I had a dream you were on the top of a hill

I had a dream that you were on the top of a hill, gazing at the sunrise over an iced over valley. I could see my breath dance up towards you as my feet were anchored to the solid ground.

There was only a moment of hesitation, where I questioned if I could join you, only a moment, where my heart raced and plummeted at the same time. In this dream, my legs didn't feel like illegally parked car tires, weighted and stuck, impossible to lift. My lungs expanded and refused to collapse upon exhale, while my spine grew straighter, rising towards the sun. There was a glow around your body that faded from orange to pink, to a soft white, that dulled the outline of your figure and your usual glare. You looked at me like I've never been more beautiful, walking up the hill with unexpected ease. I felt it; I felt strong, I felt beautiful, I felt worthy, I felt you for the first time in a long time. But this was a dream. In reality, the truth is that I can barely walk up your front stairs, and I think you've forgotten how to look at me like that, and it doesn't snow in San Francisco.

Birthday poem to Mom

What is Normal?

Looking into others windows

i imagine myself in their bodies

feel their toes w I g g l e

in their socks at the dinner table

feel wine 

r

U

N

down their throats

their full belly laugh

Slouch i their chairs 

throw their heads back 

sit for hours through dinner and dessert

stand and wash dishes, 

curl up with their bodies at rest 

and feel their 

Hearts b e a t. 

Normalcy. 

Stand in a shower 

without collapsing and feel their pores empty. 

What is normal?

brush their teeth 

Pearly white, bloodless

Feel their enamel 

the raised bumps on their tongue

Look at their bodies and think nothing

think everything

which is to think of nothing

i imagine…

that i sleep normally with dreams

    with ease

    uninterrupted 

    restful

I imagine their dreams 

their occasional nightmares

Feel warm and still in blankets

Light and airy

but this is my own dream

being them, 

being simple, 

being normal.

being able

to have a day 

Have a body

without worry. 

But, what is normal?

r - a - w

Published in Humble Pie Mag

April, 2016

The 100 Pounders: The Disordered Eating on Social Media

November 1, 2016

I scrolled through Instagram to pass the time. I was early. It was 720PM on a Tuesday. I had ten minutes to kill before the meeting.  

I waited outside Saint James Church at the intersection of California Street and 8th Avenue in San Francisco. Saint James is a historic Episcopal church founded in the late 1800’s. It’s a quaint white building that’s hidden in between typical Presidio / Inner Richmond architecture; two-story squat pastel painted houses with steep stairs and single car garages. There was only street parking and on a Tuesday night, most of the surrounding neighbors had stolen any good parking. 730 was the start time for the “Newcomers Meeting.”  A thirty minute meeting for new potential members of Overeaters Anonymous. Then at 8, it would merge into the next hour group which was the, “100 Pounders,” meeting.

When you think of OA, the typical image is of an overweight person, overeating. The 100 Pounders was the section of OA that went majorly undiscussed: the over-exercisers, the anorexics, the bulimics, the body dysmorphic folk, the bingers and purgers, and other similar labels that while not may include traditional overeating, most certainly included obsessive and compulsive habits relating to food. 

The meeting was in the community room of the church, where Sunday Services and children’s birthday parties were thrown. It was sterile and smelled old, in a haunting musky kind of way. The room was set up with black metal fold out chairs and plastic tables. There was coffee, tea, and water on one, and an assortment of fruit and reading materials on the other; handouts, magazines, questionnaires, name-tags, and such. People flowed into the community room and kept to themselves. A few hugged, others awkwardly head nodded to each other, saying hello from across the room. There weren’t many newbies, it was myself and three or four others -- all of whom I assumed would transition into the 100 pounders meeting.

I put away my phone as instructed, closed Instagram and switched my phone to Airplane mode, something I didn’t do very often. Social media, technology, virtual communication - off. 

