Painful Scene

I try not to make assumptions about people based on their physical appearance.  I swear.  But sometimes you look at someone and just know.  Sometimes it can be attributed to intuition, and sometimes it's just so obvious that the only possible crime is no assumption but denial.

So there is This Girl.  I would guess she is about a year younger than me, just because I have no memory of her from freshman year.  I have seen her around the science side of campus almost daily for a couple of years now.  She started out slender, became skinny, then gaunt, and now she's just scary.  Scary as in I have no idea how she makes it to class in the morning.  Scary as in I want to follow behind her and hold her backpack up so its weight doesn't crush down on her frame any more than necessary.  Scary as in she acts completely oblivious to the fact that she looks like walking death.

Keep in mind that I attend a large, preppyish university in a region where women are still often encouraged to be demure, dependent, and delicate.  In other words, we're a breeding ground for EDs, and it's not uncommon to see gaunt, hypoglycemic people around campus, either haunting the coffee shops, sitting in the library with their sugar free gum and diet Coke at 1:00 in the morning, or puffing along at dawn and dusk in the Skeleton Crews of joggers in their Sofees and sorority t-shirts.  This is part of the landscape, unfortunately.  But This Girl still stands out, I cannot emphasize my disbelief that she's able to get out of bed, much less attend classes, etc.  It's ironic that the human body sometimes surpasses our expectations the most when we are subjecting it to the worst abuse.

Still, at first I tried to tell myself not to assume things.  Maybe she's just thin, maybe she has cancer, maybe I should mind my own disordered business.  Then one day I was not far behind her on our way into the chemistry building, and I overheard her wailing into her phone: "And then my mom made me sit there and eat a muffin!  In front of her! Who does she think she is? I wish she had just beaten me, I wanted to die."  The cancer hypothesis suddenly seemed much less likely.

That was last year, and this semester is the worst I've seen her.   Body invisible within her clothing, face reduced to nothing but eyes and cheekbones.  Usually I see her in/around the lab building, but today G. and I were out walking, enjoying the afternoon sunshine after the past few days of storms, and I saw her crossing the street towards downtown. 

This was possibly the saddest scene I have ever witnessed.  She was trying to exercise.  But she couldn't.  She would take a huge breath, kind of jog/trot for about four or five steps, and then have to quit and go back to walking.  About twenty paces of walking, then another four-step attempt to run, then another failure.  Hand to chest.  Slight pause. Look up at the sky.  Praying?  Cursing? Able to form a thought at all, or just channeling sheer will?  Then back to the another truncated attempt at jogging. The cycle repeated again, and again, and again, until my eyes were too full of tears to watch her anymore.

It reminded me of an experience I had back when I was around 13, at the absolute rock-bottom.  I had always been a good softball player, not to brag, but I was typically the starting first-baseperson. Ever since the age of four, I lived for that game.  But at spring tryouts that year, after a winter living inside my vortex of ED, I wasn't even a shell of the player I had been the previous year.  I managed to get a hit, but couldn't make the run to first base, I literally couldn't.  Tried, and fell, got up, few more steps, and face planted in the dirt again, my legs just couldn't do it.  One of the most humbling experiences I've had, but one of the most important too, because it was a big eye-opener for me, and ended up being a turning point in realizing I truly had a problem.

Have I mentioned how much I hate the hell out of anorexia?  This afternoon, watching that girl's syncopated progress down the street, I was literally shaking with rage and sadness, and that got G. nervous and upset too.  In case you have forgotten, Cammy doesn't cry under normal circumstances.  It's amazing how intense my indignation and frustration become when I am able to observe the disorder from the outside, instead of the distorted view from within.  Fuck you, ED, on behalf of everyone that you have ever deceived and destroyed.