Dive: Chapter III
By: Vivian Norris
Tags: Anorexia Recovery, Anorexia, Mental Illness, Memoir, Eating Disorders

The next day at PHP, I sat at the white rectangular table picking at a plate of crackers and eating single lentils out of a bowl of soup. My dietician, Jackie, and my therapist, Lacey, pulled me into an office. I sat on the couch, arms pressed stiffly at my sides.

“Vivian, we’ve decided that you need to go to the hospital because of the vital signs that we took this morning.” said Jackie cautiously. “It’ll probably be different from when someone you know has gone to the hospital. There will be other kids there. And you’ll get to wear your regular clothes; you won’t have to wear a hospital gown or anything.”

I felt an unexpected surge of fear- tears blurring my view of their pursed lips and tilted brows. I stumbled over some words of protest.

“Your parents will be here soon. You should get your stuff.”

I walked into the kitchen and grabbed my lunchbox, tears streaming from my face.

Jackie let my mom in at the front door and I shoved past her. We drove the short ways from the clinic to the hospital. My mom gave me a stiff, unrequited hug in the parking lot. I looked over her shoulder at the hospital. It looked different in the daylight. The windows reflected the sky. This was what I wanted. Right? We walked across the endless parking lot, in through the lobby, and through an intimidating pair of heavy metal doors. The kind of doors meant for keeping people in them and out of them. It seemed kind of sad that there had to be a whole eating disorder unit. I passed by a room with a large ovular table. Around it sat a couple of girls in baggy, wrinkled clothing. A plump nurse weighed me in a small room and offered me a donated blanket, the knotted flannel kind. It was made by a boy scout troop. I thought that was pretty nice of them. The nurse showed me to my room and attached a three lead heart rate monitor to my chest. The room had two beds in it and numerous unidentifiable medical machines attached to the wall. I had a roommate named Gemma. I knew her name because of the poster on her wall signed by all her volleyball teammates. The curtain was open between her side and mine. She didn’t talk to me. She lay on her bed, tapping on her cell phone. A nurse walked in and handed me a blueberry yogurt. Her black hair was a wooly cloud around her head with a bride-of-frankenstein stripe of gray hair in the middle.

“I’m Mimi. Snacktime.”

“Do I have to eat it?”

She chuckled, her crooked teeth showing. “Yes. Or we’ll give you Ensure. And if you don’t have that, we’ll give you a tube.” I ate the yogurt without a second thought.

My parents came and sat in my room for the rest of the day. We watched a TV show on my dad’s laptop. The Amazing Race, I think, until my dinner of chicken and pasta in a translucent slime arrived.

“I think the food is pretty good here,” Mimi informed me with a jagged jack-o-lantern grin.

“Do you want one of us to fold out the chair and sleep here with you?” my mom asked hopefully.

“No, no. I’ll be fine. I just need some space.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Go get some rest.”

When they left, I was grateful to be alone. I stared at the colorful patterned curtains that encircled my bed. They ran on metal tracks embedded in the ceiling, like toy trains. I could hardly believe that I was in the hospital. It seemed too good to be true. I was a traveler, big eyed with that buzz of adventure and that weary undertow of stiff-necked sleep deprivation I could only barely outrun. But I was happy. I had crossed the finish line. I watched night fall, the small window showing a sliver of deep blue and the triangle of peach evening glow cast upon a building across the street. I did some sit-ups, hoping that the nurses wouldn’t notice my heart rate rising on the monitor. After a while, I fell asleep.

I woke up with a jolt, in the midst of a sudden inhale, to the sound of my door swinging open. A woman was silhouetted in a rectangle of yellow light at my door, breathing fast, her short ponytail swinging. Who is that? Where am I?

“Oh. Vivian, I think one of your leads disconnected.” I reached up and felt a wire on my chest, my fingers finding a detached sticker. I looked over at the flatline on the monitor. Thin and white and still.

I was woken up again a few hours later. The searing light of my phone screen said it was 5:30 AM. A man pointed to the gown, neatly folded, laid out at the foot of my bed. It was too dark to see his face. “Go ahead and put that on- then come out and get weighed.” I put on the gown, tripping over my leggings. I tiptoed out into the yellow light and stepped on the scale. “We’ve got to get these numbers to the doctors when they get here this morning,” the man informed me. “Did you pee yet?”