Standing at 5’5” and weighing slightly over 100 pounds, with a handful of obsessive and compulsive tendencies, some that certainly revolved around food,  and a personal addiction to Instagram, I decided to enter the space of the 100 Pounders. I wanted to find out what the perceived health trends and faces of social media looked like behind the scenes. How did living in a tech obsessed city do to influence eating habits and disorders? Was social media just another mask that we wore throughout our day to day lives, fooling followers, preaching hypocrisies to the masses? 

I myself had felt the impact of the digital era living beside the peak of the content and tech creators in San Francisco. Every morning, without fail, my fingers slid my phone open and started the pattern without thinking: email, instagram, snapchat, facebook, scroll, scroll, switch hands, work instagram, and back to  emails again. My brain and hands did this without a thought. My thumbs, sore at the bases from typing, texting, swiping, and scrolling, did all of this intuitively. My own social media was full of pictures of “personal cakes” disguising late night binges, and #sadgrrl posts that showed myself covered in boxes of Junior Mints. No one knew all the boxes were empty. No one knew I cried while I ate them. No one knew it took me ten minutes to eat them all or that they stayed in my stomach for even shorter. 

The room was full of only women. One of them, while picking up a chair, announced.

“Why don’t we all start unfolding chairs and make a circle here in the middle of the room.”

There were dozens of black metal folding chairs, without cushions on the top of them. Firm and cold, some of them had been sharpied on, others had been scraped, revealing their true silver color. They opened easily with mild sounds of metal on metal, squeaking, unfolding to help construct a circle with around twenty chairs. There were seven of us in total. 

“Hi, I’m Molly* and I’m an overeater. I’m your group leader for tonight. First off, welcome to Overeaters Anonymous and welcome home.”

Molly filled up half of the black folded chair she sat on. She wore three layers on top, but you could still see her collarbones protrude out of her base shirt. Her nails were painted deep red and her face lit up as she welcomed each of us to the circle. She was easily the oldest in the room. Her crow’s feet and loafers made her seem in her early forties. She intimately discussed the 12 steps of OA, the various groups, the meeting’s goals, what a sponsor was, and her personal timeline with OA. Her voice was bubbly with a harsh vocal upswing, but was oddly calming and more genuine than the woman on the hotline.

        Molly had been a bulimic since she was 12. Her bulimia and compulsive habits turned from being just food related to evolving to things like shoplifting and eventually had led her to getting arrested for stealing hundreds of dollars of clothes from a Macy’s back in her hometown. There was no jail time, although she said she spent that night in county jail, where she shared a cell with six other women, with no beds and a shared toilet. Her parents had thrown her into a treatment facility, she dropped out of school, and working on her bulimia became her full time job. For a few years she said she had it under control, it being the consistent throwing up after every meal, but she noticed that her compulsive behavior just manifested in other ways. That’s when she became obsessed with working out; she and her husband ran a gym in the Castro together.

“Without OA I wouldn’t have a safe space, I would continue to hide behind the mask of being healthy because I run a gym.”

The different masks people wear that give the illusion of being healthy was what I was interested in. How did eating disorders hide behind these health trends that seemed to be on the rise in America? How did people use OA as a space to uncover these unconventional forms of unhealthy habits?

        The next meeting started more naturally than the first. A handful of other girls and women walked into the room, finding a seat, grabbing an extra chair, putting their purses and backpacks in the corner of the room, almost nobody grabbing anything to eat or drink. The meeting title certainly applied to their overall physique. No one was above a size 2 and besides a few women who seemed to be more voluptuous on top, it was safe to say that everyone there could shop in the little girl’s department if they wanted to.

A girl who was my height sat next to me. She had white converse on and black skinny jeans, both equally faded. She wore a flannel over the top of a Giants t-shirt. Her glasses were thick rimmed and looked like Ray Bans, making it seem like they could be fake. Smiling with just the corner of her mouth, this was her form of a hello, before she began fidgeting with her shoulder length hair.

