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Guest Posts, eating disorder, pandemic

Mother Daughter Stew

July 25, 2021
ingredients

by Nancy Crisafulli 

Ingredients

From Mother’s Expansive Garden 

1 cup low-cal self-esteem

For correct blend mix equal parts shame, blame and overripe guilt.

2 cups shredded body image

Tear fresh images into bite-sized pieces, rinse under cold water and drain completely.

8 oz. night-blooming tobacco

Steep tobacco in 7-14 oz of any red wine (see directions below).

1 lb. depressed family history

This ingredient may also be found in Father’s garden and is often mistaken for a bothersome, invasive weed.

From Daughter’s Secret Pantry

1 cup high-concentrate anxiety – Use full strength – do not dilute.

2 cups well-seasoned perfectionism – Straight A+ seasoning is preferred, but type A will also work.

4 oz. flowering fear of failure (FFF)

Note: FFF is a bitter herb that will significantly impact the flavor of your stew -remember, a little goes a very long way.

2 lbs. genetic predisposition – This underrated ingredient can be found at many organic stores including Roots and MoMs Organic Market).

Optional Non-Organic Ingredients

7 Tbsp. expectation to excel in all endeavors (EEE)

EEE grows like a wildflower in suburbia so check your backyard before purchasing.

Multiple shots of reprocessed Insta-Selfies – Adjust lighting, filters, angles and number of shots for maximum impact.

Directions

Step 1: 

In medium-sized bowl, carefully combine mother’s low-cal self-esteem and shredded body image with daughter’s undiluted anxiety. Mix thoroughly.

*Mother: To be sure ingredients are thoroughly blended, pinch and knead the fatty area behind your knee (or any other unattractive body part) repeatedly while chatting heart-to-heart with your adolescent daughter. Adding this personal touch is guaranteed to work better than the most efficient KitchenAid.

Step 2: 

Macerate night-blooming tobacco in red wine and let soak in a tub until all liquid is absorbed.

*Daughter: While Mother macerates, use a paring knife or other sharp object to make shallow cuts in your flowering fear of failure. Cover carefully with a dry cloth and store in a cool, dark place.

Step 3

In a separate bowl, sift together mother’s depressed family history with daughter’s genetic predisposition. Do this slowly, alternating just a bit of depressed history with a little predisposition until you have the perfect mix of these secret family ingredients.

Step 4: 

Place all prepared items from mother’s garden and daughter’s pantry into the domestic cooking device of your choice (see side bar for choices). Sprinkle freely with non-organic optional ingredients to taste and cook as directed.

Step 5: 

Serve piping hot with a side of solitude and regret.

Sans appétit!

Tip

For a less robust stew, slowly introduce one or more tempering agents (Wellbutrin, Ativan, Lexipro) before the stew is fully cooked. See individual packaging for suggested amounts.

Yield

This recipe serves 1-2 but, properly stored, its prolonged shelf life can often under-nourish an entire family for generations! Studies have shown that a sustained diet of this popular stew is almost guaranteed to yield the following:

Daughter

  • Drastic reduction in calories and fat
  • Grinding, obsessive exercise
  • A feast of secrecy and self-loathing
  • Suicidal thoughts and/or actions

Mother

  • Growing dread of family meals
  • Searing, wild remorse
  • Frantic weeding of personal garden
  • Ravenous craving for a shared bowl of daughter’s favorite childhood ice cream

Chef’s Note:

Organic vs Non-Organic? Conventional wisdom suggests that our genes and the environment around us play important parts in the development of eating disorders and other chronic diseases. For people recovering from anorexia, bulimia or other EDs during this pandemic, the combined ingredients of Corona-related stress, grief, lack of structure, and social isolation may be the perfect recipe for relapse.