“No.”

“Oh, shoot. Well, we’ll have to do your weight again after you go.”

I walked, a bit wobbly, over to the tiny bathroom in the corner of the room. There was an oddly shaped plastic bin on the toilet seat with Gemma’s name on it. I assumed I wasn’t supposed to pee in that one, so I removed it and replaced it with the other basin that had sat next to the toilet. I was back in bed a few minutes later. A tall brunette nurse came and took my vitals. Picture perfect. Damn. My parents arrived a bit after breakfast. I had to stay in bed all day, so I spent my time sending emails to all of my teachers.

“Unfortunately, I was admitted to the hospital this afternoon. I am unsure of when I will return, but I will make efforts to keep up with my schoolwork.”

A team of doctors all came in in the middle of the day and sat around the bed, staring at me. Legs crossed, perms, clipboards, and kitten heels. Slacks and salty beards and boring ties. They asked me a torrent of questions. I put on an easy demeanor, and gave my best impression of normal.

“Are you suicidal?”

“No- I mean, I think about death. But not, like, more than a normal person thinks about death in an existential way.” I laughed nervously, my eyes darting across their five expressionless faces.

“Um, okay,” the man closest to me said “Self harm?”

“Yeah, I guess. Sort of. I cut myself. Or, I used to.”

In the afternoon, while my parents were at lunch, Gemma’s friends came. I wished that my old friends from before I moved were able to visit me. Would they have visited me? They laughed on the other side of the curtain clustered together on her bed. Eventually, they opened the curtain and introduced themselves to me. They were friendly, so was I. They turned back to Gemma, glancing back at me every so often.

I felt a bit like a zoo exhibit. “Look! An anorexic! I’ve never seen one before. How fascinating. She’s not as thin as I expected.”

My parents had returned and the day was winding down. The man from my earlier interrogation strode into the room, dressed in slacks and a black suit jacket like he was at a funeral.

“We are actually going to be able to discharge you tonight,” he announced from the doorway. “Your vitals were fine for 24 hours.”

I blanched, horrified. I felt like I’d been punched in the throat. This couldn’t be happening again. Please just let me stay one more day. The shame burned in my chest. It stung bitterly. I wasn’t sick after all. I was a fake. An impostor. I wasn’t anything like Alana or Lilly or Tia. They were real anorexics. I was pathetic. I didn’t need to be in the hospital after all.

“Now, I know that you’ve had some real eating problems in the past, and I don’t want this to invalidate you,” he granted me with a patronizing tilt of the head. That somehow was the worst thing he could have said. I forced a tight smile. It was a handout, a pitying one at that. He was trying to soften the blow. He knew I wasn’t really sick. How could I have let myself believe for even a moment that I deserved to be here.

I packed up my bags. My parents had brought a mountain of clothes and all of my school books and papers. They clearly thought I would be here longer. I failed them and me and that doctor and Gemma and Lilly and that girl I saw in the hallway who had to sit on a butt pillow. Her face was like a bird. I’d never been more jealous of anyone in my entire life. A smiley brunette woman came in just before we left.

“I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m the dietitian here. I know we didn’t get to meet. It’s very rare that we have someone here just for observation. Usually people are here a lot longer.”

Mimi handed me my night snack in a paper bag. I made the walk of shame down the hallway and out through the double doors, the nurses smiling and their eyes saying how nice she got out so quickly. Strange she was here at all. My parents and I walked across the circular mosaic on the lobby floor and out into the evening. The sky was dark blue, but not yet black. I felt heavy with sadness and disgust. I was furious. I would prove them wrong. I felt something else too-a crumbling, a rockslide into cold, watery brokenness. As if I’d been watchthing the past 48 hours from miles and miles away, and the shock waves had only just hit me.

Years later while looking back over those few months, I dug up one of my old journals. Only the first few pages were filled with my tight, neat cursive. I found a journal entry, written the night of my discharge from the hospital, 10/3/17

“This time has been brief. But it has made its mark on me. These hours spent craning my neck to see out the window, although all I could see was a building and a few pathetically tiny patches of sky. The photo of the kittens taped up beside Eric’s drawings. The electrodes on my chest. The hospital bracelets on my wrist. Gemma’s friends. The motorized bed. Doctor Bowen. The maze, the interlocking network of curtains. The loud and empty silent darkness. This awful, awful place. One of the most terrifying experiences of my entire life.”