On the other side of me sat a much more vibrant woman. She was older, maybe in her mid-thirties, her leg bounced anxiously, swinging her clogged foot back and forth. She looked like a baker; her bleached straw like hair in a loose bun, her pants, slightly oversized and stained, her shirt buttoned all way to the top, with a pen sticking out of the pocket. I soon found out, she was a line cook at an Asian-fusion restaurant that had recently won a Michelin star. She was recently rejected from a celebrity cooking competition. They said they had just gone with someone else, she was sure that she just didn’t work on camera. 

“What’s a celebrity chef anyway…?” She would mumble under her breath, as she shared. 

Her later description of the dumplings she recently purged on after a shift even made my mouth water.

  “Hi, I’m Tiffany and I’m an overeater.”

Tiffany was the first to share that night. She had come to OA when she was 17 years old, which guessing from her messy braids and soft baby cheeks, didn’t seem like too long ago. She talked about how she had been struggling with accepting that she was powerless over food. She described her daily routine of eating; the snacks, the calories, the precise cuts and amounts, the timings, the rituals -- she didn’t seem powerless over food. Recently, she decided to cut out sugar, especially with Halloween around the corner. This was another attempt at controlling food. She had already cut out all animal products, and mentioned how being a vegan made her feel even more empowered around food.
Molly cut in and asked her if she didn’t think all of these actions were just attempts to cover up a bigger issue. What would it be like if she didn’t follow all of these rules for a day? What if she broke out of her routine, then what? Tiffany’s face looked horrified, as if someone was actively forcing her to give up her routine in that very moment. A hand across the room shot up as we sat in the dead silence.

“Hi, I’m Angel and I’m an overeater.”
Angel was a thin Latina woman whose face had been contoured with layers of carefully applied makeup. She responded to Molly’s questions, saying how sometimes she would have cheat days from her daily routines but then she would just lay in bed depressed all day, feeling defeated. For her, she didn’t know what that greater power was that could help her break out of the cycle. Angel was as she phrased it, “mildly Youtube famous,” having around 60,000 followers that she shared beauty and wellness tips with. How was she supposed to give that up and change her image, how could she tell 60k people that she was an OA member?
Angel twirled a piece of hair that kept falling in the front of her eyes. It was perfectly curled and bounced back into its spiral each time it left her fingers. There was a hopelessness that lingered on her breath as she sighed and talked about how after every meeting she would still try and convince herself that food didn’t have power over her. Everything was manageable. Everything was okay.
Most people had sought out OA because there wasn’t another safe space they felt like they could go to without ruining their image - both physically and socially and in a technological space. The meeting was full of women, who in their day to day life, represented something to a larger group of people. On social media, in their businesses and videos, to their friends and family, being a 100 pounder was an image of health, beauty, wellness, and ultimately status, that nobody seemed to question.

One girl, shared half way through the meeting. She wore a red crop top that brought out the rosacea in her face. Her nostrils were red and the inside lining of her eyes looked rubbed raw. She sniffled as she talked, hugging her knees to her chest.
“I stopped going to therapy for bulimia about a year ago. My parents thought I was in recovery, that I had fixed my bulimia. I mean, I did stop throwing up but I realized really quickly that I had just formed something else.” 
She was a college student at San Francisco State, originally from Minnesota. She was as pale as a Midwesterner but didn’t have the accent. Her a’s and o’s were short, and she spoke at a fraction above a whisper. She talked about how her binging and purging had turned to controlling her food and faking food allergies. She cut out dairy and gluten and told her parents that she was going on the Paleo diet because it was supposed to restore the flora in her stomach. California was supposed to be ‘good’ for her.
“I thought coming to SF State would be a much more open minded community than back home. I didn’t know anyone with bulimia, but I think…”
She paused for a long time and Molly consoled her, saying she could take a minute. There wasn’t much eye contact in the group. Most of the girls stared at their cuticles and played with their split ends. If phones were allowed to be out, every single one of them would have been on Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat, but without their screens they all just looked down. She started again and a few girls looked up as she did.
“I think being around so much technology and tech obsessed people made me get sucked into a different world of controlling.”
This was a common thread of the night. Being around so much technology made each girl or woman feel a pressure to be a part of the latest food trend. As food trends changed, so did their labeled eating disorder.     

