From Hunger

In September 2007, at the age of 22, I jumped from a moving freight train and landed on my face. The train had originated in Worcester, Mass., and was headed west toward Buffalo, but the path leading up to that event had begun six months before, in Long Island, where I was double-majoring in English and secondary education at Hofstra University, interning at a high school, taking two extra classes and dating a guy who liked to self-medicate. Bulimia and anorexia had reduced me to a skeletal 92 pounds, and I’d developed an addiction to diet pills that filled my small off-campus apartment with plastic bottles and bubble-wrapped packages hidden in drawers and crevices where my roommate wouldn’t find them. Every flat surface was home to a stack of celebrity gossip magazines full of articles about beach bodies and diets.

I had a few friends, but they seldom visited me. I rarely slept and would spend long nights anxiously staring into the vacuum of my living room, feeling the walls breathe around me, smoking cigarette after cigarette, searching for the peaceful center of my hunger. The day I finally hit bottom, my mentor at the high school found me crying in the supply closet of the teacher’s lounge with bits of tear-soaked tissue all over my face. I hadn’t slept in days, and had just finished throwing up a lunch of edamame beans and Red Bull. As was my ritual, I followed this purge with two Hydroxycut pills to “burn off” whatever remained in my stomach.

I told my mentor that I had just been given a diagnosis of a thyroid disease, hoping, though he never asked, that it would explain why I was so skinny. I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he gave me permission to leave for the day. I called my father in Florida from the parking lot, crying hysterically, my mouth tasting of metal and stomach acid. Two weeks later, I checked into an inpatient rehab facility in Tampa, where I would spend the next 60 days trying to learn how to eat properly and how to speak candidly about my feelings.

It did not work — at least not right away. Two months after my release, I was still not abstinent. I’d stopped attending my 12-step meetings for “philosophical” reasons and began hanging around with a girl I’d roomed with in treatment who was worse off than I was. I wasn’t starving myself, but we had started shoplifting, and went back to drinking and smoking weed — generally causing trouble all over town. A photograph from that period shows us together at a water park in Tampa. She is much taller and heavier than I am, and I remember thinking when the picture was taken that, standing next to her in a swimsuit, I must have looked so small. I am visibly sucking in my stomach, playing it off as comical, but looking back, I know it wasn’t.

Soon I knew I needed to flee — the self-medicating boyfriend, the life I was living in Florida, everything. I had to be where no one could see or find me.

An old friend introduced me to her cousin — let’s call him Michael — who had issues of his own and was looking to leave town. Desperate to escape, we decided to leave together. Some friends of his had just returned from months of hopping freight trains. Their stories sounded exciting, liberating, exactly what we needed. They told us the nearest hub for freight traffic was Savannah, Ga. From there, we could catch a train north, and then another one west. We could go anywhere we wanted to without documentation. We could live the way we wanted to, free of any rules. We packed our bags with compasses, pocket knives, duct tape, lighter fluid: everything we thought we’d need to survive as members of the squatter punk subculture. Two weeks later, we were on an Amtrak train to Savannah.

Michael and I were out on the road from July to September. I cut off my hair and my sleeves, rubbed holes in my jeans, sewed patches onto my shirts, refused to shower, and gave myself a road name – Ema. But even while hitchhiking and hopping freight trains, my motivation was image-centric: I was more concerned with looking the part of the hobo than being one, and anxious not to be exposed as a fake.

Sitting next to the Allegheny River one night in the rain with a group of hobo kids, one told me I looked like a model. It was meant as an insult, but I took it as a compliment; I was prettier than all the dirty hobos in the gravel pit that night! I dyed my hair purple in the river with another girl and three days later bleached it blonde in New York City in the apartment of a friend who made us shower twice before letting us sleep in his bed. We took a bus to Massachusetts and caught our last train ride out in the middle of the night.

Hunger on a freight train is not the hunger of the anorexic. You know that no one is looking. It is the difference between wanting food and needing it. Michael and I rode on a car with no roof and two narrow strips of sheet metal for a floor. We could see the tracks racing by underneath us. Rain soaked through our clothes and our packs. We ran out of food soon after we left and had no fresh water, and hid beneath the semi truck that shared our car. Pulling into Buffalo some time after dawn, we knew we had to get off. We waited for the train to slow down, but didn’t wait long enough.

My last memory is of the gravel rushing toward me. I woke seven hours later to Michael feeding me ice chips on a gurney in the Buffalo hospital. I was starving, but I wasn’t allowed to eat because my stomach had to be empty when they stitched me back together. I could stick my tongue through a hole where my tooth was knocked out, and my upper lip was split to my nose; my lower lip down to my chin. My left eye was swollen shut, the eggshell-thin bone behind it cracked, causing me to see double for months. It would be days until I could eat solid food again, and I knew then, asking for more ice, that I would never be beautiful like I wanted to be. Like I had striven to be. Like I didn’t want to want to be.

