Sensitivity Disorders

When I was a freshman in college, my classmates and I were herded into large lecture halls to watch orientation videos about various College Terrors, including but not limited to binge drinking, drug use, peer pressure regarding drug use, what to do when you suspect your friends of drug use (a lot of them seemed to focus on "drug use"), and how to avoid getting your car impounded on campus (answer: buy our exorbitantly-priced permits).

One of them focused on eating disorders. What they were, what to do if you thought your friend had one, how they were ridiculously common on college campuses. And I remember sitting there in that darkened lecture hall feeling stricken, shocked, horrified--not by the emaciated images on the screen, but by the hoots and hollers and laughter from the teenagers around me.

Everybody around me was laughing. Everybody, that is, except for those of us hunched down uncomfortably in our seats, watching pieces of ourselves displayed on the screen. For some reason the anorexic and bulimic behaviors seemed hilarious to the college freshman crowd, like absurd caricatures, like intoxicated madness shambling around on the screen and distorting the human experience just enough to be hysterically funny.

Those of us hunched down in our seats didn't all have eating disorders (although I'm sure some of us did), but we'd all been somewhere that hurt when it came to food, body image, weight, and the gaze of others. We'd felt searing judgment in the eyes of everyone around us, we'd felt the rejection, the obsessive calorie-tracking, the cognitive haze that comes from hours of standing in front of a mirror hating oneself.

That laughter rang in my ears for a long time, and it still does. I opened up to a friend about how I have trouble eating enough when I got stressed out, and he scoffed, "Oh poor you, what a problem to have!" I went to lunch with a work colleague who frowned at my sandwich and said, "Well, you must work out a lot." I've heard eating disorders called a disease for rich, overprivileged, spoiled white brats and I've seen them glamorized more often than I can count, a disease for gorgeous ballerinas and exotic, intellectual, whip-thin women. Nobody explicitly endorses it, but everybody wants to be a little anorexic.

We've made a lot of progress in dealing with mental illness with compassion and clarity, but there are still vast amounts of ignorance where these and other disorders are concerned. According to the National Eating Disorder Association, at least 10 million women and 1 million men in the US are struggling with anorexia right now, and countless others with various forms of eating disorder. Even more are subject to unnecessarily severe body image dissatisfaction. At the same time, and clearly psychologically related, we are dealing with an unprecedented obesity rate, further underlining the fact that we don't know how to eat. More importantly, we don't know how to look at ourselves in the mirror.

I don't have big solutions; I wish I did. I don't think we even understand how fundamental things like eating relate emotionally to our self-image and how to deal with when this basic function becomes a proxy for control, or comfort, or whatever explanations there are behind disordered eating. I wish we could understand the connections behind rising obesity and rising eating disorders better, understand the unhealthy messages we ourselves may be contributing. This issue is of course connected to the overarching issue of mental healthcare in this nation, a dire need too-often ignored.

I don't have big solutions. But I never act surprised at the size of someone else's portion, I try not to complain about my weight or fitness around my girlfriends, I try to respond to joking self-deprecation from them with real affirmation. Maybe I come off as over-sensitive, hyper-serious about this issue. But at least I will never be one of those people laughing.