality. I didn’t feel much of anything. I had a couple of dates with boys, and they didn’t work, so I went back to the group and put all other thoughts out of my mind.
My friends and I were a close-knit group, and the fact that there were no boys romantically in my life didn’t bother me at all. What bothered me was being what I believed was overweight and unattractive. My sadness and my lack of physical self-confidence meshed together, leaving me feeling powerless and desperate to fix this aspect of my life. I had failed to make my mother better. I had given up on romance. I had to succeed at losing weight. I had to get control over something in my life, and controlling my weight, therefore, became my obsession.
I decided that self-induced vomiting was the answer. I started making myself sick when I was sixteen. It never helped me lose weight. Clearly that wasn’t what it really was about.
And on top of how I felt about the way I looked, I was sad and lonely in the aftermath of my mother’s death. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a fat, motherless kid with pimples who couldn’t figure out how to dress or do her hair or do any of the things girls are supposed to know how to do.
But see, the trouble is you start self-inducing vomiting for one reason, or at least you think that’s why you’re doing it, and it becomes a way to escape the things you’re really feeling. By excessively overeating, you become numbed out. Which is a great place to be if you’re feeling any of the overwhelming things I was feeling as a teenager. And by physically vomiting, you’re expelling more than the ridiculous amounts of food you’ve ingested. You’re expelling whatever you’re feeling, whatever you don’t understand, all of your difficulties—you’re just getting rid of them. I was throwing up the pain of my mother’s death, the overwhelming guilt I felt for my role in her sad life, and my sorrow, my mountains of sorrow.
The other thing you’re doing, by self-inducing vomiting, is making your body do something it’s not supposed to do. And if you are in an exceedingly out-of-control situation, you’ve mastered control over some thing, which gives you a false sense of power.
The bulimia and the drinking didn’t have much significance to me then, because I thought everybody was doing
My friends and I traveled in packs, mostly, and we had fun. This part of life is when many teenagers start drinking. On a typical weekend, a group of us would go to Manhattan to the Limelight or the Palladium. Or when we stayed on Long Island, we’d go to Malibu in Lido Beach or to TR’s (for Teddy Roosevelt) in Williston Park. We’d go out around nine or ten and meet up with other friends. Sometimes one or more of the girls would bring along a boyfriend or an older brother. Then you’d just go and hang out, dance, and drink. If you weren’t driving, you’d drink until you were drunk. It certainly wasn’t sophisticated, but getting smashed didn’t seem out of the ordinary, at least among the people I knew. We’d sometimes make our way home at three or four in the morning.
From early on I assumed that I wasn’t going to have a romantic life. I just wrote it off. So when my friends talked about boys they liked, the ones they found attractive, and which ones they were going to pursue, it felt irrelevant to me. I had my own philosophy, my own set of goals. I was going to make something of myself. I was going to help people. I was going to have fun. But as far back as I can remember, I subscribed to the belief that you can’t have everything. I had friends, I was smart, and I did pretty well in school, and that was enough. I didn’t worry about my sexuality. I didn’t feel much of anything. I had a couple of dates with boys, and they didn’t work, so I went back to the group and put all other thoughts out of my mind.
My friends and I were a close-knit group, and the fact that there were no boys romantically in my life didn’t bother me at all. What bothered me was being what I believed was overweight and unattractive. My sadness and my lack of physical self-confidence meshed together, leaving me feeling powerless and desperate to fix this aspect of my life. I had failed to make my mother better. I had given up on romance. I had to succeed at losing weight. I had to get control over something in my life, and controlling my weight, therefore, became my obsession.
I decided that self-induced vomiting was the answer. I started making myself sick when I was sixteen. It never helped me lose weight. Clearly that wasn’t what it really was about.
And on top of how I felt about the way I looked, I was sad and lonely in the aftermath of my mother’s death. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a fat, motherless kid with pimples who couldn’t figure out how to dress or do her hair or do any of the things girls are supposed to know how to do.
But see, the trouble is you start self-inducing vomiting for one reason, or at least you think that’s why you’re doing it, and it becomes a way to escape the things you’re really feeling. By excessively overeating, you become numbed out. Which is a great place to be if you’re feeling any of the overwhelming things I was feeling as a teenager. And by physically vomiting, you’re expelling more than the ridiculous amounts of food you’ve ingested. You’re expelling whatever you’re feeling, whatever you don’t understand, all of your difficulties—you’re just getting rid of them. I was throwing up the pain of my mother’s death, the overwhelming guilt I felt for my role in her sad life, and my sorrow, my mountains of sorrow.
The other thing you’re doing, by self-inducing vomiting, is making your body do something it’s not supposed to do. And if you are in an exceedingly out-of-control situation, you’ve mastered control over some thing, which gives you a false sense of power.
The bulimia and the drinking didn’t have much significance to me then, because I thought everybody was doing
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