Caroline Huckeba

Dinner and a Show

The food at the eating disorder clinic reminds me of my elementary school cafeteria—specifically, the part where the food was bad. I take the last bite of my quesadilla and hear it go down with an audible gulp, the kind you hear in cartoons before someone gets hit by an anvil.

“Valentine!”

“Heart!”

“Is it Crazy, Stupid, Love?”

It’s the daily word association movie game—a dinnertime ritual meant to distract us from the emotional landmine that is eating. I didn’t understand it on my first day, a month ago. But I’ve figured it out since then: the point isn’t to win. The point is to stay focused on something other than your own food—or worse, someone else’s. Because here, comparison is as contagious as the flu. The game is a coping mechanism, a kind of therapeutic hypnotism. A way to survive quesadillas.

Meals are supervised and structured. We sit around a large table under Emma’s watchful eye. Emma is one of our therapists—young, blond, and eerily calm. She eats the same food as us, like some sort of undercover cop. We are nine women, aged roughly eighteen to fifty-five, though most of us hover around college age. I’m nineteen.

Most of the other girls have been here for months. I’m still new, relatively speaking. Denial is my default. I tell myself I don’t belong here. That having an eating disorder post–pro-ana Tumblr is cringe. That I’m too self-aware to be sick. That I’m not like them.

Normally, when you start struggling with the disorder, you feel really special and different until you realize twenty-eight million Americans have one. And if you don’t die from it, you become another patient. Three years later, I’ve realized the only thing that makes me special is that I recovered from it and never looked back. But for now, denial is an incredible coping mechanism, and I wield it like a sword.

Then, suddenly—

Sadie bolts from her chair. We got a runner!

Emma calls for another therapist to chase her down. I sit there and look down at the bright full moon of my empty plate. My stomach suddenly feels sore, and I come to a terrible realization: I ate the same meal as Sadie. That very same meal.

If she’s running, should I be running? I don’t feel like running, but maybe I should start preparing for the worst, just in case. My body doesn’t often consume a lot of food, but my brain thinks about consuming food all the time. It’s a tough dynamic.

At my smallest size, inside my skinny body was a fat person waiting to break free. I was convinced that eating a single cracker would lead to some rapid, uncontrollable expansion, like Violet Beauregarde turning into a blueberry in Willy Wonka—a scary-ass scene I would personally constitute as body horror. The science was not on my side, but the paranoia was.

It’s 2022. A month ago, my dad left me here at the Eating Recovery Center in Plano, Texas. This was not my idea. I wasn’t excited about it, but my therapist gave me a choice: either I accept this “incredible opportunity for growth,” or she would drop me as a patient. The way she talked about my behavior, you’d think I had committed tax fraud.

On day one, I stripped in the bathroom for vitals. It felt like airport security designed by people obsessed with numbers: weight, blood pressure, heart rate—maybe even circumference of will to live. My pale, makeup-less face stared back in the mirror—sunken, uneasy. I don’t know how one can fail at an entire gender, but I seem to be giving it my best shot.

Then came the hospital gown.

The logical way to wear a hospital gown is like a robe, right? Curtains closed in the front? So, naturally, I did just that. Turns out, I was wrong. The woman in the bathroom with me quickly let me know.

“But this way is more comfortable,” I argued.

“Well, it’s incorrect,” she countered.

So, to recap: the right way is actually the bad way, where my backside is completely exposed to the world like a sad little Victorian ghost.

After my modesty was officially revoked, I sat in a waiting room—a gray, depressing circle of chairs—until the other girls arrived for group therapy. Most of them were my age, around nineteen, except for one woman who stood out. She later told me she was fifty-five and that this was her twelfth time here. I couldn’t stop thinking about that. Would this be me one day? Still returning, still relapsing, still trying to fix something broken long ago?

In group therapy, a girl talked about how she has accepted that she will always have an eating disorder. Even if she stops the behaviors, it will always live in her brain. A parasite. I started to cry.

But I think the other girls like me. Even though eating disorders trigger competitive behavior between you and everyone around you, we are all aware that our sick minds are always pitting us against each other. They still tolerate me, even though I am extremely regimented, always in a good mood (but in an annoying way), and sometimes highly condescending.

Sample quote:

“I actually love eating now.”

However, I also have a sort of off-the-rocker, maternal quality to me, and people find that comforting—like if Mary Poppins had a nervous breakdown but still tried to hold everything together with a spoonful of sugar and some deeply repressed feelings.

I talk a little in group therapy, mainly saying things that show how out of touch I am about being sick.

Sample quote two:

“I just look in the mirror and tell myself I’m smart and beautiful. I actually think I’m cured.”

