the misfit west

Tag: creative non fiction

  • automatically, without sound

    There is a muscle that runs from your lower spine through the bowl of your pelvis. Most people don’t know it exists until it wakes up. I had often heard about the psoas in yoga classes, the advanced ones where the teacher’s voice gently glided into authority of anatomy. One teacher often commented that we keep our exes in our hips and don’t be surprised if you randomly start crying.

    I was always moving. Feel bad, run, strength train, feel a little better, punish myself for feeling better. Then I started noticing my shape. I was never the thinnest in the room but I could hold my own in yoga classes, scantily clad in whatever overpriced Lululemon I had bought in spaces my income said I didn’t belong. I also started writing ever so carefully about eating disorders in my blog. I talked mostly about binging and purging and watched private messages flow in.

    In grad school, there was lots of encouragement of disclosure in a way that moved the class along, paralleling our ultimate use of disclosure in session to move therapy along. One girl talked about her eating disorder. She mentioned how the purging got so bad one day she could see and taste blood in her mouth. She was kicked out of our program that semester and had she never told us this info, I would have known.

    I keenly observed this woman like the other 21 folks in the program. How had they gotten here, were they better than me, did I have any business being here? And this girl, I saw her most. Her eating disorder wasn’t a secret to me. I knew exactly why she was always drinking water from her Nalgene, why the pack of gum was always sitting right next to her notebook, why she spent hours in the gym barely lifting weights while I ran mile after mile after mile on the treadmill.

    To this day, I know the calorie count in most foods. I know exactly what exercise will burn the most calories and how. I learned that to lose REAL weight, to lose the kind of weight to enter the disordered zone, you can’t workout as much as you would like. You simply get too hungry. I worked out at least twice a day and would become dysregulated if I couldn’t attend both my morning and evening classes.

    On break from school one spring, I found myself in a hugely crowded yoga class in Fort Collins, the last of four classes I had taken as I traveled back from southern Colorado. Class in Colorado Springs. Class in Denver. Another class in Denver. And now here I sat exhausted and forced into a place in the front of class where I felt the excitement of it all. Losing weight was a lifestyle now. Thoughts of thinness preceded every action and the goal was always to weigh less. And I had found the perfect community in which to mask it all: yoga.

    I had felt I escaped some fate when the classmate was removed from our program and the only difference between us was that I knew better than to talk about eating, disordered or otherwise. I knew better than to tell people the regimens I had lined out in my head that had to be completed for me to relax. I knew better than to go to lunch with anyone who might see me tuck away three quarters of my meal and vomit up the rest. If I didn’t do two a day workouts, one yoga, one running and strength training, I would feel anxiety so crippling that I could barely sleep. The only comfort was knowing that I could work out in a few hours when the studio opened.

    I never excelled too much at restriction or a slow measured approach to diminishing myself. The purging was the main gist of it all. I had trained my belly and my brain to feel certain amounts of food and automatically and without sound I could easily discard fresh meals. My secret wasn’t always kept that way and one time at work I was caught. In conflict with a coworker, he sharply said that maybe I ought go puke about what had gotten me upset. He knew. I had been sloppy. What bothered me most was how much money I would waste. $250 of sushi in the toilet at Mizos. Pad thai down the drain at Anongs. Pastries barely chewed down the toilet at Coal Creek.

    This went on for years. The binging and purging never seemed pervasive enough for me to do anything about it. Vomiting at this point wasn’t so much about staying thin as it was the feeling of relief that followed fullness. Feelings and thoughts expelled into nothingness. I started to get better at restricting, adjacent to a man who had the disorder as well. We entered an unspoken competition.

    Embarrassment and shame became ugly smelling incense lingering in the air and he floated right in with it. I watched posts about the flat earth and alleged spiritual enlightenment fill up his Facebook wall and X feed. In reality, he was an abusive prick who took way too many drugs and didn’t know how to cook or eat at regular intervals. He always had a woman to do this for him. The thinness I had managed right before things went south was in direct response to this man. Can’t win for losing with a personality disordered person.

    I eventually broke up with him and around 2019 I no longer had the privilege of worrying about weight. I was fired for doing community organizing and getting a free breakfast and lunch program into an elementary school. Who knew food was so political. Every Saturday after that I sat at the Farmers Market handing out double up food bucks, suggesting squash over potatoes to women thinner than me, nodding along to conversations about clean eating. I was the expert. I knew exactly how many calories were in everything on every table.

    A year later I was dating a man who excelled at ski mountaineering and said something sweet about the roundness of my belly. I think he intended to be sweet, talking about the bulge like a pineapple, but instead it landed like a verdict. I had stopped running the numbers long enough to gain the weight back and didn’t know what to do with a body I no longer recognized.

    The binging and purging shifted after that from food flying out of me to drugs and alcohol. Fired, single, and now a drunk. I would drink until I passed out so I didn’t have to feel the inertia of falling. At some point the fentanyl made purging involuntary. Projectile, sudden, out of my control the way nothing had been in years. My body lying still on the couch, feet crossed at the ankle without me noticing, the psoas locked and silent. I had stopped moving entirely. I didn’t know yet what that was costing me.

