Cleansing

a sensation junkie examines what it means to live less & less

I’ve been called many things in my life but “sensation junkie” is probably one of the ones that rings most true to me—it’s what an old yoga teacher called me when I was still new to yoga at 19, without knowing my issues with drugs and so many other things that hurt me but in the best way possible. I like tattoos for not just the finished project but how they feel, I liked skincare that stings and burns, I love the smell of gasoline they say because it kills brain cells—I am just more than okay with lots of types of pain provided I live through them.

Fasting is in this category for me. Starving yourself just short of causing yourself harm in the name of doing yourself good.

I don’t know what made me want to embark on a cleanse at this weird late stage in the pandemic, in the middle of winter when you are supposed to be filling your stomach with warm nourishing fatty foods. I think part of it was the reason everyone does it: to lose weight. I had started gaining weight again—I tend to fluctuate a whole 25 pounds and this has been happening since my 20s, though weirdly my size doesn’t shift much so people do not notice as much—probably due to the fact that I have averaged one cake baked a week since this pandemic has started, occasionally two. (I am the only one eating them.) I also have started exercising which causes me to build muscle very fast and we all know that unfair fact that muscle weighs more than fat—I get bulky once I start working out. Anyway, I have done a few fasts in my life, almost of always of the juice cleanse variety. That’s what I did this time too—I chose the cheapest 7-day juice cleanse I could find online (they all are basically variations of the same thing, at around 4 green juices and 1 carrot based and 1 beet based more or less, sometimes with a nut milk one added in) and I pulled the trigger. Nevermind it has been a whole four years since I even considered doing this—ironically, my health was never good enough in recent years to get this healthy. At my sickest I was eating Chipotle and Shake Shack sometimes several times a day to gain weight. Nothing makes me lose weight more than relapses of my various illnesses.

The truth is since I was young I was one of those annoying naturally thin people. I ate and I ate and I never gained weight. My dad and my brother were also this way. (My mother was the opposite—short and curvy and prone to constant dieting in a way that made her metabolism far slower than ours sadly enough.) My dad and I especially—very lanky people who had a ton of nervous energy to burn away at all our many junk food habits. I only experienced this current sort of weight gain a bit in my late 20s—and that was mainly long overdue curves. One time I also took a birth control that made me balloon up too in a few weeks—that was maybe the most drastic. But I have rarely been above a size 4.

In high school I had an anorexic friend and she liked to go with me to Panda Express after school and watch me eat a “snack” meal, which, well, was a normal person’s meal-meal. I’d inhale a large plate of chow mein and she would watch—she claimed it helped her to live vicariously through me. Every meal she mentioned how lucky I was and I never registered it because it was just how I was. After our friend break-up, over who knows what, I never had those snacks meals at Panda Express again.

In college—a fancy liberal arts college in upstate NY—anorexics were everywhere and everyone wanted to talk about it. It was the 90s, “heroin chic” was a reality. I was at peak skinny so I assumed they thought I was too—anorexic or drug addict or both— but my extra gangliness was from taking up smoking, I think. I was thinner than ever. I recall one time a socialite followed me to a lunch line and audibly took note of the usual sandwich I ordered: pumperknickel bread toasted with cream cheese and avocado slices and sprouts. God, I loved that weird sandwich. She asked me what was in it, even though she had definitely heard, and when I told her she said nothing and walked away, as if offended. Only three years later she finally told me that she was furious, sure I had told her some fake fatty thing to make her gain weight. Lord.

Because of my mother most likely, I had a real aversion to diet talk. I would just glaze over. I had no interest in listening to stories of eating disorders, I didn’t even care much for body positivity. The body just did not interest me, I would say, although maybe it was easy for me to say.

Especially as midway through college I was told my measuresements were pretty perfect and I could get paid being a fit model. I did that in Manhattan on my off hours here and there. I realized I had to stay a certain weight and certain measurements or everything would be ruined—the income for me was very necessary. It was then that I started taking water pills when I was PMSing so I could lose the bloat. It was for my job, I remember telling a school nurse who was concerned that I regularly took those pills.

When I went on my junior year to Oxford, things got really weird. I could not get as much work there, though I found some hours working at a vintage clothing store. I was still very broke and so I could barely afford food. At the same time I had fallen in love with Gerard Manley Hopkins and I was obsessed with reading about his asceticism especially when it came to food. Soon I started restricting in weird ways. Breakfast was one apple with precisely one teaspoon of honey, plus black tea with a 1/4 teaspoon milk. Lunch was a bag of Marks & Spencer’s cut up mixed vegetables (the kind you are meant to roast or boil as a side or stew dish). Dinner was one can of Sainsbury’s tomato lentil soup. That was it. All I ate for a year, with the occasional pints of beer. A drunken night means maybe taking a few bites from my friend’s chip van haul but that was as far as things got. My pale thinness earned me the nickname “Morticia” which of course I loved. It was the first time I understood how much control had to do with my strange disordered eating.

