This isn’t the first treatment center that thought yoga would make me feel more connected to my body, moreinsidemy body. They believe having someone else’s hands on my skin will lead to some kind of breakthrough and I’ll realize thatI take up space;I have borders and edges that can’t be breached.
They always talk aboutmy bodyas though it’s an entity all its own.
Love your body.
Feed your body.
Move your body.
Their words are like a refrain from a song I can’t get out of my head. As though my body is a stray dog found by the side of the road that needs to be cleaned up before it can be adopted by a family who will love it forever. #Proana influencers like to talk about historical figures who were sainted for starvation. Of heroes who went on hunger strikes to protest an unjust occupation, a war, a right deprived. Suffragettes would pin ribbons to their chests, proudly announcing to the world for how many days they’d gone without. But no one holds people like me as heroic.
I wonder if my fit, cheerful yoga teacher knows that most theories about eating disorders (they’re all about control, they’re exclusive to rich white women…, etc) have been debunked, or at least augmented by other explanations. Some research suggests they may in fact be neurobiological, which means all those therapists who complained about ED patients, calling us “difficult,” really ought to apologize, because we weren’t beingdifficultwhen we resisted treatment at odds with out brains’ wiring.
After yoga, I pick up my phone and see a text from my grandmother:I love you.I write back,I love you, too.
And another message from Jonah:Take all the space you need. Just glad you’re okay.
Okayis a vague term, covering a multitude of scenarios Jonah (who grew up in a house both his parents called home, with Christmas dinner and family vacations to Disney World) can’t possibly imagine. Not even after everything that happened.
Leonie and Dr. Mackenzie think I need to put on five, ten, fifteen pounds to be healthy. If I weretrulyhealthy, I would be twenty-five pounds heavier right now, at least, but they don’t know that.
No one does, except Jonah.
16Amelia Blue
After Georgia died, Naomi boxed up everything that had belonged to her—clothes, books with bent spines in whose margins she’d scribbled, unsigned contracts, forgotten makeup. I was finishing my senior year at boarding school, and by the time I got home, all traces of my mother were stacked in plastic bins in the garage. Naomi told me she’d tried to organize everything, but it had proved impossible. Even when Georgia was alive, Naomi and I had never been able to make sense of how she arranged her belongings.
This past June, when I moved back to the house in Laurel Canyon after graduate school, I opened the boxes and bins for the first time. The contents still smelled like my mother, her unmistakable scent of hair dye and patchouli, sweat and ink wafting from the bins like smoke.
It was almost impossible to distinguish what should have been trash from what was worth keeping, but eventually I found the notebook that’s in my hands now. I’ve read its pages so many times over the past six months that I can practically recite the contents, but I couldn’t imagine leaving it behind when I came here.
The first page reads,Twelve days sober. My sponsor says I should keep track.
The next day:Someone recognized me at the meeting last night. Up till now, everyone has at least pretended not to.(Pretendedis underlined twice.)
I had to read those sentences three times before I understood them, my mother’s words like a song that I couldn’t get out of my head even though I didn’t understand the lyrics, as foreign as the Hebrew prayers Naomi taught me to say at Georgia’s funeral without telling me what they meant.
Finally, I understood: I’d found my mother’s sober diary, written, according to the dates scrawled at the top of each page, over the year before she died. Georgia had a sponsor. She was, apparently, going to AA meetings.
Eighteen days and the house is quiet with Amelia Blue away at school. Sometimes I forget Mom is here, she skulks around like a mouse. Not that any sounds Amelia Blue makes when she comes home are directed toward me. I can’t remember the last time she spoke to me.
I didn’t think she’d noticed when I stopped talking to her. She talked enough for the both of us.
Day 23: Sobriety is sneaky. It holds open the door for all the thoughts you tried to keep outside.
I stare at the page like I think more information will magically appear. But Georgia didn’t bother explaining what thoughts she meant.
Thoughts about me? About my wrong nose, wrong hair, even the wrong disorder? All the reasons Georgia let Naomi raise me rather than doing it herself.
I read the diary for what must be the thousandth time. It’s a plain spiral notebook, nothing like the journals I kept as a little kid—bound books that Naomi gave me with locks and keys, inspirational quotes on every other page, pictures of teddy bears and puppies dancing across the front covers. Scattered in between Georgia’s day-by-day count are nonsense words and phrases, like sometimes she ran out of thoughts about sobriety and simply wrote whatever came to mind just to have something to do.
The final entry is dated January 2, 2015. Two weeks before she came here.
Day 203: New Year, still sober.
It’s possible, of course, that the words in the journal aren’t true. Georgia lied like she breathed. No reason to think she didn’t lie to herself, too. We tell ourselves stories in order to live and all that.
I close the diary and scroll through my phone. But instead of a break from Georgia, my social media feed is full of posts about her, the algorithm encouraged by the rabbit hole I went down last night. There’s a video of my mother performing at some dive bar in Downtown Manhattan, black tights ripped at the knees, pink lipstick smeared across her face. Another post shows a series of photos of my parents together with the caption “Is this the most nineties couple ever?” In the comments, people argue whether my parents are nearly as iconic as Kurt and Courtney or Richard and Cindy or Brad and Jen.
