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Chapter 5

The Mid-Freshman-Year Crisis

My parents made the five-hour journey to Boston with me to help set up my dorm at Babson College. As they unpacked each tchotchke and memento, the pit in my stomach grew larger. When the other students were having tearful goodbyes with their parents, I did as well—please, I was a hysterical mess—but, on top of that, I worried about how I would quit my dependence on laxatives cold turkey. Now that I had a roommate and would be sharing a bathroom with many strangers, how would I get any privacy at all if I binged? I decided I would just be extra good at dieting—I’d fine-tune my expert starving skills. It was time for me to get off laxatives anyway, because bingeing was counterproductive to my weight loss. This would be easy…or maybe easier said than done.

I had my tricks to ignore the hunger pangs and make sure nobody noticed I wasn’t eating: (1) Avoid social meals, explaining to people that I’d already eaten or grabbed a snack at the library. (2) When I was hungry during the day, satiate myself with gumballs, tea, and diet soda. Bottles of Diet Coke and several cups of tea with at least five packages of Splenda helped curb my appetite and appease my sweet tooth. The barista at the student center nicknamed me Earl Grey because I ordered so much of it. (3) Night food—one small bag of Rold Gold Honey Wheat Braided Pretzel Twists, total food consumption for the day.

To get as much mileage out of each pretzel as possible, I would suck the tip slowly until it was nice and soggy and then bite the top off and swoosh it in my mouth. Instead of swallowing it, I spat it out onto the other end of the pretzel to conserve it, and then I slowly proceeded to put the whole pretzel into my mouth. Chewing slowly, I’d stop before my reflex to swallow kicked in, and I’d swoosh the crumbs in my mouth for a while, spreading the salty taste before finally allowing it down my throat.

My rule was to wait ten minutes between each pretzel. But often I’d break my own ritual because I was so hungry. That tiny bag of pretzels soon became my one and only pleasure in the day. I’d wait for it, like people wait for a hot date or a glass of wine at the end of a long workweek. All day long, I’d pine for that bag, my reward for working so hard.

When my roommate was asleep, I’d reach under the covers for my bottle of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray, rolling away from her to spray it into my mouth, pumping as slowly as I could to mute the spritzing sound. My reward for making it through another day, showing my hunger who was really boss. I was! I could take it.

I could feel my pants getting bigger. Now I had to wear my size-twenty-six jeans with a belt at its smallest hole. I couldn’t help but admire my nice flat tummy and be impressed with my discipline. Unfortunately, I couldn’t starve myself forever; I was bound to slip, and that meant a purge.

It was a Friday night, a month and a half into my laxative sobriety, and I was really stressed out. I was struggling with an extremely difficult school project that was due on Monday. I had been working on it all day, but felt like I hadn’t gotten anywhere. I am going to fail. How am I going to get this done? I am so stupid. So overwhelmed, to the umpteenth degree, I finally couldn’t take it anymore. With the pressure to make progress, combined with that empty feeling taunting me from the pit of my stomach, all I could think about was food to distract me. Fuck it all. I am a failure. I grabbed my keys and drove to a supermarket in the town of Wellesley, five minutes from campus. Charging into the store, I manically grabbed a jar of peanut butter and a big bag of pretzels along with a loaf of whole-wheat bread and a ninety-count box of ex-lax. Why healthy whole-wheat bread would matter at that point is a mystery, but it made me feel better about what I was about to do.

I sat in my car in the parking lot eating all of it—stuffing it down my throat in chunks and pieces. Midway through eating, I took the laxatives as my punishment. Then I ate and ate, feeling my waist expanding. I shoveled the food into my mouth without taking a breath, so quickly that I could hardly taste it, but it wasn’t about the taste. No matter how much I ate, I never seemed to fill that empty pit in my stomach. Tears dripped from my eyes as the nausea from the laxatives and food set in. I looked in the rearview mirror; my dark brown eyes were bright red from my rubbing them, and I had peanut butter smears around my mouth. My palms were stained with the melted blue coating of the handfuls of laxatives I’d popped into my mouth. What was I doing?

Suddenly overcome with the sharp contractions of my intestinal walls, I reversed the car, headed back to campus, and sprinted to the communal bathroom on my floor. I was going to be sick. As I ran past a girl taking off her makeup after a long night of drinking, I avoided eye contact, hoping she wouldn’t get a good look at me. Stomach gurgling, I lurched into a corner stall with the sudden horrifying realization that she was going to hear me. I heard her giggling at my prominent stomach noises—loud hollow noises followed by embarrassingly loud gas. I was mortified, but maybe I deserved to be laughed at. Maybe the laughter would serve as a reminder to make me think twice next time I even contemplated bingeing.