If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, please reach out:

National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA)
https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/help-support

Academy for Eating Disorders
https://www.aedweb.org/expert-directory

 National Alliance on Mental Health Illness (NAMI)
https://www.nami.org/About-Mental-Illness/Mental-Health-Conditions/Eating-Disorders/Discuss

stew

Nancy Crisafulli received her BA in English Literature from the University of Maryland and spent the next forty years in the field of instructional design in and around Washington, DC. She did most of that writing in a corporate office. Her other writing has been languishing in her spare bedroom and recently asked to move out. A few of those pieces have been published in Under the Gum Tree and The Sun. When she isn’t writing, Nancy is probably out walking, doing yoga, playing with the grands, or on the co-ed softball field with her husband and best friend, Frank.

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Although each of Jenny Offill’s books is great, this is the one we come back to, both to reread and to gift. Funny and thoughtful and true, this little gem moves through the feelings of a betrayed woman in a series of observations. The writing is beautiful, and the structure is intelligent and moving, and well worth a read.

Order the book from Amazon or Bookshop.org

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Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

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Guest Posts, eating disorder

Jumping, But Not For Joy

October 25, 2020

By Rebecca Portela

My senior year of high school started in the midst of my deterioration. I spent a lot of my time reading memoirs of women with eating disorders, while my mother read psychology books on understanding women with eating disorders. Our relationship was fickle, despite the fact that we both just wanted me to be healthy and didn’t know what was causing me to be in such distress all the time.

Thinness was just the side effect of my strict regimen of calorie counting, exercising, and sheer mania. It was simply an ongoing endurance test, and I constantly needed to push my limits. And I always took it too far. My personal record was a whole week without eating or sleeping. Because why stop at starving? Let’s add a side of delirium, too. I spent most of the time at a friend’s house doing jigsaw puzzles. We had taken over the dining room table and the living room floor. We eventually had to dismantle our least favorites to make room for new puzzle stations. I was quite proud of our specific strategy styles. I pulled out the corner pieces and the edges, and he immediately grabbed the two closest pieces and tried to make them fit together. Sometimes he would force them, mashing his thumb down on top of them, convinced that they belonged together. Without speaking, we made piles of same-colored pieces and designated them accordingly. Sometimes we would have to speak and say things like, Be on the lookout for a little hat with some gold in it. During smoke breaks, he sat at the edge of his pool and splashed his feet in the water. He’d take in a big drag and as he exhaled, he’d make definitive claims like I’m gonna move to New Zealand and become a welder. I walked around the edge of the pool, stepping in the exact middle of each tile and saying something like, Can I come with you? We watched the sun come up on the seventh day and, by then, the leaves on the trees were puzzle pieces with little bits of sky. My cigarette smoke made love with his on top of the pieces of puzzle sunrise. I blinked and heard my eyelid unstick from my eye, like fresh Velcro. I knew that he would never move anywhere and he knew I would never go with him. The freckles on his hands lifted off and popped like juicy bubbles, interrupting all the smoke sex. A wild laugh bounced around at the back of my throat and I threw up all of it with the rest of the emotions in my gut. My back was itchy, which was how I knew I was on the grass now, crying or laughing or screaming or puking.    

I fainted at school, and they called my mother to come and pick me up. She warmed up a can of soup that was in my pre-approved cupboard of “safe” foods. It was a soup called “Super Broccoli” and contained exactly sixty calories, and not much else. I waited until she left the room and dumped it down the garbage disposal. It wasn’t long after these periods of rebellion that my body kicked into survival mode and ate, whether I wanted it to or not.

This is where bulimia creeps out of the woodwork. Bulimia terrifies me because she is a slippery garden hose, whipping around in all directions and out of control. She is a gluttonous savage that devours everything in sight and then rejects it. She goes from zero to sixty to zero again in the blink of an eye. I did everything possible to kill that bitch.

I frequently turned to drugs and men when I couldn’t control my eating disorder. It was the only way to curb my obsession and compulsions, which were the actual root of my problem. After my first encounter with drugs, I craved the escape. I craved the insanity. I craved the feeling that nothing is real and so nothing really matters. I liked that my thoughts were turned off and that food wasn’t the focus of my existence. I was too busy being out of my mind. I didn’t have to care about anything.

