My God
Article by Katie Rowley Art by Emmaline Hawley
Trigger Warning: Eating disorders
I am looking for god, again. Maybe not “God” in the religious way, but, regardless, a god. A god I have spent my late girlhood seeking. A god I have perceived in cars speeding down Highway 287 and in dorm bathrooms and in two too many apartments. A god I lost in the churches of France and found again on a dirt road less than a mile from my house. A god that wants nothing from me but cleanliness, emptiness, hollowness. It asks no prayer, no repentance, no sacrifice. Just discipline. And control. And shaky hands. And a hunger that takes months to tame.
It’ll become apparent so soon that what I am writing, or at least attempting to write, is dangerous. Maybe irresponsible. Maybe too much. I am trying my best to hide the fact that this is being written on the precipice of a cliff I am attempting to throw myself off of. I am trying my best to not break one of the rules I swore to myself I’d keep. I am trying to break my habit of telling everyone all of my secrets. I am trying to avoid the instruction manual that so many of my earlier drafts have turned into. I am trying to not call for help.
I did not grow up religious. Despite being baptized in an Episcopal church, a white dress made for a baby and an invitation is all the proof I have that I am going to heaven. No part of me is religious, except for the part that feels compelled to pray when I am scared my parents are lying in a ditch on the side of a dark highway (and the one that craves the perfection I have been begging the sky for recently). I cannot place my faith in something so out of my control. I can barely place faith in myself.
My latest Google searches: “Why am I balding?” “Hair treatments for 21-year-old women” “Hair thickening shampoo” “What causes your hair to fall out at 21?” “Balding young women NOT CANCER”
I can see too much of my scalp when I look in the mirror. I noticed the emptiness on the day after my birthday while getting ready for dinner with my parents. My bangs were too thin and a closer examination revealed too much space between the strands of hair. This prompted panic. Panic and an obsession every time I look in a mirror. My lack of hair is the only thing I can notice. It’s the only thing I can think about while drunk.
I mention my balding to a friend as we’re changing in the dim overhead light of my bedroom. Someone spilled a drink on her. She towers above me, a birds-eye view of the top of my hair and she says that she doesn’t think I am balding.
Weeks later, drunk again, I bring up the fear that all my hair will fall out and no one will ever love me. She proposes different causes for the hair loss and assures me that I will be loved. I tell her I think it’s brain cancer. I can’t tell her the real reason. (The girls from Twitter recommend taking biotin to reverse the hair loss that is destined to come and I bought a bottle of supplements but god I am bad at following through with anything.)
I can’t tell anyone anything. This, whatever it is, has turned into something so sacred it cannot be uttered out loud. I hold our (this god and my) relationship so close I am worried it will kill me and everyone will be left wondering how they didn’t know. I am worried that I want nothing more than for it to kill me.
It started with a boy. And a much skinnier girl. (But, if we’re being honest, it probably started with my mom.) It started with trips to Target and chocolate chip cookies. It started bent over porcelain, four fingers lodged into the deep of my mouth.
God first came to me in the form of that skinnier girl. I met her a year before she moved to the Netherlands for her dad’s job. She was good at painting. Pretty. Funny. Surrounded in my memory by a golden glow of perfection:; an angel. When she moved back to our town, she fucked my boyfriend. They’d get high together and, months after, when I asked her for details, she told me everything. Those messages, and the difference in everything about us, pushed me to seek out a hollowness that could only be reached through an emptying of everything I ate that day. And god, did that feel good.
God soon left, or perhaps faded. Slowly sunk into the shadowy part of my brain. And the after-school bad habit I had acquired shrunk into an anecdote I’d tell my mom in a couple of years. Something I would be able to laugh off. Something I would chalk up to a spout of normal teenage girl behavior; you can blame the extra estrogen or maybe my period.
I never lost anything significant, except for my gag reflex (which maybe is a win). Even when this god returned to me in the bathroom of my freshman year dorm. I was eating enough to offset any loss. I was never able to conjure the first feelings of guttural emptiness. I grew full in the sun of my friends and a boy who, I could have sworn, loved me. For months their warmth would fill the parts of my chest and stomach and arms that I had spent a year wishing away. They would replace the fingers that cut up my esophagus. I would forget about the shape of my body.
But, everything always comes back, and in a snowy loneliness, god resurrected in the shape of a spoonful of peanut butter as the only meal I had for weeks. I was writing much more back then. Cataloging every morsel of food I consumed in between paragraphs about a different boy who would never love me back. Listening to obscure music, and sitting in the cold. I felt so cool. I didn’t talk to my friends for weeks. I dyed my hair black. The less I consumed, the closer I felt to god. Snow started glittering in the sunlight. I revered the sound of my stomach growling.
