Weighty Matters

In 2012 I was fresh off a summer tour with Sting, starting to get some really interesting guest conducting opportunities, living with a loving husband in a beautiful house in a great neighborhood; life, by all outward accounts, looked good.

I was also clinically underweight, eating less than half the calories I needed for baseline bodily functions every day, suffering from amenorrhea and hating everything about my physical being.

This post isn’t meant to be a précis about eating disorders – that information is available elsewhere, and it doesn’t feel right to me to speak of other people’s experiences, as I can barely comprehend my own. Suffice it to say that 30 million Americans suffer from an ED (an acronym I’ll use from now on), and, despite it’s name, EDs are really not about food.

But I will issue a trigger warning here – if you’re currently suffering from an eating disorder, I’m going to talk about some uncomfortable stuff, so please be aware. And for the rest of you, this is going to be a long and personal post, so proceed at your own caution.

As a kid I’d always been vaguely unhappy with my size. It started when I had an outward growth spurt at the age of 8 and my horrified parents put me on a diet, never mind that kids grow up or out at different times in their development (and I ache for that 8 year old me – those slightly chubby cheeks, in retrospect, were kind of adorable, and I eventually grew out of them.) That unhappiness played a part in a 9-month bout of very disordered eating I had as a teen (which in my mind I think of as my “anorexia lite” period), which eventually resolved itself as I found my footing in high school.

Fast forward to 2012. The Sting tour (it was for the Symphonicities album) was a huge deal, life changing. And my whole thought process began innocuously enough – if I was going to be 20 feet tall on a Jumbotron in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans every night, I wanted to look my best. And if the camera adds 10 pounds, well, it couldn’t hurt to lose a little weight.

The tour was amazing, something I might write about later, but I came home a changed person, because I knew my life was going to change. And it did (name recognition, inquiries from new presenters, increased guest conducting offers, media interest), and it was both thrilling and terrifying. And the one thing I could rely on was the certainty that if I controlled my diet, I could control my body, and that’s what I did.

The 10 pounds became 15, 20, 25 off of a frame that, to be honest, didn’t need to be smaller in the first place. I was buying clothes in ever-diminishing sizes every few months. Eventually I ran out of sizes, but to myself I looked big, hulking, out of proportion – a clear case of severe body dysmorphia.

By the time I reached my lowest point, sometime in late 2012, I was weighing not just everything I ate, but every ingredient that went into every dish I cooked (you can only imagine how long it took me to cook anything). I rarely went out for fear of food over which I had no control.

I did not look good.

But controlling my body was, for me, a form of coping, of self-soothing; having command over something in a life that seemed so much bigger – and overwhelming – was deeply comforting.

When I’m overwhelmed, I want to feel like I can take charge of something, and that makes me feel good; that’s the psychological side of anorexia. The physiological side plays a part as well; when you’re starving, you generally feel pretty numb; numbness can be soothing. But also, starvation causes your freaked-out body to pump out high levels of cortisol, which gives you a buzzy and slightly manic energy throughout the day. It all feels kind of good in the most awful way possible, despite the insomnia.

It was a perfect storm, and it took me nearly 4 years, three stays in an intensive outpatient program, endless therapy and some really difficult soul-searching to find my way out of my self-created world of torture. The fact that during this time my career was flourishing is, in retrospect, amazing to me. I managed to keep up my existing positions, handle my increasing guest conducting, appear functional to my colleagues and friends and become serious about distance running.

Part of the healing process, initially, was very practical; break down the rules around food and start nourishing myself properly. Eating becomes prescriptive, because it is the most crucial part of healing the body and allowing the brain to function properly. It took patience, and practice, to re-teach myself how to eat.

More difficult by far was learning, slowly, how to release myself from a life dictated by my own rules, of limiting myself from fully becoming myself. Because in retrospect, it was not so much that life felt like it was becoming too much – it was my own fear of me becoming too much, for both myself and the world. I had to accept that I could, both literally and figuratively, take up more space in the universe, and that this was not only possible, but necessary to realize my own potential and to live a fulfilling life.

Add to the mix the fact that humans are complex and flawed and wonderful and weird, and I didn’t want to deal with the challenging emotions that surround that truth. I’m frankly grateful for my experience because, in the end, having an ED made me face myself, all of myself – from the intense ambition to the deep compassion, and everything in between, whether I was comfortable with it or not. And it turns out I’m much more OK with me than I thought I could be; open curiosity about myself is far healthier and more sustainable than my own elaborate rules that kept me in check.

Which is not to say any of this was a simple “aha” moment when everything became fine. I’d like to think that I’ve put all of that behind me, but the truth is that I feel like I’ll always be in recovery.

While I’ve let go of the vast majority of my food rules, they tend to creep back in during times of stress. And it’s still an effort to be comfortable with my body – its natural state (athletic, not stick thin), its preferred homeostasis (which requires carbs, not keto) – without trying to micromanage it. Our bodies, it turns out, are expert in managing themselves, and we simply get in the way.

But the temptation to tinker is still alluring to me. And when that arises I have to ask myself, why do I want to turn to this maladaptive coping mechanism? What’s really going on? And those simple questions lead me to the complex answers that are never about food, but about feelings, discomforts, stressors, desires, the wonderful messiness of life.

I feel like it’s going to be an ongoing process, and one that I consciously work on daily. And because EDs can be so secretive, it’s not something I’ve discussed much with anyone besides my family and my closest friends. This secrecy keeps it in the shadows, and that hiddenness is what can make it self-perpetuating.

So, for my health, and hopefully for the benefit of others, I wanted to expose this part of my life to anyone and everyone who has gotten this far in this rambling post. Life is challenging. We are often challenging to ourselves. It’s only when we can face those challenges with curiosity rather than calling up our defense mechanisms that we can be fully present for ourselves.

Thank you reading this. I always hope that by sharing my stories I’m sharing an experience that will resonate with someone else, and that resonance is what can create deep connections to people and to the world. And it helps me to externalize and to put things out into the universe, in the open, because it forces me to think things through with clarity and transparency, and to do that I need to be really, really honest with myself. And that honesty creates a foundation, which in turn creates strength, and that’s what keeps me moving forward.