My utter recklessness should have sent me to an early grave. As I peaked on one of my acid trips, I had a fleeting thought that a police officer, in the distance, suspected something. Or was that a tree? Speaking of which, I needed to get home to plant a tree because I needed to feel connected to the earth. Everything was connected. I was the earth. I was invincible. So I jumped in my car and played a very dangerous game called Driving Home on LSD, listening to “Eleanor Rigby” on repeat. Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door. Who is it for? All the lonely people, where do they all come from? It took me an eternity to drive the twelve miles from Coconut Grove to Cutler Ridge––two hours in real time. I didn’t even have a driver’s license at the time. My hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that they were throbbing and visibly pulsed in front of me. The traffic lights wore majestic tails that stretched out into the swirling neon signs of strip clubs and bars. The fusion of lights, honking cars, and the mysterious symbols on the dashboard was making it impossible to concentrate. A little lightbulb went off in my head every second, rapid fire, you need to push on the pedal, you need to push on the other pedal, now the other pedal again. It was exhausting and a little bit of an existential crisis. I’m still dumbfounded that I didn’t kill anyone that night.

The comedown was always the worst. My entire body was crawling with bugs that weren’t really there. They were digging into my skin and some even made it all the way into my blood, burrowing into my identity, taking over. I wanted to surrender to the creepy crawly bugs of sadness. I could feel myself giving up. I was losing myself.   

2002, eating disorder treatment, take two. The treatment facility tried to incorporate “real life” as much as possible, so that it wouldn’t be as difficult to transition back into the world upon leaving. We were assigned an apartment in a building with regular people. The first floor was the eating disorder floor and the second floor was the substance abuse floor. And the other ten floors were for normal people. Our roommates were also people in the program who vowed to follow an honor system and refrain from “behaviors.” One of my roommates came outside on our porch to join me for a cigarette. She scolded me for doing sit-ups in the middle of the night and told me to cut the shit or leave. The weird part was that I did actually want to get better, but my eating disorder had been with me for so long and had been what kept me company all these years. Little rebellions were all I had left. So I found myself doing sneaky little things just to feel the slightest bit in control. Every night I would slink into the kitchen when everyone was asleep and dump out some of my salad dressing and fill it with vinegar. By the end of the first week, it was 100 percent vinegar. I had never felt more pathetic. I decided to give recovery a real shot.

Each morning both floors boarded a bus that we called the Druggy Buggy, to head to the main building, where we spent most of the day in groups and individual therapy and met with our nutritionist. I was very expressive in group, writing allegories and poems about my eating disorder, comparing it to an abusive lover, a rabid animal, or even a parasite baby inside my womb. At night we would attend various Anonymous meetings around the area. Almost all of the women in the treatment center had issues with drugs and co-dependency, so we attended those meetings as well.

On my eighteenth birthday, I boarded the bus and smushed my face up against the window. I stared out at the traffic and chanted to myself This.is.not.my.life. This.is.not.my.life. Thisisnotmylife. A child in a car seat stared back at me from a car driving below. I forgot where I was for a moment and made silly faces, making the little boy laugh. I glanced over at the mother driving the car. She looked up at me and smiled. She became startled as she noted the words on the side of the bus, checked out the twenty other twig-shaped people inside, and sped off. I peered over the side and read: IN RECOVERY. It might as well have read: THIS BUS IS FULLA CRAZIES. HIDE YOUR CHILDREN.    

I stepped on the scale with the number facing away from me. My nutritionist frowned and scribbled some notes on my chart.

“What’s wrong? What’s happening?” I asked.

“We’ll need to up your fat intake by 50 grams. You’ve lost some weight,” she replied casually. That put me up to 120 grams of fat a day. Being a vegan, this meant I had to chug olive oil.

