Winter is the best season for hiding things. A blizzard is a flurry, then a blanket. The neighbors stay inside. The sky is dark when you leave for work; the sky is dark when you get home. Men can enter your apartment without notice at twilight and be back in Manhattan for dinner with their wives by nightfall. You can blend into a crowd in winter, get lost in a sea of black and grey hats and coats and scarves, walk with your head down. You can walk to the bodega naked save for a coat and a pair of boots and nobody will know what’s underneath. In fact, you can hide your naked body in so many layers that people won’t notice it until spring, but by then you’ve given yourself an inexorable head start. I have been working against hiding things as a mode of being for the past decade. Winter is, unsurprisingly, my favorite season.
I started keeping secrets when I was fifteen. Once I got caught for the first time I realized I liked the way it felt to have them, so I added more and more until my life became a list of names and feelings I couldn’t talk about to anyone. I thought that keeping secrets was the only way to own my identity—a shortcut to the autonomy and control I so desperately sought. Mostly it was just a shortcut to loneliness.
Last year I met a woman looking for people to interview about eating disorders, having struggled with one herself for years. As a fuck-you to my secret-keeping, I volunteered to be filmed talking about my own. How it developed, what factors in my childhood or adolescence might have triggered it, when I started eating again. What “recovery” means to me, if it means anything at all. I was curled up on my roommate’s leather armchair, swallowed up by a blue men’s button-down, drinking red wine between takes, looking at this calm, quiet woman while she asked me questions I didn’t know I had the answers to. At one point, she asked about my sexual history, in hopes of finding some connection between my first sexual experiences and the development of my eating disorder.
This was a story that was thrilling to me at first. Then funny, then sad, now disturbing. I was fifteen, M was twenty-eight. I harbored what I then thought was a secret crush on him, realizing later how completely obvious it had been. He exploited this attraction, and my innocence, to his advantage and sent me—via Myspace—romantic messages, then explicit messages that I believed were romantic, not yet knowing the difference. Four months before my sixteenth birthday, M and I sat on his bed, covered with a blanket he’d received for his high school graduation—the summer before I entered kindergarten—and listened to Wilco while he kissed me, then gently pushed me down on the bed and removed my shirt, my bra, my skirt, and my underwear, in that order. It was all consensual, as consensual as a sexual interaction between a never-been-kissed-before fifteen-year-old girl and a twenty-eight-year-old man can be. I cannot listen to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot without feeling like I am back in M’s apartment, giving something up for every garment of clothing tossed onto the carpet next to his bed.
Years later, when I flew back to Florida from New York at eighteen, I was twenty pounds lighter than I’d been when I’d left. I was exposed, eighty degrees outside, pale skin in cutoffs and tank tops. I was all bones and picking at the food on my plate. My mom made me stand on the scale at the grocery store. I was shivering in the air conditioning, praying for double digits though I knew there’d be hell to pay, feeling something like victorious when the line settled near one hundred. Back in New York, I went to a therapist, kept my coat on the whole time, talked about everything but. For months. He never asked and I never told him. My mother has still never even said the word ‘anorexia’ to me, regarding my own experiences. Never.
I come from a long line of women who believe that if you don’t talk about something, it never happened. We will erase our history by never talking about it. I am trying to talk about it.
I want to talk about the days when all I cared about was planning my day around a calorie count. I want to talk about the man who drove by my parents’ house at night, flashing his headlights at my bedroom window like a calling song while my parents slept in the next room over. I want to talk about the nights when my coat hung heavy from my tired, bony shoulders. About the man who had a live-in girlfriend, a thirteen-year-old son in Colombia, and said, “This is the last time,” every time. About the carrots, and the apples, and the cups of tea, so many cups of tea. The hotel room mattress and the blindfold over my eyes. The man I left early in the morning on a balmy Florida Christmas Eve, peeling mandarin oranges with one hand as I merged shakily onto the expressway, heading back to my parents’ house to help cook food for a dinner I wouldn’t eat any of. I wrote a letter to that man earlier this year, asking him, Did you know I was anorexic back then? I am trying to talk about everything without glamorizing any of it.
Keeping all of these secrets made me feel as I were glowing, made me feel like skipping down the subway steps and screaming into my pillow with glee. But for years—for years, I dreamed of ink stains, a drop falling, a small black dot spreading across a white cloth, me powerless to stop it. What a stupid fucking obvious metaphor.
Most important is to understand that everything is woven together—the secrets and the not eating and the string of men I turned into numbers. I thought that being in control and out of control at the same time, through some twisted logic, could balance each other out. There is a certain type of power in secrecy, but it is a lonely power that often feels like shame. It is a passive type of power. If you’re not careful, someone else—or the pictures of you as a skeleton of yourself—will tell your secrets for you. I wish, so badly, that someone had told fifteen-year-old me those things. I thought if I did things that weren’t good for me and kept them to myself I could erase them. I still do bad things sometimes. The difference is that someone else always knows.