“I started because of all the layered smoothies on Instagram.” One girl with a long braid down to her hips announced.
She looked like a Zumba instructor; 5’9, blue eyes, Adidas trainers, grey leggings, and a dark green Patagonia jacket. She fidgeted with the silver cross necklace that fell out of her zipped up top. She talked about how obsessive she became with buying healthy additives and frozen fruits and nut-milks to make these photogenic smoothies. She would make four or five a day, eating all of her mistakes and her final products. What her followers didn’t know was that in between blending, she would throw up her creations. Not to mention, she was spending upwards of $800 a month on her liquid food experiments.
“My friends come to me all the time asking for supplement advice, like what’s the best protein powder to keep me full all day long. It’s not like I know, but I tell them what I use, the $65 dollars I will spend on organic vegan plant based -- idk, whatever.”
Her face shut off and her body stiffened. Other girls, “Mmhm-d,” in response and the group leader told her how strong she was for sharing.

“I spent this past weekend in a dark spiral of looking at health food blogs and writing down new diets to try.” The girl with glasses sitting next to me said.
She had found OA after going to her third dieting center. She had been to an underground water detox center where she only drank water for two weeks, she had been a fruitarian for three years, and now she said she was on the Keto diet, where she mostly ate nuts and vegetables. No one questioned her hunt for the next best diet she said, most people asked her for health advice too. She worked with youth outdoors as her day job and ran a “back to the earth, fit-spo” blog at night, both giving off the image that she was a healthy and all natural woman. It was true, she smelled like dirt and some sort of blend of basil and lemon, and as she sipped out of her Nalgene covered in, “Save the Earth,” stickers, she reminded me of every camp counselor I had at summer sleepaway camp.
Overeaters Anonymous didn’t seem to know how to address how powerful the media had started to play a role in health food trends. The images of smoothie bowls, yoga mats, meditation, juice cleanses, raw and slow foods, were all new masks these women wore to hide deeper Issues. How did the idea of living a healthy lifestyle turn into the extreme and morph into an obsessive compulsive disordered way of eating for these women

“Hi, I’m Lynda. I’m a recovering overeater.”
Lynda’s voice had a certain power in it that I hadn’t heard before in the night. Her posture was perfect, her tailbone positioned firmly at the edge of her seat, her feet flat on the ground in combat boots.
“I started a new social media account and told all of my friends that I was deactivating all of my accounts.”
The room was in shock. “Why?” some people blurted out. Others slid back in their chairs to hear her out. Her answer was that she wanted a fresh start. She wanted an identity and a body that wasn’t attached to food. With 15,000 followers, she felt judged for every food picture she posted, every outing, every selfie, every hashtag, every life.
“I want to post a picture of a popcorn at the movies without getting into a media war about whether or not there’s butter on it or extra salt or if I should even be eating popcorn.”
Losing that many followers was an easy trade as she talked about realizing how everything had become unmanageable, how everything wasn’t okay anymore.
When group ended, the circle of trust that had been built collapsed as everyone folded the black chairs and put them back against the far wall. Silence blanketed the room again, like each of us hadn’t poured our hearts out. I walked up to the girl from Minnesota, who seemed to share the most throughout the night.
“Do you think that coming to OA is helping you?” I asked.
She didn’t know.
“Probably not, I think I’m always going to have an eating disorder -- or like, disordered eating habits. But being a part of the 100 meetings is the first time where I haven’t had a therapist or a friend be either disgusted or like in awe of how healthy I’m being.” She smiled and nudged me.
“What about you, think you’ll come back to us?” She handed me her phone that had the search section of Instagram pulled up. I typed in my name and added myself for her, smiled and shrugged my shoulders. 640 followers.
The meeting seemed to be the first place where these girls could openly announce how their healthy habits weren’t healthy and have there be no questions asked about it. Their masks could be pulled off, their compulsions calmed, and for a brief hour, sitting on hard cold chairs, they could admit how unhealthy their habits really were.

http://www.oasf.org

http://oa.org