“This doesn’t make any sense. I thought we were supposed to be learning how to eat normally. Normal people don’t have a nice tall glass of oil with their dinner. Seriously, this is insane. I won’t do it. This is bullshit.”

    This particular treatment center operated very differently than any other facility I had experienced. They banned all sugar and flour from our diets and focused on a more whole foods approach. The idea was that sugar and flour were addictive empty calories. It was also one of the main reasons I agreed to admit myself. Ya know, before I knew I’d be doing shots of oil without a chaser.

The girls that were following their meal plan and maintaining their weight got special privileges. They got to choose between a thirty-minute run, an outing with a trusted pre-approved person, extended phone calls, or being able to come along on group field trips. I was doing really well and got awarded all privileges. As I sat awaiting my turn on our bowling outing, all that oil just didn’t seem worth the payoff.

For my unsupervised outing with my person, I chose my boyfriend, Jason, to take me to dinner. There was a vegetarian restaurant called Here Comes the Sun that I was excited to go to. I had never been to a fully vegetarian place before. He came to pick me up and we hugged for a long time. We hadn’t really spoken since I told him I had a problem, a problem so big that I needed to go to rehab for it. He was as supportive as he could be for someone he’d just started dating, but he didn’t really know how to proceed.

We started driving and the farther we drove from the center, the more antsy I got. What if we just ran away and never went back? What are they gonna do? I needed to rebel in some way. I had to take this opportunity.

“Pull in here,” I said, pointing to a cheap motel off the highway.

“What? Why? We have reservations. What are you saying?”

“C’mon. I miss you. It’ll be hilarious.”

He turned into the parking lot and we giggled wildly as we walked to the front desk knowing we would be checking out a few hours later. I giggled even more. I was skipping dinner. And going to get away with it.

The room greeted us with fragrant, stale must. The one working lightbulb strobed and hummed, leaving little to the imagination of what kind of sketchy meetings this room had seen. The motel bathroom was maybe once lime green, but now had a permanent brown film coating the walls. The shower curtain was decorated with cigarette holes. We looked at the floor and sat on opposite sides of the bed.

“You look well. How are you really doing though?”

The air conditioner dripped arrhythmically. 

“I’m good. Can we talk about something else?”

He started talking about his grandmother, who was sick but still had her spirit. He tried to visit her once a week. They always went to the same restaurant. And he always made the same jokes that she liked to laugh at. He told me stories of stupid things his friends had done over the weekend. I rested my hand on the unusually moist bed and immediately yanked it back to my lap. We were sitting in front of each other, like a jail call with the glass in between us. I was in jail and he was living on the outside and this wasn’t real life. The light flickered, making his face look like he might ask things like, Do you want to die tonight? I started to cry and he awkwardly moved over to me and put his arms around my shoulders. He smelled like fresh mint and cloves.

The week before I was discharged, my therapist had me write a letter to myself that she would send to my house six months later. I stared at the blank piece of paper and honestly couldn’t imagine what six months from then would even look like. Or what I would possibly want to read from my six-months-younger, in-treatment self. What wise words of wisdom could transcend the barriers of a possibly relapsed future me? Or a possibly flourishing me? Or a possibly deceased me, and my poor mother opening this now irrelevant letter from her then-alive daughter?

Bex,

Don’t fuck it up.

Seriously.

I stuffed the letter in an envelope and gave it to my therapist.

“That was a short letter.”

“Yep. Short and sweet.”

Rebecca Portela is a writer and speaker for human rights and animal protection in New York City. She specializes in the genres of psychology and comedy writing. She recently finished writing her memoir, Unearthed, where she uses her unique sense of humor to address difficult subject matters, including PTSD and sexual abuse. Her work can be found in Idle Ink magazine, Beyond Words (Queer Anthology), X-Ray, trampset, io Literary, Stone of Madness Press (inaugural issue), and elsewhere.

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Upcoming events with Jen

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Anti-racist resources because silence is not an option.