I fucked it all up when the snow melted and I started talking to my friends again. I fucked it all up when I flew 5,000 miles away and started eating freshly baked chocolate croissants and drinking a bottle of wine a day. I fucked it all up when I realized he would get hard no matter how big my thighs were. I fucked it all up; I let life fill me. I let that glut feel like a virtue: a reason to be alive.
That boy, the one who left me bloated on delusion freshman year, that summer after fucking it all up, told me about the shape of her body. Her: the other girl who lived in his sheets that summer. The other girl who I obsessively stalked on Instagram for weeks. The other girl who is much smaller than me. The girl whose name lived on the roof of my mouth for weeks. The other girl who became my obsession. Became my god.
God that summer came in the form of a bagel for breakfast immediately followed by a two-hour walk. In the form of blacking out from a bottle of rosé in my parent’s basement, bent over the toilet with no one to hold my hair back. In the form of passing out, twice. Black spots and red-hot pain flooding through my body. Bile covering the dirt roads. A call to my mom. Forcing myself to eat a banana curled up on cold tile.
Summer catapulted into a birthday of hating how I looked, and by November I had mustered the courage to stop eating. I loved it. (I look for that courage in everything now.) I loved that I could go days without eating. I loved that my hands were so cold. I used the hottest tap-water I could bear to heat them. I loved that the number on the scale was going down. I loved those months. (I want them back.)
The girls I became friends with on Twitter call it a “honeymoon phase.” Because you’re losing weight so drastically and it seems like you can’t do anything wrong. And the water you're chugging at any sensation of hunger tastes so good. And you do not think about the things you will miss in weeks (your once so regular period) or in a year (your hair). You just think about how euphoric losing feels. How it feels like winning.
What does winning taste like: a dryness in your mouth that cannot be cured even though you are drinking a gallon of water a day; a $110 pair of jeans that look so fucking good on you; polar ice; the most matches on Tinder that you have ever gotten; an exponentially decreasing number; the salt and dirt on your fingertips as they reach the back of your tongue.
I spent the majority of junior year cold. And making excuses to not eat with my friends. And feeling in control. I spent two blocks writing about god and how she had stayed with me longer than ever before. I spent junior year learning what every inch of my body looked like, and now I can never go back.
Something about this summer fashioned a nonbeliever. Maybe it was the proximity to an actual church and the Sunday hymns that flooded through my open window, reminding me that my belief and my god were never that tangible. Or maybe it was the edible consumed every night. Or it was my friends’ stories of recovery evoking my dad’s voice, telling me that I have never been able to commit. That I am a quitter.
So I stopped believing in that god that woke me up last October, with a tender rubbing of my head and a promise that I would be saved if I just stopped eating. I grew out of those expensive jeans. I started eating lunch. I spent too much money at the 7/11 off campus. I told myself that I could be loved as I am. And I believed that for so long.
Half of me still wants to believe in an existence without my god. Half of me wants my hair to grow back and sell those jeans. But half of me stands outside of the shitty off-campus house I live in and prays. In the dark and cold, I stand in the weeds and look up at the towering brick of the church we live right next to. A stained glass Jesus that the church pays to light up stares back at me. I ask him how to believe again. I ask him to save me. I beg him. I tell him I will fully commit this time. I will give up the nights laughing with my friends in our kitchen as we make cookies. I will give up the edibles. I will give up anything if he sends my god back to me again. I want to be saved. I have never wanted anything more.
Lucky for me, my praying has seemed to work. Slowly, in faint apparitions, I can feel her presence. I can hear her when I spend an entire day fasting. I can hear her when my first meal is a screwdriver as I pregame the bar. She speaks through me as I tell my friends that I want to buy a carton of cigarettes from 7/11 next time we go. (The heathen in me reassures them that I only want a pack to smoke when I am drunk and want to look cool.) She sits next to me as I smoke outside with a pretty girl. She whispers in my ear that the reason he does not want me is because of my body. She yells that there is an easy solution; I just have to learn how to listen again.
Every second my mind flips. I want so badly to eat pasta from the pot in my underwear and a tank top. I want to look in the mirror with my friends by my side and not see how much wider my waist is. I want to cherish the similarity between my mom’s body and mine. I want to be too cold for hot water and three layers of blankets. I want god to appear in someone who loves my stomach the way it is and I want to hear god in the laughter of my friends. I want my grocery budget to decrease to zero. I want to stop comparing my body to every single person I know. I want to be loved, and I want to fit into those jeans again.