The morning after my mother died of metastatic breast cancer in 1997, I walked to middle school alone. My father had offered to drive me to school, but I turned him down and went about my day acting as though everything was fine. I showed up to my homeroom on time, ate lunch with friends in the cafeteria, and completed my classwork as I would on any other day. Later in the week, I read the eulogy at my mother’s funeral without shedding a tear.
Family and friends praised me for being a “strong” and “resilient” 11-year-old, not realizing I was playing pretend. I wanted to make believe I was okay, because I hoped it would make the pain of my loss go away. Above all else, I wanted to stop time. If growing up meant living without my mom, then I wanted to stay little forever.
By the time I was 12, I had learned about eating disorders in Seventeen magazine and in my seventh-grade health class, and I was beginning to realize I could change the size of my body based on what I did (or didn’t) eat. Maybe if I stayed the same size I was when my mother was alive, I thought, I could be closer to her. I started restricting my food intake — not to lose weight but to keep myself small and safe.
My food restriction became so severe that I was hospitalized and diagnosed with anorexia nervosa at age 13. I would spend the next few years rotating in between the hospital and residential treatment, unsure if I’d ever get better. “My anorexia is so powerful that I don’t seem to have the strength to overcome it and take control back over my life,” I journaled during one of my hospitalizations. The irony wasn’t lost on me that in my attempts to stay little, I had developed an unbearably big disorder.
But eventually, I learned to grieve my mother’s death and came to realize that anorexia hadn’t made me closer to her. I began to recognize anorexia for what it was: a disorder that had worked its way into my core, ruling everything and giving nothing in return. Through a series of small steps, I did get better. I left residential treatment at age 15 and returned home, where I was intent on reaching the gold standard: full recovery.
The truth is, though, I didn’t know what “full recovery” meant, and I couldn’t recall anyone ever defining it for me. In the absence of a definition, I equated it with a perfectionistic ideal. Much as I had tried to be the perfect motherless daughter, I tried to be the poster child for being completely well.
I did my best to eat and exercise in amounts that I considered to be “just right,” and I stopped going to therapy because I assumed I no longer needed it. I got all As in high school and joined as many extracurriculars as I could. Classmates voted me “Most Likely to Succeed” and “Most Likely to Change the World” — worthy accomplishments for my imagined recovery report card. Keen on excelling, I couldn’t help but keep score. If this is what full recovery looks like, I thought, then I’m getting an A+!
I came to see full recovery as the ultimate measure of success: a life completely free from anorexia. My black-and-white views of sickness and recovery came with protective barriers: If you master the art of full recovery, my disease told me, then you won’t get sick again. If you don’t make any mistakes, you’ll be safe.
Living in those extremes was exhausting, and at times I wondered if it was hurting me more than protecting me. But I didn’t trust that there was a space in between; it seemed too unknown, too precarious. I worried that if I made just one wrong move, I would fall into dangerous territory.
The pressure led me to relapse in college, where I fell into a toxic cycle of binge-eating and restricting my food intake. I found myself trapped in this cycle for well over a decade — and yet, I continued to tell people I was fully recovered. There was a chasm between the narrative I shared publicly and the one I was living out behind closed doors.
To bridge the gap and move forward in my recovery, I needed to start exploring that space in between — the one that had for so long scared me. By the time I was in my late twenties, it occurred to me that I had been living in this space with shame because I didn’t think I was supposed to inhabit it. I began to consider a new possibility: Maybe if the stigma were removed, this space could be defined not by guilt but by growth. It felt like I was onto something, and after not so many moons, I gave this expanse a name: the middle place.
Once I reframed my thinking around the middle place, I began to make meaningful progress in my recovery. Instead of seeing any “slips” as grounds for failure, I came to see them as opportunities for progress. I challenged myself to get back up after slipping, rather than letting every slip turn into a slide. And I started telling a truer narrative about my recovery, born of the belief that complicated truths help us grow in ways that sugarcoating seldom can; they make us more attuned to gray spaces by widening our view of the world beyond black or white, positive or negative.
From within the gray middle place, I’ve learned that recovery is not a return to who you once were, so much as a retrieval of all you lost while you were sick: pleasure, possibility, some semblance of peace. It requires a ruthless commitment to hard work. It’s an accumulation of slow steps, with an acceptance that some steps will lead to slips. And it’s a promise that you’ll be honest about the slips, knowing they’re an inevitable part of progress. You can’t slip, after all, if you’re standing still.
I’ve learned to apply this line of thinking to my perfectionism, too. I used to berate myself for making mistakes. Now, it’s easier for me to admit and acknowledge them. I’m still a perfectionist, but I’ve learned to give myself more grace.
I write about all of this in my new memoir SLIP, a restorative narrative about embracing imperfections in the aftermath of illness and trauma. Just as I’m in the middle place in my recovery, I’m in the middle place with my grief, too. My mother has been gone for nearly 30 years, and yet, I’ve still not arrived at a place of closure. The load of loss has lightened over time, but it’s still a weight I carry.
I felt that load when revisiting places from my past during the book-writing process. At one point, during a wintertime visit to Massachusetts, I retraced my younger self’s footsteps. I walked the same path from my childhood home to my old middle school, passing by the historic shoe factory on Water Street, the strip mall pizza joint on Central Avenue, the four-way intersection where my mother taught me to look both ways. The walk felt strangely familiar, save for one thing: This time, I told myself it was OK to cry.
Mallary Tenore Tarpley is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the memoir SLIP.
