It was 2am late July, 2011 as I emerged from the belly of the R train at Lexington and 59th street after a night out with someone who made no lasting impression. I walked 2 avenues east, one block north, under a neon blue sign and through the finger print smudged glass door of Atomic Wings on the corner of 60th and 2nd Ave across from my mid swanky midtown east studio.
Chunky wedge heals cramping my feet (but hey my legs looked great), 3 martinis heavy on my breath and a scream in my heart, I stood at the counter and placed my order for onion rings, french fries, the large size teriyaki chicken wings, a cheeseburger, vanilla shake and a sprite and made my way home. But, not before stopping at the all night bodega below my studio for a late night slice and a maple donut served up by the shop keep whose melodic native tongue tripped over his limited English vocabulary.
The graveyard shift door man greeted me underwhelmed. He had seen it all before- the lost look in the eyes of a late night lady with a greasy, steaming paper bag under her arm; it didn’t move his gauge. I toppled from the elevator through the door of my studio, took off my coat and shoes and sat in the middle of the floor and strategically ate every last bit of the food.
I took small sips of the soda and milkshake throughout the meal so that it would all mix up and make it easier to purge. Too much liquid and I risk the food not staying in enough of a bolus to come up. Not enough of the right kind of liquid, water was a no go, the bolus is too hard to pass through the esophagus and I choke. Too much milkshake at the end of the meal then it’s all a cold sludge. There is an art form to preventing any sort of digestion and the perfect distribution of food and liquid for the perfect purge.
Upon inhalation of the last bit of pepperoni pizza my body began to sweat and my heart raced against my chest from the pressure in my stomach and the inundation of poor quality frying oil, fake salt and all of those weird named ingredients that make up what we now call food. I was euphoric, numb to the pain and for one blessed minute I had laser focus on a goal I could accomplish. I was unstoppable. I felt on purpose.
I quickly made my way to the bathroom, stuck my right pointer finger way down my throat and began to heave the heavy load of bad burger and bad pizza and bad this and bad that up and out of me and into the shining white porcelain toilet bowl. My rib cage thrust up into my shoulders as I choked and gagged and wrestled the pizza, then the chicken wings and then the fries, but… but the rest wasn’t coming up. I had to get it all up. If one french fry stayed inside, even half of one, it meant an extra hour on the treadmill pounding patterns of shame and self hate deeper into my mind/body the next day- which happened regardless, french fry or no.
The fear rose in my belly, my eyes watered and protruded from my skull. I could not breathe. The blood vessels in my face popped, I was choking. I had been here many times, like the night before and the day before that and that one time I was so panicked I puked over a balcony because the bathroom was occupied and that other time decades before in front of my best friend begging for help or that first time as a young teen in my friend’s bathroom where I learned to wash away the fear of going home and being punished for enjoying myself.
In a wild panic I kept reaching deeper into my guts for that empty relief when I felt a presence in the bathroom and heard a voice:
“YOU- ARE- GOING- TO - DIE.”
And then the ringing of a bike bell from the late night delivery boy trying to make ends meet below in an almost silent NYC street -and I knew that it was true.
I stared into that toilet with blood in my throat and tears in my eyes-
“Then you had better help me because if you don’t, I know I will die soon.”
I could not stop hurting myself. I would not stop if not stopped. I was too far into the addiction to reach for my own hands.
If you don’t know the grip of addiction you can not grok the fucking wild shame of knowing you are taking your own life and yet cannot help yourself even though you spend every minute of every day trying to figure out how to help yourself. Or, of the searing pain of unmet potential that beams back at you through the eyes of others while a love song tortures you in the background of your heart when you fail them because of that voice in your head that pushes you towards that potential and punishes you each time you fall from the flimsy pedestal of determination you wake up with in the morning that says “today I will stop, today will be different, today I will dance”, and that lasts a white knuckling five hours until you cave into the searing impulse and carve another lost dream out of your heart and flush it down a toilet feeding it to the underworld monsters so the cycle begins again and the trenches deepen and you become a good little soldier to shame and you drown in so much shame that eventually it floods your insides suffocating your life force until you actually die unless somehow and someway there is a razor thin space that opens to give another voice a chance.
Two days later I was called into work early. Aug 1st, three months to the day after relocating to NYC from Seattle for the company, my boss relayed to me that it was time to part ways after 10 plus years. I lost the only job I had ever really known as a marker of success in the world. I had no “higher” education past some soulless classes I took for my AA degree in community college, a hefty NYC rent, two friends and an it-girl gym membership.
I looked my boss in the eye, a man who had been sexually aggressive with me since the first day of my employment, barely heard his apologies and the patronizing “I know this is best for you”, which was true and “fuck you”, and a lightning bolt of sobriety rocked my spine. I was all of sudden stone cold sober to something I had no access to before. I could feel a wrinkle in the present moment and how many layers of lifetimes were in that room with me and this man.
Something said “stop, breathe, wake up”. I realized I had a power that I had never accessed. He was heavily relying on my usual sweet, naive, fawning nature to overlook the situation at hand as I had for all those years because “boys will be boys”. He then realized that I wasn’t falling for his coercion to sign the meager severance he was offering me that would not have even paid for my relocation back to Seattle. The room buzzed with a nervousness as thick as a Katz’s deli sandwich.
I gathered my things, including the laptop that bossman shoved into my hands in his wriggling fear, hoping that more gifts would shut me up, my unsigned severance proposal (you best believe I was gonna take my 21 days to sit on this and make him sweat) and made a phone call to my dear, big, beautiful, suited up black man lawyer friend/lover, whom my boss had met at our opening party- to come over from his Gramercy flat and gather me from under bossman’s wimpy gaze. I stepped out back of the store onto a NYC stoop, sat down next to the paint peeled railings and smooth splatters of old gum, placed my hands on my heart and that lightning rod awakened me to something laying long dormant under the pain of every purge.
I looked up at the small sliver of sky competing for real estate above the Flatiron building and said “you can take everything- all the little bit of money I have, all the stuff, all the friends- BUT YOU DO NOT GET MY LIFE. HELP.”
It was a true prayer. Every cell within my being stood at attention to a higher power. The Godseed within me had sprouted. What else can awaken a miracle of such caliber? From that moment on I went from thrusting my pointer finger down my throat for decades, often multiple times a day, and my head hanging in a toilet watching my life slip away, to binging and purging only twice in that next year and then never again. A miracle.
The addiction was far from gone, however. The act of purging was a symptom and a protective shield for the underlying wound, not the actual wound itself. Yet, the action of purging is what would have killed me and it would have been called a heart attack, or esophageal cancer or mental illness or anything but the truth.
In the middle of the big apple a shepherding hand opened a door in my heart and I let it guide me into a whole new life.
Not once did running back to Seattle or shopping my resume around occur to me and I was curious about that. I stood ground and took one step after the other into the unknown toward the direction of wherever that voice told me to go. My life had been saved.
I had no language for it at the time but I somehow knew a huge part of me was being annihilated for a reason. A trickle of relief spiraled through my veins along with a euphoric trepidation at the empty space before me. I was high with transformation and the lingering questions:
Why here? Why now?
Enter 2012- present and the arduous uncovering of what had been living under the rubble…