Christie Tate explores how eating disorders affect relationships in her new book, B.F.F.
“How do you feel?”
“Honestly?” I looked at Meredith’s glacier-blue eyes and told her the truth. “Fat. I feel fat.”
She guffawed so loudly that two teenagers turned around to stare at us. It was true, though.
For the past few days I felt like my clothes didn’t fit, and I imagined extra rolls of fat lining my stomach. When I exercised, my body felt leaden and too big to move. I didn’t think it was funny.
“Fat isn’t a feeling.” Now that she was training to be a spiritual counselor, Meredith had a host of new sayings that she rolled out with startling authority.
“You have an eating disorder; you know what I’m talking about.”
“Of course I do. I feel fat all the time.”
I shook my head at the insanity of eating disorders, hers and mine. Meredith was one of the thinnest women I knew — her clavicle bones jutted out from her chest and her ankles were the size of my wrists. Sometimes we emailed each other what we’d eaten during the day, and many of those days she ate less than my toddler. Breakfast: a cup of yogurt, grapes; Lunch: hard-boiled egg and chocolate milk; Dinner: bagel with cream cheese. But eating disorders don’t give a shit how much you weigh or how old you are or how “clean” your food is. Meredith had taught me that when she called me sobbing about drinking too much chocolate milk or eating too much yogurt. “I hate myself,” she cried into the phone one week, and the next week it was me saying the exact same thing.
She leaned forward and held my gaze. “Our lives are made of patterns that always repeat. I think they repeat until we learn how to be different inside them.”
I felt agitated, anxious to be better already.
“How? Let me guess. More work,” I said.
Meredith nodded and took a sip of her coffee. “If you’re like me, and I think you are, then ‘more work’ usually means ‘more pain.’”
I slapped my forehead with my open palm. “More pain? Is that always the answer?” She didn’t mean I would have to stick my hand over an open flame, but I would have to face the pain I’d caused others.
“How did you recover from bingeing and purging?”
I pursed my lips and looked out the window. My recovery from bulimia had been slow going. And now two decades had passed since I started going to meetings and letting go of my eating secrets. I no longer binged and purged, but I still struggled at times with the attendant parts of my eating disorder: obsession with body image, days of restriction, periodic episodes of overeating, and self-loathing about my appetites. Some days I swam in guilt about what I had eaten the night before. Some days I felt uncomfortable in my body, despairing that it was “too big” and fretting about every calorie consumed. Sometimes I ran miles on the lake on an empty stomach. I sometimes lost minutes of my life envying women who seemed at ease in their bodies, or I lost hours scheming about how I could make my body smaller. To me, all of those behaviors fit squarely in my “eating disorder” box. These episodes didn’t last as long as they used to, and I always talked them over with my friends in recovery. Recovery didn’t mean no more hard days; it meant no more facing hard days all alone.
“It takes a long time to get well,” I said.
Meredith smiled and lifted her coffee cup. “I’ll toast to that.” She’d left me a message earlier that week about skipping dinner more than once in the past few days. She knew a thing or two about disordered eating.
I tapped my cup of hot tea to hers.
“Did you make any friendship amends related to your eating disorder?” Meredith asked after telling me a story about writing a one-hundred-dollar check to a former roommate from whom she stole food and money.
“Sure.” I had practice coming clean about the food I stole, but not for the ways I let down the people I loved by drifting away. Of course, my secret eating disorder created a substantial barrier between other people and me, though I dropped hints to friends in high school and college. During those years, I also chased boys who were deep in their own burgeoning addictions to alcohol and drugs. How could I be available for any close friendships when I was occupied chasing drunk frat boys and hiding my bulimia?
In 1992, I was a sophomore in college, zooming toward an emotional and physical collapse from bulimia. Rock bottom looked like fainting in the shower after bingeing and purging on a pizza I’d rescued from the trash can in the dorm’s common area. The silver lining of almost dying from literal garbage pizza was that I became willing to do anything to get better. A friend who’d gotten sober in AA our senior year of high school recommended a similar recovery program for people with eating disorders, so I looked up the meetings in a giant phone book on the shelf in my dorm room. In my first meeting, I realized that if I wanted to keep my head out of the toilet, I would have to work the steps of the program. I set my sights on a sponsor — Teresa, a soft-spoken woman with rosy cheeks and clear brown eyes who had graduated from my high school a few years ahead of me. At some point, she told me to make a list of all the people I’d harmed when I was bingeing and purging. Top of the list was Kate. Kate was my roommate and closest friend and in the time we’d lived together, I’d helped myself to her food, never asking in advance, instead swiping pieces of this and bites of that. She wouldn’t have cared that I ate one of her Hot Pockets or sneaked a handful of pretzels, but acting in secret and stewing in shame were the centerpieces of my eating disorder.