In the years after college, as I struggled as a broke freelancer in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn, I realized I could not say at times if I was just broke or anorexic. It was so unclear, even to me. It was very easy for me not to eat much although I was also the same person friends knew as a foodie. It perplexed me. For a couple years my main meals were CVS ramen and a fruit here and there. I had very little money and this made sense though a side benefit was looking so fashionable as the 90s rail-thin heroin-chic was still in the air in 00s NYC. In grad school just years later, the poverty continued in Baltimore and I got a job as a bistro hostess where I was constantly praised for how thin I was. I was also discouraged from taking home food, even if I wanted to buy it myself. I lived on pasta and ketchup and white bread with canned tuna. Indulgences this entire decade, my 20s, meant an extra pack of cigarettes not extra food, never.

As I am typing this, I am thinking to myself, yes, that sounds like an eating disorder.

And also yes, it sounds like you could not afford food.

But still: you paid rent, you wore clothes, you had dogs. It was food where you skimped most.

It really wasn’t until I got chronically ill that I realized how important eating right was. Still I was attracted to junk foods—somehow I think real LA people always are—and so I had an MD at one point who thought a juice cleanse might not be bad for me. He also said it could help me quit smoking, as it was awful to smoke when just drinking juice—he had been there. At that point, only Wellbutrin had worked to get me off smokes. And I hated that drug—it make me shaky, it messed with my sleep, it triggered weird manias. So I looked up cleanses.

A popular one at the time was one called "the master cleanse.” I remember some of the press on it mentioning that Beyonce loved to do it. I read more about it and it seemed easy enough: you just squeezed a lot of lemons, and added maple syrup and cayenne pepper. And that’s all you drank for as long as you could. I tried five days at first knowing well that people sometimes did this for 50 days.

I remember my first sense of joy from it was realizing how cheap it was to do it. Sure if you got a high grade maple syrup it was costly but lemons and water cost nearly nothing. And if you could survive at least for a while on this, why on earth would people not do it occasionally just to be smart about money?

I don’t remember much of that week except I was very depressed. I also felt somewhat manic, a weird energy suddenly introducing itself, me going from hungry to forgetting about food altogether. It was cold out and I decided I wanted to go ice skating at Central Park, even though I was so bad at ice skating. I did it. I did a bunch of other weird things that week too, including break up with a guy who I just felt was going nowhere in partnership with me. At the end of the cleanse, I felt I had accomplished something, made it through something all the way to the other side.

I guess that’s the other thing: the feeling of accomplishing something most people cannot easily do, a thing humans really should not do. There is something immortal and divine about saying you do not need to eat. There is something so otherworldly and almost magical about forgetting what it feels like to eat—something you may feel for a day or two in the midst of a cleanse. And there is a way in which this also tells you, you can survive. With nothing.

Back to the money issue: you don’t have to buy food, you don’t even need it like you thought.

At least for a bit.

Back to sensation junkie: the eating disorder as a way above and beyond the boy, above and beyond material existence. Wow, right?

Except you come back down, like every good mania. I made it through the seven days of this juice cleanse and like clockwork I gained back the weight within days. I went back to junk and meat and dairy and whatever I wanted. I forgot the empty bottles of juice piling up on my countertop, a distant memory of just another thing I did.

I think so often about how unknowable we are even to ourselves. The body to me will never not stop feeling like an experiment, like the whole of living I guess. How we are supposed to spend this time, what are habits are to look like, what we achieve and what we do not—it is sadly all up to us. In a year of such extreme deprivation, where all most everyone on earth has know, is solitude of the most extreme sort—the inside of their bedrooms with nothing but horror outside—it seems especially wrong to crave more depletion. But there is that factor of control. Of choice. That I opted for all this nothing. That I can decided when it comes and goes.

Over the years, I have had many students with eating disorders—ones I suspected, ones I knew. I recall one in particular who wanted to spend her lunch hours with me, knowing I understood, knowing I would not pressure her, knowing I could shield her from others, knowing I was a safe space. We sat in a corner of the cafeteria and I watched her make a cone shaped pile of bits of pilled bread crumbs, one after another. She told me once that one of the hardest parts of her condition was a period where in her old school people got so used to her being like this that no one stared anymore, no one worried. Around that time, she had forgotten what it was like to be them too. And she realized she was in a competition with normalcy more than anything. I said I understood although I don’t think I fully did until recently.

It is very cold out, the snow of this week at the form we all dreaded even as it freshly fell: the mounds of gray city ice like moulding on the edges of every street, a demented jagged icing on this sorry late winter urban cake. I find myself in my kitchen a lot, making stews and soups, dreaming of new cake projects. I find one of the small empty bottles from the juice cleanse, just a week ago but already feeling like lives ago, and I fill it with water and stick a few flowers in it. I stare at the vessel on my desk during an online fitness class where the instructor keeps reminded us to “check in” with our bodies. As if we could forget, through all the sweat and strain. Amazing how dead flowers are so good at looking alive even days and days after being severed from their lifeline. I breathe hard into the still night air, already too hot from the heaters, and for a second a thought flashes through my head, as it always does, so uninvited: you will die. By the time I step off the mat in not too long, my body is pulsing through the wear of heavy movement, exhausted yet also electrified with all the extremes ordinary existences offers us and I think instead I will live.