Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

BINGE
One afternoon, I got an urge to pull into the drive-through at Jack in the Box. Do I like Jack in the
Box? Not particularly. But the urge snagged me, and before I could unsnag myself, I was on the
conveyor belt that led to the drive-through’s metal box, where I ordered my carb explosion. What I
noticed—as I idled there with a queasy feeling like I was getting away with something—was that
absolutely no one was going to stop me. The bored teenager wearing a headset did not ask “Are you
sure about this, ma’am?” The woman who swiped my credit card did not raise an eyebrow, because
she had seen so much worse. There were precious few barricades between my stupid, fleeting
impulse and the moment I sat on the floor of my living room with ketchup covering my fingers and
chin.
“I just ate an Ultimate Cheeseburger,” I told my friend Mary. She lived around the corner from me,
and she had been a champion binge eater most of her life.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “Did you get the curly fries, too?”
“I can’t believe you even asked that.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie. Of course you did.”
When addiction lives in you, it sprouts many vines. For the first year after I quit drinking, I refused
to worry about food. I would do whatever it took to give up alcohol, which included a typical
dependency swap: Trade booze for smokes. Or trade smokes for Double Stuf Oreos. Or Nutella. Or
Double Stuf Oreos with Nutella.
A year and a half of drinking nothing should’ve made me proud. But a year and a half of eating
everything in my path had left me defeated and ashamed.
“I think I need to go on a diet,” I told Mary, lobbing the words into the air before I could snatch
them back. Diet: the toxic buzzword of body dysmorphia. Diet: those things destined to fail.
In the old days, a heroine in search of happiness lost weight and found a prince. But current
wisdom dictates a heroine in search of happiness should ditch the prince, skip the diet—and gain
acceptance. Stop changing yourself to please the world and start finding happiness within. That’s a
good message, given all the ways women are knocked around by the beauty-industrial complex.
But my problem wasn’t a deficit of acceptance. It was too much. I drank however I wanted, and I
accepted the nights that slipped away from me. I ate however I wanted, and I accepted my body was a
home I’d never want to claim as my own. Sitting on that linoleum floor, surrounded by empty foil
wrappers and my own disgust, I wondered if I could use a little less acceptance around here. Or, to
be more precise: Acceptance was only half the equation. The other half was determining what was
unacceptable—and changing that.
I DON’T KNOW when I stopped taking care of myself. In college, Anna used to foist vegetables on me,
which was exactly what my mother used to do when I was a child. They were both healthy eaters,
who saw beauty in nature’s bounty, and I was a hedonist who liked slapping away her broccoli. I had