Two months before I found recovery meetings, Kate and I sat in our usual spot in the library studying for a political science test. “I’ll be right back,” I said. I walked out of the library and then sprinted to our dorm room three blocks away. There, Kate had stashed two bags of Halloween candy in her closet, part of a care package for her boyfriend. I tore open one of the bags and ate five or six Reese’s peanut butter cups standing inside her closet. Jamming the candy into my mouth so quickly made the chocolate and peanut butter glob together and stick in my throat. I ran to the sink and stuck my mouth to the faucet, drinking enough water to clear my airway. Ten seconds later, my hand reached back into the bag. This time, Hershey’s milk chocolate.
In less than five minutes, I’d eaten a third of the bag. Then, panic. How could I hide what I’d done? My brilliant idea: Run across the parking lot to the campus market, buy a bag of replacement candy, and switch it out for the one I’d demolished. Did I polish off the half-eaten bag right then? Probably. I know I purged in our bathroom before running back to the library where Kate sat hunched over her textbook with a highlighter.
“That took a while,” Kate said, looking up. “Who’d you run into?”
“Someone from my women’s lit class. I don’t know her name.” My cheeks flushed from the sugar, the purging, and the sprints across campus. Lying to Kate made me feel hot and dirty — my clothes were suddenly too small, the library now boiling hot.
When I got into recovery, I told Teresa all about this incident — and others like it — and she advised me to tell Kate the truth about my eating.
“Kate,” I said solemnly, on a Sunday night as we sat on our beds deciding whether to watch an episode of Northern Exposure or catch up on reading for our classes. I tried to act naturally, but my voice sounded lower than normal, and my hands were shaking. “So. Well. Um. I’ve gotten into recovery for my eating disorder, and in order to stay clean, it’s necessary for me to make amends to people I’ve harmed. I’ve stolen food from you the whole time we’ve lived together. I’ve lied about how much I was eating and hidden my bulimia from you. I’m getting help now, and I need to come clean to the people I’ve harmed. I’m sorry for all the ways my eating disorder has harmed you and our friendship.” As soon as I got all the words out, I waited for relief to wash over me, but all I felt was embarrassed. This was the hardest conversation I’d ever initiated.
Kate, ever loving and supportive, knew I’d been suffering, even if she didn’t know the details. “I’m so glad you’re getting the help you need. I’m here for you. And I’m proud of you for getting help.”
We hugged and decided it was a TV night. The relief of coming clean arrived by bedtime.
From that day forward, Kate supported my recovery. She knew that drinking too much triggered my desire to binge, so she’d put her hand over my cup when she could tell I’d had enough spiked punch or keg beer. When I was late to sorority chapter meetings because I was at a twelve-step meeting, she covered for me. She wanted me to be safe and happy; I wanted the same for her.
Kate’s friendship was an incredible gift for someone in her first year of recovery. Once I came clean, I never had to hide who I was or what I needed. When we graduated from college, we backpacked through Europe where, in Italy, she waited patiently at our hostel while I attended a twelve-step meeting; in France, Switzerland, and Spain, she let me pick the restaurants because the foreign foods were freaking me out, and she wanted me to be comfortable with the menu.
After our European summer, I decamped to Chicago, and she began her business career in Texas. I should have been able to hold on to the friendship. I had all the tools of recovery plus an email account and a cost-effective long-distance plan, but I drifted away.
Sometimes, I’d hear a Hootie and the Blowfish song that Kate loved or think of one of our many inside jokes, and I’d miss her. In those moments, I had perfectly rational thoughts, like I should call her or I’ll invite her to Chicago! But I’d quickly convince myself it was too late — one phone conversation or visit couldn’t dent the distance between her life as a businesswoman in Houston and my graduate school existence in Chicago. Then, I’d picture her big life — filling out expense reports, bar-hopping with a lively new roommate, hobnobbing with consultants and junior oil execs — and feel certain she wasn’t missing me.
So much second-guessing. So much projection. So much of my imagination devoted to imagining her glorious postgraduate life. So many missed opportunities.
“So what would it look like?” Meredith asked.
“What?”
“What would it look like to get better?” She tapped on the table.
“Do we ever really change? I mean, appreciably. Is that really possible?” I asked.
“You must believe in progress, right?”
“Sure.” As doubt-filled as I was, I’d watched people get well around their eating disorders and dating patterns, family relationships, and finances; I’d seen it in myself and in countless others. Progress definitely existed.
“When we feel pain around friendship or notice anything that brings up shame, anger, or loneliness, then we’re making progress.”
“Sounds fun.”
“The alternative is denial.”
“I’m such a slow learner. Please don’t give up on me.”
“Never.” She took my hand in both of hers. “You’re never alone, you know.”
“You either.”
I felt expansive, like my body held the whole horizon. I knew I would never abandon Meredith, no matter what happened. That truth made me feel strong, like all things were possible.
I could be a friend.
I was a friend.
Christie Tate is the author of the New York Times bestseller Group, which was a Reese’s Book Club selection, as well as her new book, B.F.F.: A Memoir of Friendship Lost and Found (S&S/Avid Reader Press, 2.7.23). She has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere, and she lives in Chicago with her family.
