Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

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One of the curious aspects of middle school is how extraordinary the pain feels, even when the
affliction is quite mundane. The wrong pair of jeans, your unpronounceable last name, a paper wad
thrown by a popular boy that hit your back during an assembly. Has anyone ever suffered like this?
My mother used to tell me all kids were struggling. Even the bullies. “It’s such a tough time for
everyone,” she would say, and get a tsk-tsk look, like she was talking about Ethiopia. A nice
perspective, I suppose. But I was pretty sure my unhappiness was worse than everyone else’s.
In sixth grade, I walked home alone every day. In the quiet hours before my brother returned from
football and my parents returned from work, I rooted around our cabinets for new kinds of comfort.
Graham crackers. Chunks of cheddar cheese melted in the microwave for exactly seven seconds, the
moment the sides began to slump. Sips of occasional beer weren’t enough anymore. I needed the
numbing agents of sugar and salt.
Becoming a binge eater in a house like mine wasn’t easy. You had to get creative. My mother
bought natural, oily peanut butter, but if you swirled a spoonful with molasses, you had something
approaching a Reese’s. Four tubes of cake icing sat on the fourth shelf of the pantry, and I squirted a
dollop in my mouth each day.
But my new comfort also brought a new pain. “You’re getting fat,” my brother told me one day, as
I watched Oprah on the couch. He and I didn’t speak much anymore. He stuck to his room and his
Judas Priest. But he had an older sibling’s homing device for sore spots. “Fat” was the meanest word
you could call a girl. The absolute worst thing in the world.
My first diet started in seventh grade. My cafeteria lunch shrank to iceberg lettuce dribbled with
low-cal ranch dressing. I loaded up on Diet Cokes. Three, four a day. After school, I grape-vined to
Kathy Smith’s aerobic workout. I confined myself to frozen Lean Cuisine dinners. Cheese pizza.
Cheese cannelloni. Cheese lasagna. (The same three ingredients, rolled up in different shapes.) The
diet craze of the 1980s was a nationwide tornado that left leg warmers and V-hip leotards in its wake.
Even my food co-op mother bought a book listing calorie counts, and I memorized those entries like
Bible passages. I couldn’t tell you much about John 3:16, but I knew Blueberry Muffin: 426.
The misery of calorie restriction is well documented, but what people rarely mention is that it’s
also a bit fun. How much hunger can I tolerate? How much joy can I withhold? What a perverse
pleasure, to be in charge of your own pain.
My extreme dieting became a power struggle with my mother, just like the extreme amount of Wet
N Wild makeup I wore or the extreme number of sitcoms I watched every afternoon. I was the dish
thrower in our house now. The good part about weight obsession, though, is how it bonded me with
other girls. Quite a few of us were sweating in unitards by then. Two of my friends told me about
lying in bed one afternoon in their bathing suits, circling trouble spots on each other’s body with a
permanent marker. And when I heard that story, I thought: That is love.