When I read this now, I pity that girl. I pity her because she has so much suffering ahead of her. So much suffering that she could not, at that point, imagine or predict. Suffering she didn’t know could exist within a person. I pity her that neither this time, nor the time after that, will be enough. I hear the naivety in the voice of my fourteen year old self. I mourn that she will remain swaddled in her innocence for precious little time after she writes this in her fluorescent pink journal.

I grieve for how many times she will have to crane her neck to look out the window, and how many times there will be no window at all. I ache for how much she will soon resent those patches of sky. How much she will hunger for its whole expanse.

I lament that at the same time she will grow to find comfort in her cage; that she will find the view of the world through the bars more beautiful than the world unobstructed. I am sorry that the most terrifying experience of her entire life will be upstaged again and again. I am sorry that she will follow the breadcrumbs of her eating disorder and find herself a shattered person in an unfamiliar place.

I made another wish bracelet when I got home. The same bitter, coarse hemp cord, the same iridescent red-brown beads. This time I wished to go to residential. Residential treatment centers were pretty much what they sounded like, I’d learned from Netflix. They were treatment centers, usually in a house, that you lived in for a relatively long period of time. Most places would keep a patient for at least a month. It was a pretty big deal. It was like Hogwarts for eating disorders. You’re an anorexic, Harry. According to the movies it was pretty fun. But I was also scared shitless. Fortunately my eating disorder had a way of making the things it wanted not seem so scary anymore. It was a blessing, really, in a way, to at least be spared that pain. I was a hostage, but I felt like a guest.

The next day, back in PHP, I sat before a tall glass of chocolate boost. Jackie sat in front of me, silent and smiling softly. I remembered the machines on the walls and the eyes that peered at me from across the room. I remembered the walk of shame with my brown paper bag of peanut butter and graham crackers. I remembered Gemma and Lilly and Alana and Tia and all the people who were sicker than me and better than me and all the ways I would never, ever be enough. I started breathing faster. Each breath was shallow and tight. It felt like when I was a little kid and I insisted on drinking tiny sips of soda out of the bottle cap. Cap by cap by cap. I couldn’t get enough air. I was having a heart attack, I knew it. I was dying. I gasped, hot, stinging tears leaking out of my wide eyes and dripped down my face.

“Hey Vivian, look at me.”

I tried to look into her eyes. It felt like looking into the sun.

“Can you tell me what things you can see that are green?” What the hell? My voice shook and I grabbed my elbows.

“The trees outside. The pen. The wall. That thing hanging from the ceiling.”

“How many stars are hanging from the ceiling?” I counted. My breaths shuddered and slowed.

A few days later, I was called away from another untouched glass of boost to my therapist’s office. Everyone else was rolling out yoga mats and piling up their shoes in the corner of the group room. I sat on the couch with the blanket that always shed and stared at my lap. They told me I was going to a place called Center for Discovery. It was a residential treatment center in California. I stormed out, breaking into breathy sobs. I stood outside, trying to quiet my breathing, before pushing open the creaky door into the dark, quiet group room. The other girls were lying on their mats, their eyes closed. I sat on the empty one on the far side of the room. I wrapped my arms around my legs and pressed my forehead into my knees. My back shuddered up and down with silent sobs. The yoga teacher tiptoed over, light on her feet. She crouched down beside me and rubbed my back in circles.

I lay down on my back on the mat, staring up at the pockmarked ceiling tiles. I’m going to residential. The tears slid down the sides of my face and dripped into my ears. This was what I wanted, right? I’d done this on purpose. I’d made this happen. I’d even made a stupid fucking bracelet. Why was I so upset?

I swallowed hard and decided that it would be in a really nice house. A beachfront, white-walled mansion with floor to ceiling windows. A much nicer house than mine.

~

I stood by the car and looked up at the cramped two story house. It wasn’t ugly, per se, just far from spectacular. A little haunted looking. It was a drab shade of gray with no front yard. Definitely not a beachfront mansion. I hugged my arms close to me as I walked up the rickety wooden stairs. A woman with pursed lips and a pinched face opened the door.

“Welcome,” she said cheerfully, but in the way that darkens at the edges.

