“There are so many random steps on campus that you don’t notice until they become a barrier. It’s hard to explain the dread that washes over you when you’re trying to crutch from Schultz to Friend in ten minutes and encounter a flight of stairs.”
Again and again, I told myself I wasn’t ashamed of my condition…. Yet alone, waiting for a McCosh nurse to take my weight, I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed by what the eating disorder had made of me.
“You didn’t talk to me today. And I suppose I didn’t say anything either. So I searched for an excuse for you to remember me, wondering what I could possibly ask.”
One day this summer, sitting in a blank white apartment that was not mine, I felt a strange weariness. This apartment was full of more books than I will probably ever read and I had fellowships to apply to and emails to write and the whole Internet in front of me and all of New York City clamoring outside.
As the firstborn in my family, I was a unique challenge for my parents. Of course there were all the new issues of how to raise a child, but first and foremost, what would they call me?
“I speak a sort of poetic Italian and German,” I tell people. “I could tell you the word for ‘woman’ or ‘flower’ or ‘moon’ (the classic subjects of opera and art song) but not ask you for the check.”