I heard her exit that bathroom fast, probably to gossip to her friends about what she’d just heard and witnessed or to avoid being rude by laughing even louder. I flushed the toilet and wobbled out of the stall. Sometimes, after these binges, my equilibrium felt off, like I was coming back down to earth (after visiting some faraway galaxy, preferably Endor due to the Ewok population, but probably more like Purge-a-tory, the planet of purging) and my body couldn’t adjust properly. I leaned over the sink, washing my hands with soap and water. As the water ran, I looked in the mirror. I still had a peanut butter mustache. My reality was as pathetic as that peanut butter mustache.

Bingeing was often spur of the moment, and there was no time to talk myself out of it before it was happening. It was like I was a remote-controlled car steered by some invisible hand. Then the reality would set in, the horrible reality—the regret, guilt, and self-loathing. I would just have to find a bathroom that was more private and plan my binges in advance. At least, if I thought about bingeing, I’d have to make sure it was a good time, where people weren’t around and have the diuretics and food in stock. I had that much self-control. Hopefully.

The graduate school offered a safe spot for planned binges because it closed around eight in the evening for anyone entering, but if you were already there, you could stay as long as you wanted. As everyone left, I would take the laxatives in my private corner and get sick in what became my private bathroom. Then I would stay, studying, until two or three in the morning. When the diarrhea, accompanied by drooping, baggy, crusty eyes, was over or significantly easing up, I would drag myself across campus to my dorm, body aching and stomach sore. I’d fall helplessly into my bed, the blanket comforting my exhausted body.

Parents’ Weekend was my first unplanned slip since my sticky-blue-peanut-butter-fingers incident. I was so ravenous and out of control after bingeing on Chinese food at my parents’ hotel room, I couldn’t stop: lo mien, chicken fried rice, sesame chicken, and fortune cookies (why do they put so many in takeout orders? Ugh). When I got back to my dorm, I did something I was not proud of. I raided my roommate’s food supply and ate her food. I even dug through her trash to see if she’d left anything behind: a half-eaten Snickers bar—score. I had a bag of Cheez Doodles, peanut butter crackers, and animal crackers—anything I could get my hands on. I felt like a dirty rat, digging through the garbage. Correction, I was a dirty rat, digging through the garbage. Luckily for me, my roommate didn’t walk in.

Shortly afterward, I hit an even lower low, losing control in front of my parents one weekend at home. They didn’t see my purge, but they had noticed the copious amounts of sushi I’d put in my mouth.

“I am starving, and I don’t have time to eat a lot at school because I am always studying.” It was my way of saying, Look, I eat. I am fine! My skinny body is from stress. That’s all…

I binged on every single sushi roll I could get my hands on, tempura-fried and all, a Kamikaze roll, which was perfect because I felt like a Kamikaze, so out of control and borderline suicidal in my eating patterns. Screw chopsticks, I was picking the rolls up with my bare hands and stuffing them into my mouth. I took laxatives immediately after, in the privacy of my bedroom, and was sick to my stomach all night. The next day, on the way to the shuttle back to Boston, I was burping up a rotten-egg sulfur smell in “burp-hiccups” so strong that my dad and I both gagged on the smell as he drove me to the airport. I had never smelled anything so disgusting. It was like I was burping up Newark, New Jersey, and anyone who has smelled the air in that city is familiar with the potent rotten-egg stench equivalent to an egg salad sandwich five days old. Holy “Jersey Stink!”

I can’t describe how horrible that plane ride back to school was, me sweating and burping, on the verge of throwing up. On top of that, there was terrible turbulence, which made me sweat even more with anxiety. This poor Asian businessman who had the misfortune of sitting next to me, bless his soul. I will never forget his face, a look of terror mixed with awe at the smells emanating from the tiny girl beside him. By the time I made it back to school, I’d ensured my first and only absence from class, because I couldn’t leave the bed. I mean, I’d just taken the entire Jersey stink to Boston, not a small feat!