I entered the foyer slowly, my parents following with my numerous suitcases. On my right was a sitting room with hideously stuffy floral furniture, a monotone painting of a flower bouquet, and a faded rug. It looked like a grandma lived there. On my left was another room. A large glass table occupied most of the room, surrounded by large black chairs. A few computers sat on desks against the wall, along with a few cabinets full of art supplies. The lights were off, the windows shuttered. Before me was a hallway, a tight carpeted spiral staircase leading off of it. I peered down the hallway and saw several girls laughing around a white dining table by a window.

“We’re going to check you in and bring your stuff upstairs. We’ll check your stuff to make sure you can have it and unpack your clothes.”

“Ok.”

A different woman led me upstairs. Her name was Mindy and she was a nurse. Not Mandy, Mindy. The upstairs was small and covered in a dingy tan carpet, the kind that makes the floor look tired. She led me into the last room on the right. There were two white metal beds with pink sheets, and the same ratty carpet. One of the beds had a Disney blanket on it, which deemed it occupied. Mine was on the far wall, pushed into the corner. The nurse laid my suitcase on the carpet. She pulled on a pair of gloves and began shaking out and refolding my neatly arranged shirts. I always enjoyed packing for a vacation. She opened up my shampoo bottle and looked inside. What did she think I was trying to smuggle in? A cat?

“You don’t have any sharps in here, right? No razor blades or staples?”

“Nope.” This was true.

She extracted my bathing suit from the pile of clothing.

“You won’t need this. I know it says on the packing list to bring it, but you guys don’t go swimming. They only go swimming at the drug house- they have a pool.”

“Okay, that’s fine.” That had seemed like a bad idea anyways, to make a bunch of people with eating disorders wear swimsuits.

After we finished looking through my stuff, Mindy walked me downstairs where the girls who had been sitting at the table were standing in the living room.

“We made you a poster,” scowled a young girl with brown hair in a loose ponytail. She held out a large, drooping piece of paper from one of those butcher paper rolls- “Welcome Vivian!” written in a dying blue marker. A couple unidentifiable doodles surrounded it.

“Thanks!”

I sat down tentatively on the ottoman in the center of the half circle of brown leather couches arranged along the sides of a blue and white shag rug. There was a wooden bookshelf along the wall containing numerous puzzles and games. On the wall was also a massive painting of a vase containing a sparse amount of flowers. It was hideous and somehow depressing despite the subject matter. It was contained within a gaudy gold frame. Whoever decorated this house had incredibly poor taste. The tiny backyard was visible through the sliding glass doors, the grass neon green and the stone fence overgrown with vines wet from rain.

A girl who was curled up on the couch across from me gave me a menacing stare. Her eyes were hollowed and purple underneath. She propped her head up on her arm.

“Hi, I’m Vivian,” I offered.

“Hi. I’m Mari,” she said sullenly.

I turned to a tiny girl with messy black hair down to her waist.

“Hi, I’m Vivian. Nice to meet you.”

“Hi, I’m Alejandra,” she replied in a high pitched voice. “I’m eleven years old. Hablas espanol?”

“Si. Un poco.”

The girl with the ponytail who had given me the poster introduced herself.

“Hi. I’m Alex. I’m twelve.” She scowled again.

“I’m Nia,” a tall girl with smooth dark skin said with a smile. Her voice was soft and low.

“Hi guys. It’s really nice to meet you.”

I sat silently on the couch, pinning my hands between my knees, for the greater part of the rest of the day. At dinner, Mari put two carrots up her nose and pretended to be a walrus. She still had to eat them, of course.

She seemed to be cheering up.

I lay in my room that night, staring at the ceiling, listening to Alejandra rustle the blankets as she tossed and turned. I looked over at her, her dark hair a mess on her pillow.

The next morning I was startled awake by a woman’s loud voice. I rolled over and saw her face in the open doorway.

“Time to get up,” she said gruffly. Go pee and then come to the back room to get weighed. You can take a shower after. You have to count out loud while you’re in the shower. I’m Leslie, by the way.” I walked in the bathroom and was jolted awake by the terrifyingly large picture of a pug emblazoned on the shower curtain. I hadn’t noticed it the night before somehow. A rubber duck was balanced delicately on its forehead. I peed before putting on my gown. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

I counted in the shower, feeling watched.

After breakfast I sat timidly on the couch, in the spot no one had said was theirs.