My parents paid for both my stay in rehab and the multiple rounds of surgery I would need to recover. They have never asked me to pay them back, but they did ask me to save a picture they took of me in the hospital, with over 150 stitches running down the middle of my swollen face and inside my mouth, to serve as a reminder of what I shouldn’t choose to live with anymore.

After the accident I returned to Florida a bruised and battered mess, moved back into my old bedroom, and began the slow process of finding a job with little idea of where I should be looking. I knew that I wanted to help people, but I didn’t know what I could offer another person considering the state I was in. Who was I to lead anyone? Finally, I came across an ad in the newspaper seeking temporary in-home support for adults with mental retardation. I applied, and got it. A few weeks later, Michael’s mother suggested that I apply for an assistant teaching position at the school where she worked, in a classroom for third and fourth graders with emotional and behavioral disabilities. Surely, I was qualified. I applied, and got that job, too. I worked seven days a week, five of them at the school. Meanwhile, Michael and I looked for apartments.

Days in the classroom were trying. Half of the students in the school were legally homeless, and it wasn’t unusual for a kid to come to class without basic necessities: notebooks, glasses, paper, even backpacks. While I thought it would be easier to work with younger students, I didn’t anticipate how badly behaved this class would be. The students made frequent jokes about my scar, lied about the rules, threw daily temper tantrums that resulted in overturned furniture, fought with each other and ran away. Because I was new, they tested me relentlessly. I’d leave work exhausted, and on Fridays, drive straight to my other job to work through the weekend. During this period, I drank Red Bull like water. I knew that the Red Bull was part of my addiction, but it was the only thing that kept me awake through the day. I still had relapses, but I was determined to reach a point where I could maintain my abstinence.

Despite all this, for the first time in years, I was happy. I felt, finally, like I belonged somewhere. When I wasn’t working, I was trying to write a novel.

I had decided to be a writer.

Every photograph is a memento mori, an acknowledgment of what Susan Sontag called “time’s relentless melt.” A class picture from that year shows me standing next to a pretty white teacher with a small group of black and Hispanic third and fourth graders, my head turned in such a way that, I had figured out, hid the more awkward angles of my face caused by the scar and the underlying tissue. Around this time, an oral surgeon told me that, if I kept throwing up my food, he would refuse to perform the several rounds of surgery I needed to replace the bone I had shattered in my upper jaw, and the gum that had started to recede around it, which was needed to anchor the implant that would replace the tooth I had lost.

At the risk of stating the too obvious, an eating disorder is inherently narcissistic. As if looking at a photograph, one has to enjoy climbing outside of herself to see herself as she believes others see her, then commit to fixing what’s imperfect. Without the admiration of others, her pain loses purpose; while rooted in the delusion of control, her addiction is exposed as something very much out of control; obsessive; devoid of reason or justification. The students in my classroom didn’t notice when I was hungry, didn’t care when I was tired, cared even less that I was thin. The disabled adults with whom I lived on the weekends, if they could even talk, would tell me that I was pretty no matter how I looked, because to them, I was.

Gradually, what remained of my eating disorder stopped working the way I wanted it to; it began to feel silly. Like a waste of time that, since the train accident, suddenly seemed all too precious. When I was working seven days a week, my eating disorder began to feel like a third job that I didn’t have the energy to perform. Meanwhile, I had found goals that were far more important than being thin.

After a year of living together in an apartment infested with termites where hobo friends came to sleep on our couch and share stories about their ramblings — where I had written what I thought was a novel about what little I knew about train hopping — Michael and I broke up. He was going back on the road, but I had experienced enough hardship and would not be joining him. In the year and a half that had passed since the accident, I came to realize that traveling, to me, had been a form of running away from myself. I couldn’t decide which road to take, so I didn’t decide and, instead, just took any. I wasn’t ready to do the work I needed to be a whole person, and there had been nothing in Florida to keep me there – no life to speak of, at that time.

But I had since learned that becoming whole was a gradual process, and that finding something to keep me there was my own responsibility. I still wasn’t completely abstinent; I had starved myself for several days before cheating on Michael with our neighbor, a fact I’m not proud of. But I was closer than I had been in years, and would continue to get better. I was going to be a writer, and writing was more important than being beautiful.

Rather, I found, being beautiful was writing.

This post is originally published in The New York Times. Posted here by Farhira Farudin for educational purposes only.