I had lost even more weight, and even I knew it. By the end of the first semester, all my clothes were hanging off me. When I got dressed up to go out at night on the weekends, I would layer my outfits so no one would notice. At school, during the day, I would wear bulky sweats and sweatshirts. I once carelessly didn’t layer, only wearing spandex and a Babson T-shirt to class, sweatshirt tied tightly around my waist, and one of my guy friends came over to me.

“I am worried about you. You’re disappearing.” He touched my frail arm, his expression turning stony-faced. I didn’t even know he could get that serious. We weren’t friends who had deep conversations, so I was quite taken aback.

“What do you mean? You just can’t handle my guns. These babies are weapons of mass destruction,” I said, while nervously laughing it off, and touched his arm back, pinching into muscle.

He laughed. “Yes, I should call the police, you are a danger to society.”

“I have gotten that before. Better put this bad boy on to cover them up before someone gets hurt.” I grabbed my sweatshirt and put it back on to avoid any other possible encounters like this. I’d rather be overheated than do this dance around the eating-disorder issue again—nuh-uh!

This was during finals, and I was so focused on my routines, there was no time to even look in the mirror or analyze what was happening to my body. I had to do well in all my classes or risk being even more of a failure, because it was bound to be revealed that I wasn’t as smart as everyone else at college. I wouldn’t let that happen.

It wasn’t as easy to fool my parents as my peers. Though, let’s be real, I probably wasn’t fooling anyone with my shrinking frame. My friends just weren’t going to say anything. I didn’t let any of them get that close to me. That was my purpose in spending a lot of time alone—to avoid anyone observing my weird behaviors around food and to avoid any form of connection that could bring about a confrontation from a concerned member of the student body about my dwindling (student) body. But my parents, that was a whole ’nother story.

During winter break, my mom found a suitcase filled to the brim with empty laxative boxes. I had left the suitcase in the computer room, in a corner, thinking it was inconspicuous and no one would open it. Not my smartest move.

“Dani! What the hell are all of these?” I heard in loud, piercing echoes, the same tone she’d used back in middle and high school when I carelessly left my dirty socks everywhere, forgetting to toss them into the laundry: a sock on the kitchen chair, another sock on the table, a sock hiding in the crack of the living room couch. The list of places went on and on, and it drove my mom completely bananas—more like BANANAS! I’d hear her yells echoing through the vents, “DANI!” and that was code for “Get your butt down here now OR ELSE.” Nothing made my mom more pissed-off. Except for this.

“Whoa, all of what?” I replied, startled by the tone of her voice.

“This, this…” she screamed, and shoved the now-empty black suitcase in my face, indicating that she’d found my stash—as if it weren’t obvious enough.

“Dani, if you don’t stop doing this to yourself, I…” She could hardly breathe, “I can’t send you back to college.”

“Mom, I am so sorry. I really will stop. I just messed up, and all of those were from a really long time of collecting, not just since I got home.” Which was a lie, I’d been bingeing and purging every day since I got home.

My mom’s therapist at the time, who she made me talk to after uncovering my laxative stash, was convinced I had done this subconsciously to get caught. She was totally wrong. I just had a careless moment, but I went with that because I could twist it into a good excuse for why I would never do it again. I wanted you to catch me, Mom. Yeah right! Psh! I would not use laxatives anymore, I reassured her. It was time for me to put an end to this anyway. I really would never touch them, I was so sorry. I wanted to believe I could do this. I wanted to believe I could stop, that I wasn’t lying to her again. That it was truly that easy. These promises and discussions lasted until I went back to school for my second semester, where all I could think about was purging again.

FULL Life, October 2014

Approaching the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) Walk, my mom and dad held hands as I trailed after them, taking in the view of all the people in green and blue NEDA shirts huddled together to keep warm. We were by the Brooklyn Bridge at Foley Square, way downtown. This was the first year I had raised money for the event. Though my team was small in numbers, it was big in pride. As I got closer to the crowd, I couldn’t believe the sea of people whose lives had been touched in one way or another by this disease. For someone who always thought she was the only person in the world battling her anorexia and bulimia, this was an awe-inspiring moment.

A tall woman with kinky black hair and dark skin came to the podium and started talking about her battle with exercise bulimia and how she used to run the Brooklyn Bridge rain or shine when she attended NYU. She said she had been in recovery for six years. I remember thinking Wow at the notion that someone could be in recovery for that long and still be okay, and even more crazy was the fact that she was now able to fight for others, so they could see recovery is possible.