Mari sat curled up in a ball around a heating pad on the couch across from me.

“I hate periods. My cramps are so bad,” she whined.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I haven’t had mine in a few months, but they really suck.” She glared at me. That appeared to be her thing. Or maybe she just didn’t like me very much.

After lunch we had group in the room with the ugly couches and yellow wallpaper. A woman with short brown hair and protruding round eyes sat in a chair placed in the break of the couches. “My name is Lila, I’m a therapist here. This group is called confrontations- it’s where you guys let each other know what your peers are doing that’s bothering you.” There was a collective groan. “I’d like you all to do at least one, except for you Vivian because it’s your first day.”

“What??” Alex protested. “Do we HAVE to?”

“Yep. Confrontations are important and they’re hard for most of you.” This sounded like a stupid idea to me. I could stick up for myself, why did we end a group dedicated entirely to forcing us to publically humiliate each other? “Ok, who wants to start” Mari’s hand shot up.

“Vivian, I know you just got here, but I feel like you were calling me fat when you said that you didn’t have your period and I did.”

There was a stunned silence.

Tears of guilt bubbled up and stung in my eyes. I stammered apologies, managing to shove the tears down. After group Lila came up to me. “I’m actually your individual therapist. Would it be ok if we met now?” Great. Now my therapist thought I was an asshole. I spent an entire hour hysterically crying on her cold leather couch.

Diary Entry. 10/14/17

Today is my third day at Center for Discovery. I truly do hate it here. At first I only disliked it…I want to go home. I don’t fit in here at all. I really don’t think I can stick it out. It’s become the kind of place where when I wake up in the morning, I feel crushed when I remember I’m here.

I learned in those next few days that residential treatment centers are not like Hogwarts or camp or sleepovers. They do not let you do whatever you want. They do not take you out to do fun things every day. They do not make you feel special. They do not let you bask in your anorexic glory. They are actually just boring. The mornings came too soon, and I dragged myself out of bed still burdened with exhaustion. I counted tonelessly in the shower and changed clothes in the dark, folded between the closet doors. Breakfast was nearly always cold toaster waffles smeared with globs of butter, lukewarm bacon wet with oil, and hard strawberries. I spent my mornings lying on the white shag carpet and spatting with Alex over who was cheating at Spot It. I avoided eye contact with Mari. I endured the groups while curled up on the couches and picking at the velveteen cushions. At lunch I sat before either a chewy peanut butter sandwich and carrot sticks or a bowl of warm-ish lentil soup and Ritz crackers. I rolled my eyes at maddeningly purposeless therapy assignments, slowly acquiring a sense of weary beleaguerment.

At lunch one day I sat before a soft peanut butter sandwich and a white circle of cheese. A thought popped into my head. What would happen if I didn’t eat? It’s not like they could do anything. It was worth investigating. I ate about half. A blonde woman named Lindsey placed a large mug of Ensure in front of me. Ensure was just like boost, except for it tasted even worse.

“You have five minutes.”

I sat, spinning the mug around by the handle and watching the brown liquid ripple and slosh. I bounced my leg up and down.

Lindsey returned and removed the cup of Ensure. “Your five minutes are up. You’re on couchrest now, so you have to sit on the couch and you can’t play games or talk to anyone until the next meal.”

“Ok.”

Two weeks had passed since I arrived. Whatever novelty there was in residential treatment had worn off entirely. I was bored. I was restless. I had realizing that what I’d thought this place would give me was still just out of reach. This was a checkpoint, not the checkered flag. I still wasn’t sick enough.

As it would countless times in the future when the dullness settled around me, when the upheaval calmed, the chaos in my head became the loudest thing. I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t sick enough. Everyone was skinnier than me. The deterrent of couchrest was obsolete, given that there was nothing to do besides sitting on the couch anyways. I picked at my food and pushed away the mugs of Ensure. They told me I’d better start eating because they would have to send me to the hospital. That was encouragement rather than a threat. It was exactly what I wanted. I knew they would have no choice but to send me to the hospital eventually. I was going to fix what happened last time. This time, I would prove to myself and everyone else that I was actually sick. That I was a real anorexic. Not some sort of half-assed, half-anorexic who couldn’t hold down a hospital bed. This time I’d prove them wrong. I’d always loved proving people wrong.