    The eating disorder slowly went away not because I worked at it but because everything I knew was no longer true. My mom killed herself that fall. My uncle six months later. I stopped weighing myself sometime in there and didn’t notice until summer. The grief was so total it crowded out the counting. There wasn’t enough room in my life to both stay alive and quantify doing so. I held off on my licensure. I stopped working. I waited to see what would be left.

    After the great losses of my mom and my uncle, I went to a doctor. She gave me a simple formula. Keep added sugar under 26 grams. I started eating chocolate almonds and cereal to manage the cravings the opiates had left behind. I tried Club Pilates but it was too fast and left my hips feeling sore and unmoored. Another studio with Turkish wooden reformers was out of reach financially. I eventually landed on the Lagree method, which was slow and deliberate. Moving that carefully after years of running myself into the ground started to work. My body finally started to feel what it was like to move without punishment.

    Despite all this, I ended up losing weight again. From 224 to 170 as of yesterday. I used to use this formula where folks who are 5’0″ weigh 100 pounds and then you add five pounds for every inch. That math tells me I should be around 170. Looks like old formulas and habits die hard. This weight loss was the way the doctor wanted, though. Simply cut out added sugar and watched two pounds per week until it stayed.

    Great loss cured me and I kept circling that like a drain. Most of my family is dead or estranged and I worry I’ll go unclaimed when I die, that my landlord will clean out my house the way I cleaned out my uncle’s. My aunt texts me about food because it’s neutral ground. Last week she told me they split one steak three times a month and mostly eat toast and eggs, that they all just need to walk more, with you as the exception. I held my phone for a second. Everyone compliments the disorder and calls it discipline. No one compliments the balance because the balance doesn’t look like anything from the outside. I don’t ask if she knows. That’s exactly how it always worked. Don’t say a thing. Keep it quiet.

    I run until I think Angel has waited long enough in the car. All four windows down so she can watch. One front leg, separation anxiety, overweight in ways the vet keeps mentioning. I don’t count the miles or check the time. Somewhere around thirty-five minutes something opens up in my hips. Not a thought, not a number. The psoas, maybe, finally loose for a reason that has nothing to do with burning anything off. Just the body, moving because it wants to. Angel watches from the window and I wave at her like an idiot. She doesn’t care. I don’t care. I never start crying on the run. But I understand now why someone might.

  • death feelings

    The gloves smell like old water.

    I don’t notice it right away. I’m already up to my elbows in the sink, hot water running hard enough to turn the room to fog, a narrow winter sun flattening itself against the kitchen window. The gloves are a cloudy blue, rubber gone soft and thin at the fingertips. I bought them after the skin on my hands split open from the dry air and the heat and the soap. Little red mouths along my knuckles. So now I slide into these damp sleeves that hold the memory of every other sink of dishes I’ve washed in this house. The inside smell is stale and sour and faintly sweet, like a mop bucket forgotten in the corner of a church basement.

    I turn the plate under the stream until the last streak of oil dissolves. The sound of the water swallows everything—the wind outside, the heater kicking on, the small elastic pop of my dog’s joints as she shifts on her bed behind me.

    This is usually when it starts.

    I look at the plate, then at the rest of the sink: the chipped mug, the spoon with yogurt clinging to the bowl, the glass that held last night’s Advil. Then I look past the dishes to the counter, to the mail stacked in its half-hearted tower, to the notebook splayed open with a pen bleeding through the page, to the bowl of shriveled limes I keep forgetting to throw out. My eyes keep moving, hooking on each object: the bookshelf, the crooked lamp, the blanket slumped over the arm of the chair, the dog’s toys, the stack of folders with my uncle’s name printed in careful black letters at the top.

    I picture all of it without me.

    Will it be easy to get rid of? That’s the question that runs underneath the hot water, under the smell of rubber and detergent. Has it always been this easy to clear me out? A few boxes. A phone call. An estate sale on a Saturday.

    When my uncle died, it took less time than I expected. I kept waiting for a secret to emerge—some hidden compartment, a false bottom, a letter taped under a drawer. He had spent his whole life guarding things, smoothing the surface, protecting the story. When I walked through his house after they carried him out, the carpet smelled like dust and old coffee and a man who had tried very hard not to leave a mess. The blue-green of it was already fading in the high-traffic places. The trash cans were mostly empty. The bathroom cabinet held three half-used bottles of aftershave and the razor he’d used that morning. His closet looked like a store display: shirts organized, shoes paired by the door. I remember standing there, thinking: That’s all. That’s really it.

    And then my sister took charge and whatever he’d been trying to keep contained blew wide open. Bank accounts, loans, mortgages he’d kept current by some quiet miracle. The money he’d stacked with the same care he used to fold his shirts, now shuffling out of the accounts like it had been waiting for her hand. It wasn’t the spending itself that made me dizzy—it was the echo of my mother in it, the old QVC boxes piling up on the porch, the way she would buy and buy and then sit us down and lecture us about how we never had anything. We were always broke, she assured us, as a new package arrived. It is a particular form of madness, being told you are poor by someone who will not stop consuming.