How beautiful. My dad couldn’t take his eyes off this speaker; his unblinking eyes released fat tears that rolled along the contour of his chin and down his neck. He never understood people talking about their issues. He grew up in a house with an old-school mentality of being quiet about one’s problems. You dealt with them, and that was it.

As we walked across the bridge, my father held my hand. “I never understood why you decided to be so public about what you went through,” he told me, “but now I get it.” Then he squeezed my hand, as if giving me some kind of approval.

“Thanks, Dad. I want to be able to at least help people with it. I mean, if I survived…” As I said that, we saw a swarm of people pass us with shirts bearing a picture of a beautiful woman that said, “In Memory of.”

“Well, you help me every day,” my dad said.

“Don’t cry again!” I pleaded. “I am good,” I said, taking my hand out of his and putting it around his back to comfort him.

“You better be,” my mom interjected from behind us. She was bundled in her winter coat, lips chattering. The freezing extra-strong winds combined with the low temperatures turned her breath into mist.

As we continued across the bridge, I felt a sense of safety and solidarity. All of these people understood what I had been through—and still go through at times. I knew at that moment I would never feel alone again.

That night I posted on my Living a FULL Life Facebook page:

“Fairy tales are more than true—not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”

—G. K. Chesterton

And they can. <3

I smiled and sat back. What a great day.

Back at my dorm, I thought about how my second semester would need to be about making some much-needed changes. With my only focuses being my waistline and getting good grades, college had been kind of a bore so far. Though it was predictable and controlled, the way I liked it, I found myself disappointed with the experience. It needed a reboot of sorts, College 2.0—this version much more exciting, boozier and wilder or at least an R movie rating, I’d even settle for PG13. I didn’t know it yet, but some things were about to happen that would shake me up, whether I welcomed it or not.

Change one: I became interested in not just crushing from afar but having an actual, real-life boyfriend.

I had a mini-crush on a boy at Babson and an even greater infatuation with a boy named Blake who went to New York University. He was a tall, dark, handsome, half-Filipino, and originally from my hometown. We were acquaintances who’d shared a lot of classes, the same honors path, but nothing more.

Then we found ourselves on spring break together in the Bahamas senior year of high school. We would sit and talk for hours, laughing and observing while everyone else was enjoying foam parties and the drinking age of eighteen. We were enjoying these benefits too, but in our own kind of nerdy way.

“You know what I keep thinking? That foam must be laced with vomit, beer, and…”

“Soap and water,” he interrupted. We were sitting on the balcony of a club overlooking a foam-filled mosh-pit dance floor.

“Yes, but that’s too obvious…more like lost room keys, spit, maybe a shirt or two,” I mused, watching dancers bump their bodies against each other.

“You think people lost their tops in the foam?”

“Hell yeah, and probably on purpose. Look at them! Clearly, we aren’t having enough fun! Okay, Blakey, we need to step up our game. Think I am going to go into the foam.”

“I am not rescuing you, and you may get pregnant by contact.”

“Good point. Then I’d have to go on Maury to find out who the father was, and there are too many guys here to ever know.”

“You better stay here then,” he laughed pulling me to his side.

“If I must,” I joked, picking up my drink.

He smirked, clinking his beer with my Diet Coke. “Cheers. Spring break, baby.”

“To spring break.” I clinked my soda back.

Blake became one of my closest friends on this rite-of-passage trip. When we were stressed at school, we’d dream about going to a deserted island together to get away from it all. I was more comfortable being my silly self with him than I’d felt with anyone outside of family. I started to really like him, and really trust him, listening for that door-opening sound (oh yes, nineties kids, you know what I am talking about) indicating that he’d signed onto AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) so we could talk. It was like I was already in a relationship, without the physical aspect. But, I kind of wanted the physical aspect too. Who can blame a girl?

I visited Blake at school a couple of times in the first semester, once over my winter break, and though we snuggled all night in the same bed, he didn’t even try to make a move. This was a little confusing. I wanted to be more than his teddy bear.

Back at school in January, I finally started drinking, wanting to have a little more excitement and feeling I was ready to try it on my own terms. I never drank beer, only vodka, which meant I could get drunk with far fewer calories. One night, during a vodka-fueled phone call, I told Blake how I felt.

“I think we should be more than friends,” I blurted into my cell phone.

Silence for what seemed like a full minute.

“Okay, shit. Not a good sign.” And oh shit, I said that out loud. In that moment, I wished I could go back in time, Back to the Future-style. Where was Dr. Emmett Brown when I needed him?