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THE ALEKSANDER SCHOLARSHIP FUND

 

Guest Posts, eating disorder, Young Voices

Ana

January 22, 2018
control

Note from Jen Pastiloff, founder of The Manifest-Station. This is part of our Young Voices Series for Girl Power: You Are Enough. We are always looking for more writing from YOU! Make sure you follow us on instagram at @GirlPowerYouAreEnough and on Facebook here.

by Rachelle Cameron

Ana was my best friend. She was the one there late at night when everyone else was sleeping, the one there who always had faith I could meet each goal of mine, and the one always telling me how proud she was of me. We were inseparable for over a year. In October of 2017 I officially laid Ana down to rest, it was one of the hardest decisions of my life, but also one of the best decisions of my life.

Ana and I met when I was twenty-one, we were friends for a few months before she ended up leaving. I thought she was gone forever, but in January of 2016 she came back. I still remember the moment I realized she was back.  I realized it in May, I was standing with my back against the kitchen counter talking about if I was going to eat dinner or not with my grandmother. It dawned on me as I told her that I was going to skip dinner tonight that Ana was back. It was a comforting moment in my life, a calming moment in my life and an exciting moment in my life. My best friend was back. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, eating disorder, Eating Disorders/Healing

The Hilly Place

September 13, 2017

By Carolyn Getches

After one week in Guanajuato, Mexico I could make it home from school without a map. My favorite route took me down the grand sandstone steps of La Universidad de Guanajuato, past the serene bronze statue at Plaza de la Paz, and through the colorful and carefully tended Jardín de la Unión. As I walked along the narrow streets, I saw a young man standing in front of a symmetrical red stucco building with royal blue trim. A small crowd was gathered in front of him and a boombox played Bob Marley near his feet.

He was holding one stick in each hand and using them to toss a third stick in the air, one that was flaming on both ends. The muscles in his ropey arms tensed as he caught the fiery stick between the other two. His dark brown dreadlocks swayed back and forth with his choreographed movements, tapping his tank top and catching on his layered necklaces.

He threw the stick up in the air again. This time, he fumbled the catch and the lit stick fell to the ground. I’ve never had the constitution for embarrassment, mine or otherwise. When I was in the seventh grade, I walked straight into the large glass door of a movie theater. My forehead and nose struck the thick sheet of glass, and a loud thud echoed between my ears. I stood still for a moment as I pieced together what happened. Then, I turned around and sprinted into the parking lot, abandoning my friend who was already at the ticket counter. She found me twenty minutes later, hiding behind a car with snot and blood covering my upper lip. Continue Reading…

eating disorder, Eating Disorders/Healing, Guest Posts

Losing My Soul Sister To An Eating Disorder

April 6, 2015

beauty-hunting-jen-logo-black1-300x88By Jessica Lucas.

Some of this content may be triggering to anyone who has struggled with an eating disorder.

It was the day of the Leeza talk show taping. The topic: eating disorders. I walked into the Hollywood studio prepared to talk about the one thing that tormented and tortured me every day, anorexia, and I had never felt so overwhelmed, frightened, and ALONE – even as I was surrounded by hundreds of studio audience members.

“No one understands. No one gets it. No one can relate. No one will care. I’ll sound crazy. I’m not sick enough. I’m not smart enough. I’m not articulate enough. I’m not thin enough. I won’t make any sense. I am all alone.” The all too familiar harsh criticisms and relentless fears ran through my mind more quickly than I could slow them down or resist them.

As I began to feel like a deer in the spotlights – visibly shaking, paralyzed with fear, drained of all color, wondering what I’d gotten myself into and ready to turn and run away – the studio wrangler led me to my seat near the stage.

Immediately, I was drawn to the woman with the comforting smile, Bo Derek-like braids in her blonde hair, and big blue eyes sitting in front of me. I knew her, but I didn’t know her. I loved her, but I’d never met her. I related to her, but we’d never spoken. We were best friends, but I’d never seen her before. Continue Reading…