Shameful Friendships

Content warning from the editors at The Machine: This piece deals with eating disorders. 

“You need to cover your arms – you're way too skinny,” my best friend said over dinner. I shoveled more peanut sauce over my meal, just so she wouldn't think I was trying to be thin on purpose.

Adrianna was my best friend since moving to town a few years earlier. Or so I thought. She’s not my best friend anymore. Mind you, she’s not even a friend, and that has little to do with the upsetting dinner comment. The rupture didn't even come from me. But I am getting ahead of myself.

I met her because she helped me with my various aches and pains as an athlete. And because I have a mostly dormant, sometimes debilitating, always vulnerable back injury. She got to know my body intimately as one of my treatment specialists. 

”Your ribs are still visible,” she said, after I brought up some recent weight gain. I had mentioned it solely to diffuse her usual judgment before it could be spoken, in vain. In retrospect, I didn’t quite realize how vulnerable and exposed I was every time I lay down on that treatment table, to be inspected, touched, and prodded, because it was the nature of the appointments.

One day I realized she hadn’t gotten in touch for quite a while. And then that while turned into months. I decided to let her take the first step back – I had already texted her more than I normally did earlier that year during yet another episode of my utterly disabling back injury. The messaging really only happened once or twice a day for a couple of weeks, but something in those excuses she sent back, usually much later, about not being one to text much had caused me to worry. Worry that I was overdoing my communication, my neediness. It didn't matter that I was howling in excruciating pain, unable to leave the couch, crawling to the bathroom twice a day, needing to lie down along the way because the shooting sciatica in my numb left leg appeared as though they wanted to stab me to death.

I should have seen the red flag then. What kind of “best” friend makes you worry that you are too needy in an emergency situation like that? I hadn’t felt needy in decades, not since the time an emotionally unavailable non-boyfriend told me so, verbatim, when severe food poisoning had me reduced to crawling on the floor.

That first step back from her never came. Almost half a year in, her birthday rolled around. Torn, I ended up getting a little gift bag together. I wrote a card explaining that it had been painful to lose her friendship. I added that I was slowly starting to feel better. A single sentence to express my emotions without coming across as needy. I worked hard to avoid making it sound like I was blaming her or fishing for a reaction. 

A thank you text came, without an explanation for her disappearance. This breach in our friendship had never happened judging from her reply. Yet, it continued just the same. It felt like the friendship had never happened, and yet she made it sound like it was unchanged, according to her chipper demeanor. It felt like she had never allowed the friendship a name, much like those non-boyfriends that were allergic to any form of labeling of our time spent together.

Back when things were ok, we sometimes went for a run that ended at our favorite Thai restaurant by the boardwalk. On one of those occasions the comments hit particularly hard. According to my “friend”, I definitely had an eating disorder. I had made the mistake of ordering that smothering peanut sauce on the side. It makes you want to devour your entire meal at once just to prove that you’re worthy.

I am athletically built, relatively thin. I'm sometimes thinner than other times because I have an autoimmune disease that flares up here and there. I'm also a runner. Running is my life, my identity. Running turned me into a person alive and connected to my aching and chronically fatigued autoimmune body. A body that finally hurts less, a soul that has stopped its quiet weeping. A body that is not as worn from its disease. Whenever I run, I don't feel sick.

Running is also a lifestyle that not everybody understands. My so-called friend doesn’t have this lifestyle, even though she runs on occasion. I run almost every day, because it’s what I do, because it's who I am. Because it makes me feel normal, energetic, almost like other people.

But I am also someone with an anorexic past. Here, I said it.

I'm very open with my story, because I've long healed from this short episode in my life that happened a full 24 years ago. 

Going through my eating disorder may have shaped the beginnings of who I am today, but it's not who I am today. It broke open the emotional prison I was in at the time, and that allowed me to start on my journey of growth, the healing lasting years and decades. My eating disorder was a mere trigger that opened the floodgates for a much bigger inner world to burst out. That inner world is me, even today. The eating disorder is not. It was a tool that served its course, one that feels foreign today.

But there are people out there who will judge you no matter the life you have now. There are people for whom the past will never leave. There are people who will see themselves in whatever is not the norm in you. 

People of this kind hold on to your past and your imperfections as much as they do to their own. They will see your anorexic past in the miles you run, in that peanut sauce you don't like. They can’t give you any space from that ancient pain because they still feel theirs. They shame and judge you because they feel shame and judgment themselves. 

And I am beginning to realize that Adrianna may have been one of those people.  

I recently returned to her office. The friendship was in the past, and, though challenging, I had taken the time to process it. It took courage and more aches and pain than usual to take the plunge and go see her, but I wasn’t willing to give up the helpful treatment. It had taken me years to find a practitioner that was able to reach the depths of my pain. I wasn’t going to give that up, give up myself. I decided to come back purely as a patient, even if it would take a while for me to feel normal about it all. 

“If anything, you look a lot more… *muscular* now. I was worried that you’re not eating enough.” 

There it was. Again. I lay face down in the cradle of her table, grateful. Because this position allowed me to defend myself. By not responding, by not uttering a word, in telling silence. 

As I lay there, staring at the paper covering the cradle, I realized that I had changed. Adrianna hadn’t though. I wasn’t really all that vulnerable anymore on that treatment table, or anywhere else – she was. She still needed to make those comments about me, I can only assume because she felt shame about herself.

I left the office with my head held high. I sent her a message to not, ever, comment on my weight or the way I looked again.

I never did cover my arms for the wrong reasons like she suggested. This body is the body of a warrior, a woman who has traveled wide and far. Wide and far to heal, to leave the narrow space of judgment and even past abuse behind. This body I'm proud of. This body I love with all I have.

It took me a little while, but I went on to look for the missing piece in my puzzle. Friends who liked to look at the horizon with me. Who looked at the world instead of looking at the other. People who didn't pick on my body, my running, or anything else that made me *me*. I found friends who valued and invested in our connection and were able to give our friendship a name. Friends who knew my supposed neediness was just that, a human being having needs like any other. Finally, at age 41, I found people with whom love came for free, with whom I felt safe. 

I'm loved. I am enough. You're loved. You're enough. You deserve the world.

Wild and free, at last.

—

About The Author

Mona Angéline is an unapologetically vulnerable new writer, artist, athlete, scientist. She honors the creatively unconventional, the authentically "other". She shares her emotions because the world tends to hide theirs. Her work was accepted in Flash Fiction Magazine, Grand Dame Literary, Down in the Dirt, Viridian Door, and Academy of Mind and Heart. She's a regular guest editor for scientific journals. Learn about her musings at creativerunnings.com.