“I don’t want to lose our friendship, Dani,” he said, concluding our humiliating conversation before it had even really begun.

With my already feeble ego bruised, plus knowing I couldn’t really like anyone else if I kept talking to him, I made the decision to cut off our friendship.

A week into this “friendship break,” I decided to tell my other crush how I felt about him. I had heard of a midlife crisis, where the person will purchase a luxury car or undergo some expensive plastic surgery procedure. I was having a mid-freshman-year crisis and was trying to fill the void I felt with a guy. I might have been better off with an expensive car or a nose job!

We were sitting and talking outside our dormitory when I said, “I really like you,” like a second-grader. But what’s the right way to go about these things? Okay, maybe any way but this way…

“Well, I really like you too. You are one of my best friends here,” he said, taking a sip of some strong alcohol concoction from his red Dixie cup. Best friend, not again, I didn’t like where this was headed. I could tell.

We sat there silent. “Dani, I never had a best friend who was a girl and I really value your friendship.” He briefly paused. “I don’t want to lose it.”

“Yeah, I totally get it.” I pretended I was okay with the whole notion of being the best friend again. He gave me a hug as I fake-yawned, probably too wide, looking like I had a face spasm.

“Well, I am off to bed. I think I drank too much, and you know me. Got to be at the library early in the morning. That drink was strong.” I pointed to his red Dixie cup, as his Dixie cup was a brother, made with the same alcohol, of mine.

“Yes, very strong. I hope we are okay.”

“Of course we are,” I said, giving him the best toothy smile I could produce, probably resembling a face spasm once again. Turning to leave, that’s when my eyes started getting teary. Rejection hurts, and boy was I tired of being the good girl stuck in the friend zone.

Two weeks into our break, Blake called and said he missed me and wanted to visit me in Boston. I took that as him possibly realizing he wanted more too. To make sure of it, I pulled out all the stops. I got my hair blown out and a new fresh cut. I wanted to look really good when he arrived. I wanted him not to recognize me, but in a who-is-that-hot-thing-sex-kitten way. I wanted to be more than his cute and cuddly teddy bear, dammit! I wore skintight jeans that made my legs look long and booty perkier, and heels to give me some height. I could tell by how my pants fit that I had already lost the little bit of weight I’d gained over winter break, plus some since he’d last seen me. I felt a little more confident as I stood for my last look at this person in the mirror, my hardest critic, me. “You got this,” I said, trying to ease my anxiety.

When he arrived, I picked him up at the train. I saw him tugging a suitcase behind him, wearing a black beanie and peacoat, kind of like Paddington Bear, but way more handsome. I parked the car and got out to help him with his bag. First thing he did, besides embracing me, was put his hand around my right wrist. “You are so tiny, Dani. What happened?” Not the reaction I was going for at all, but maybe I could rebound.

The rest of the weekend was filled with picking at food, laughing, drinking, and then our first kiss. The last night of his stay, I took him to a frat party with a bunch of my college guy friends and got the “powerful” screwdriver, which contained God knows what, to impress him. This resulted in Blake holding my hair as I hurled into the toilet, praying for my life. Not quite what I was going for, either. Alas, this was intimacy with my very first boyfriend.

Change two: Elizabeth and I lost contact. She had cried and so had I when we’d headed for our respective schools. We both knew we were really leaving and growing up. Though we promised to talk all the time, I never heard from her, despite my many messages to her “Hi, this is Elizabeth, leave a message or don’t bother. Peace out” recording. Eventually I gave up.

When I heard from my parents—they were very friendly with Elizabeth’s—that Elizabeth had come home from college mid-semester, I was saddened. I would later hear that her friends speculated it was drugs. I could picture her dancing at a house party, the DJ (a.k.a. frat pledge) booming loud music in the background, drink in her hand, cigarette between her lips, brown hair wild, and dripping with sweat. My need to fix things and make everything perfect kicked into high gear. I wanted to go home and help take care of her, apologize for losing touch and giving up, for being a bad friend. But she needed time alone with her parents to regroup, recharge, and rehabilitate.

During March break, I went to visit her.

“Hi, I was so worried about you. I left you messages, did you get them?” I said pulling her into a warm hug. She hugged me back, but something felt different, cold and uninviting.

“Yes, but you know how college gets. I joined a sorority too, you probably heard from your parents, and it takes up a lot of my time. I am going to have a cigarette, want one?”