    I rinse the plate until my fingers go numb inside the gloves. Outside, a gust of wind slaps the siding, a hollow sound, like a hand hitting a bare back.

    I think about death most days. It’s not dramatic; it’s logistical. Each cough, for example. I feel the rasp in my throat and immediately picture a shadow on an X-ray, the white smear of something that will not respond to treatment. On days when my lungs behave, my brain rewrites the script: early-onset dementia, little holes in the gray matter that will quietly empty me out until nothing is left but reflex. I misplace a word and feel the edge of it—the possibility that this is the beginning of the end and I will never again trust my own sentences.

    They say there’s a name for this—the way the mind circles death after enough blows, rehearsing it, tracing the routes by which you might leave. Someone wrote that people who have watched a parent die, or disappear, often live with death seated just offstage. Not a fear, exactly. An assumption. A constant readiness.

    I call mine the death feelings, but lately it feels more honest to call it being awake.

    I scrub the fork, working the sponge between the tines. The motion is small but aggressive. My hands ache inside the gloves. The eczema—or whatever it is—has left my skin thin and itchy. The gloves let me turn the water up hotter than is strictly necessary. I like the burn. I like the way it makes my fingers feel separate from the rest of my body, like I could peel them off and set them on the counter when they get too loud.

    My mother used to stand at the sink, too. I can see her there if I close my eyes: cigarette balanced in the corner of her mouth, ash growing too long over the basin, late-night infomercials chattering from the living room. The counter behind her was often lined with cardboard boxes—beauty kits, vacuum-sealed containers, a sequined top she’d ordered at three in the morning. She would tear into them with an eagerness that embarrassed me, then stack the contents neatly while complaining about how we never had anything. We were always broke, she reminded us, as if the evidence on the counter were proof of our ingratitude.

    She hated being seen, my mother. She hated her own reflection, the way the overhead light made her skin look sallow. She hated her body, her marriage, the town, herself. I know these things because she made sure I knew. I also know what it looks like when someone cannot metabolize their suffering, when it curdles and pours out sideways onto the nearest person. I know how it feels to have a parent who would rather die than admit she was hurting.

    I turn off the water. The house exhales with me.

    The quiet is a physical thing. It lays across my shoulders, settles over the dog, seeps into the cracks along the windowsill. There is no radio. No one calling to ask how I’m holding up. The phone, when it rings, usually brings obligation, not comfort. I have become careful about what I share with the people who are left. I have learned that certain sentences trigger a kind of arms race of suffering: I say, “I’m having a hard time,” and someone responds, “You think you have it bad?” I say, “I’m scared,” and someone answers with a catalogue of their own emergencies. By the end of the call, I’m apologizing for opening my mouth.

    I read once that there’s a term for this, too—the way some people respond to another’s pain by immediately asserting their own. It’s not evil. It’s a learned survival strategy. A way of saying, “Don’t forget me. I hurt, too.” In families like mine, where violence and scarcity were the wallpaper, it became a reflex. Whoever bled loudest got the bandages.

    I never did learn to bleed loudly enough.

    Instead, I wrote.

    At first, I did what I was supposed to: framed my pain with quotes from other, more acceptable women. I lined the pages with Toni and Maya and Margaret and Annie, letting their words rinse mine until the whole thing felt more palatable. I wanted their sentences to bless my own, to make them less embarrassing, less ugly. I wanted to be the kind of person whose suffering made her wise.

    But the more I wrote, the less that approach worked. The quotations began to feel like apologies. Like I was saying, “Don’t worry, I know my life is too much; here’s someone more important to make it go down easier.” I began to resent the way my paragraphs yearned toward a lesson. It felt like lying. There is no moral to having your mother’s voice in your head telling you you’re ungrateful from beyond the grave. There is no clean takeaway to realizing your uncle—the one person who loved you without trying to reshape you—saved every penny only for it to be siphoned away into someone else’s account.

    He used to say my stories were dark. “So dark,” he’d say, half admiring, half uneasy, his mouth tugging to the side in that way it did when he was trying to be gentle. I didn’t know how to explain that darkness was the only honest tone I had. That I wasn’t writing to shock anyone. I was writing to keep myself from disappearing. There are people whose families frame their work on the walls, put clippings on the fridge. Mine reads and looks away, then tells me I have the wrong idea about what happened.

    I pull the plug. The water circles the drain, taking foam and crumbs and the last heat with it. The gloves drip on the edge of the sink, little pale hands empty of bones.

    This is where the death feelings settle, once the task is done: in the space between the routine and the void. I picture my belongings being sorted: notebooks opened then closed, dog toys tossed into a bag, the lamp unplugged, the books divided into keep and donate. My writing reduced to a stack of paper someone will skim at most. I picture the ease with which someone could erase me—how quickly the narrative could tighten around the absence.

    Nothing resolves. No lesson arrives. The death feelings settle back into their usual place behind my ribs, an extra organ, humming.