The therapist leading group stops calling on me. Looking back, maybe my denial and lies were harmful to share with a group of women who would trade a majority of their lifespan for this disease. And the worst part? I was one of them, and I couldn’t accept it.

As I got to know the girls, I began to see myself in them. Our minds were terrifyingly similar: rigid, obsessive, detached. We were all so trapped in our own heads, unable to consider how others perceived us. None of us knew how to ask questions. We rarely smiled at each other. There was a social blindness to us—an absence of theory of mind.

In hindsight, after being released from the Eating Recovery Center about a year later, I learned in college that those with anorexia nervosa—people who don’t understand they are underweight—have reduced theory of mind network activity, which is the ability to understand that other people have thoughts, feelings, and intentions that may be different from their own.

Eating disorders look different for everyone, but the girls never ask what mine looks like for me, and I never ask about them—even though we all know what each other has. If you have an eating disorder, you have an automatic radar for being able to spot another of your kind. Ours are all different cocktails. I’m anorexic with a splash of bulimia, hold the binge eating.

I was supposed to check into this treatment center a year ago, in 2021, and just didn’t. I didn’t want to leave school. I didn’t want people to know. But I started to realize that the longer I had this disease, the more my body would deteriorate. It was 2022, and I was still sick. I wanted to nip it in the bud—which is something people also say about biting their nails or cracking their knuckles.

At the same time, I loved my sickness. It was a delicious life I would savor until it turned maggoty in my mouth. For a long time, I believed I just had rules that lived in my brain—about food, exercise, time—although I had never made them official by allowing them to be fully formed into thought. To have rules was to have awareness, and I never had any desire to inspect what I was doing. Then, when I started to cough up blood daily, the gears started turning, and I realized that my rules were killing me.

No one tells me how long I’ll be here. Throughout the first month, we do weekly vitals, daily check-ins, yoga, meditations. I’m forced to make and eat a pizza, sculpt things out of butter, and paint. In between these events, I start to realize one girl in the group is probably a pathological liar, and another one is also an alcoholic. Some have attempted suicide. I talk about my eating disorder as if it was a time I was once disgusting.

And then, a month later, I’m at the dinner where Sadie runs out of the institution—the day that really started my recovery. I wanted to run with her, follow her out to the trees outside. I am frozen in my chair, looking around at this table of nine ill women. We are all scared. We are all secretly jealous of Sadie for breaking free to blow chunks in a bush outside. I am sick like her. Different from her, but sick like her. I am here because I am sick. We are sick. I was detaching myself from this support network in favor of a sense of superiority. To believe I’m not sick like them. And for what? How much of this life could be true when it had been built around a lie?

The truth is that I am in denial because I am ashamed. I wish I could take a school exam without having a bulimic relapse. I wish I could go on a carefree vacation and have brunch with friends. But I am trapped here. At a sad dinner at a sad treatment center, sitting across from Sadie’s pushed-out empty chair. The girl a couple seats down from me is still crying, gagging on potato salad, and involuntarily vomiting a bit on her plate.

I am trapped here because I am trapped in my mind. My mind is stuck. Shame keeps us stuck. It is a paralyzing emotion. When we get caught in a shame spiral, we tend to make more of the same kinds of mistakes that caused us shame in the first place. I have an eating disorder because I feel bad, and I trick myself into thinking it makes me feel good, but it just makes me feel worse. It tricks me into thinking that I am in control of my life. But if I were in control, I wouldn’t be here. I’m here because I have let a disorder take over my life.

I look down at the empty plate in front of me. Sitting on top of it are crumbled flakes of tortilla. The door opens, and a different therapist has returned Sadie to us. She stands slightly behind the therapist in the doorway, like a kid hiding behind their mom at a supermarket. Emma, our undercover-cop-that-eats-dinner-with-us therapist, looks relieved.

My mind may be sick, but I am not taking my body down with me—not anymore. Emma meets my eyes, or all of ours.

“Dessert, anyone?”

The question is slightly unsettling now—not only because of Sadie’s prison escape going awry, but because it smells like potato salad vomit.

But the show is coming to a close.

It’s chocolate cake. I don’t just eat it; I try to taste it. It’s warm. Slightly dry. Too sweet. The icing sticks to the roof of my mouth. It doesn’t feel like victory. It feels like presence. It feels like taking a final bow, behind a velvet curtain.

I smile—an instinct. A half-moon curve. I meet Emma’s eyes.

“Check, please.”

The moon is still alive on my lips, and I feel it upturn into smiling eyes.

A girl across from me refills her water. Another girl wipes her eyes. I fold my napkin slowly and place it on my plate.

And for the first time, I don’t rush to stand.

I sit there, letting the weight of my body press into the chair. I let myself feel heavy. I let my smile fall.