Page 58 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

What the starving, purging and drinking had in common was to sever me from my heart, from

the messiness of feelings. It was this I craved most of all.

Having finally depleted my immune system to such a degree that I had no defenses, my body

succumbed to a shock-and-awe attack from Streptococcus A, the bacteria that caused the

necrotizing fasciitis, and put my slow march toward eventual suicide on the fast track. That I

survived is a mystery and a miracle.

Shortly following my release from the hospital, after the surgery that saved my life, I resumed a

cycle of dieting, binging, and purging. And drinking. Having come so close to death, my body

radically and irrevocably changed, one might assume that I woke up, took my great good

fortune to heart, and made different choices. The truth is, I did not. I continued to struggle with

disordered eating for another nine years. It was another eighteen years before I got sober. I

never mourned what the illness had taken from me, never celebrated or gave thanks for my

survival. I got on with it, pushed forward. I moved through the days functionally enough to

acquire some trappings of “success”, and spent my nights in search of “the flat line” – a quiet

state of numbness, a placebo for inner peace. Shutting down was reflexive, like a series of steel

doors slamming shut from the pit of my stomach to the top of my throat and across my chest:

Access Denied. Vulnerability, needing others—these were the hallmarks of the weak and

undisciplinedand were to be avoided at all costs.

Now, nearly twenty-five years after surviving necrotizing fasciitis, and in recovery for the

disordered eating and drinking that made my body an ideal host for the infection, I am beginning

to understand that my illnesses were a microcosm of what is happening in the dominant culture

and on the planet. Dreams have come to weave a story of connection and disconnection that

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