My Friend Mia

By Kelly Fleming

My Friend Mia is a journey inside the mind of Abby, a college student who has struggled with eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and anxiety for years. Follow alongside Abby as she takes you back to the places in her childhood where her disorder developed and in her higher education, wherein by studying political philosophy, she finds the tools from an unlikely place to begin a recovery processthat is, what Immanuel Kant would call an infinite process of gradual approximation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abbott Press
• Release date: Jul 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781458221872

Kelly Fleming

After finishing her education at Rutgers University in the winter of 2017, Kelly Fleming has two Bachelors Degrees, one in journalism and media studies and one in political science. She currently works in New York City in media and entertainment. Fleming has a passion for comedy, especially political satire, that was sparked by her previous internship at The Daily Show and the semester of college she lived and interned in in Washington, DC.

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CHAPTER 1

Pandora’s Box

Pandora’s Box looks different to everyone. If you’re a smoking addict, it is the first cigarette that your friend offers you in the back of a school parking lot. If you’re an alcoholic, it was the right drink at the right time: the start of a terrifying, cyclical, time-consuming relationship.

For me, Pandora’s Box was a blue push-pen.

I used to hate my name. Not because Abby is a bad name, but because as a chubby child in a classroom, it was difficult to forget how it rhymed with the word flabby.

Flabby Abby, they would say. I could count my age on one hand before I was well-aware of how it rhymed with the word flabby. But I was eleven years old when I opened Pandora’s Box. It was a long day at school, of the pretty, popular girl-bullies and long division and all the stresses you’d imagine an eleven-year old might have. On these days, it was my comfort to come home and be alone.

And I was alone until I reached into the breadbox, where there were Twinkies and Cheez-its, and I was lonely until I peered into the freezer, where the Good Humor had been waiting for me all day. I will tell you that food was my friend at these times, and perhaps this might also demonstrate my failure to understand what friendship even is.

As a child in a home with two full-time working, too-pressed-for time parents, there was no room to fret about food. I grew up eating whatever I wanted to. I grew up eating whenever I wanted to. This freedom would not have been so detrimental if I didn’t want to eat everything, all the time. By the sixth grade, I was the most pitiful version of myself, overweight and unhappy, certain that it would always be that way and absolutely haunted by that prospect.

It is an incredible shame that we underestimate the understanding of children, we think that because they do not yet have an ability to articulate their own interpretation of their surroundings that they do not understand their surroundings, but this is a grave mistake because as a child I understood my surroundings, I expected to become what everyone else seemed to expect me to become, the same overweight and unhappy adult, and even at this age I understood this and wanted to change it, but also understood my surroundings telling me that this was out of my control.

The house was fully stocked with sweets, always fully stocked with sweets. The house was fully stocked with sweets and completely barren of people at the same time every day after school, and here where I was alone and I was pigging out I could enjoy as many as I wanted. (I found this gorging somehow helped me forget about the popular girls who made fun of me all the time). I knew that I was too big for my age but at the same time I knew that I would forget how much that upset me as soon as I bit into the ice cream bars in that gigantic freezer that we had.

In my hand was that blue push-pen, which I fidgeted with as I tried to write my homework. "Damn you, long division!" I thought.

In my stomach swirled the thousands of calories that I had just consumed, and alone I sat on the couch accompanied by the Tyra Banks show. (We didn’t have cable).

These two things were my biggest comfort, solitude and sweets. The only thing that calmed me more than food was being alone and having all the food in the house to myself. And right at the vertex of these two things, that was where I met Mia. The second that I got up from the couch and went into the bathroom, peering over the white porcelain toilet bowl.

I had no idea how much time I was about to spend in this position, crouched with my face over a toilet bowl, over the next decade. At that second I took that pen and made it grace the back of my throat, at that second, at the age of eleven and a half, I discovered the wonders of the human gag reflex as everything I had just gorged on came rushing straight back up. Ah, yes, Pandora’s Box. Had I just opened Pandora’s Box?

I stood up and wiped the corners of my mouth and wiped my hands, gazing at myself in the mirror. My thick brown hair was tied up in a ponytail and I was wearing a big green t-shirt. Size Large. And there I was, standing there with an empty stomach but a chubby stomach. Chubby and empty, chubby and empty, oh how strange it would be to spend the next years feeling both chubby and empty simultaneously.

At that second Mia stood, peered behind me in the mirror and smiled, because she knew she had me. Mia, oh, Mia. My friend, Mia, who grew to fit her full name, (buli-Mia) as our relationship ensued. She made me feel brilliant. I was certain that I was the first in my class to make this incredible dieting breakthrough, at only eleven I considered myself to be the class-dieting entrepreneur, certain that Mia would take me in all my early disappointment, in the face of my daunting future, and make me better in every way.

What had I just begun? As much as I felt that I had made this discovery, there was a part of me that also felt that this was bound to happen, that Mia and I were destined to meet each other. Over the years, our friendship certainly developed and our personalities became so intertwined that sometimes I still try to distinguish between the two of us, disorder and me, and it is difficult. She rubs off on you, Mia does, especially over the decade as disorder grew and became, at times, my closest comfort and only friend. Mia and I have a history, a history that I couldn’t possibly erase or undo with some cognitive practices, because to do so would be to erase my own memories where disorder and the life that it infects are inseparable.

Yes, truly and brutally difficult to erase the patterns of behavior from mine when I have willingly picked up so many of her patterns of behavior over the years. Mia made me think that I could not just have my cake and eat it too, but that I could (quite literally) have all the cake that I wanted and eat it until it made me sick, then she would come, yes, Mia would come and erase all the caloric damage that a thousand cakes could cause with just a few fingers, just lodged down my throat.

You may think you know disorder, that you can understand disorder, read it and dismantle it through the various cognitive practices that have been recommended to me over the past decade. Oh, man, do I have some bones to pick with cognitive behavioral therapy. But please, if you do not really know Mia, then do not try to.

Mia is a disease cleverer than that. She is more ferocious than that. Perhaps this is why I found solace in her, because it is something that we had in common, our tendency to be grossly underestimated by the people around us, us clever monsters trying desperately to pierce through people’s preconceived notions about us, about me and about Mia.

For all those who befriend Mia you know the place that you’ve reserved for disorder in your life and the prospect of losing her as a friend is as daunting as the prospect of living with her disorder forever. Mia is not only the mechanics of disorder, she is the entity that embodies it and breathes it into existence, and no cognitive behavioral therapist who understands the mechanics of an eating disorder can treat it unless he or she understands, knows, my friend Mia.

Now come away with me as I introduce you to my friend Mia, our long-term relationship, our intense love affair, and the rocky path that led to a wonderful and devastating breakup.

CHAPTER 2

Meeting Mia

I tried to diet many times before. I was only eleven and my relationship with food was so dramatic, worthy of a bad remake of Pretty Little Liars but at the end I was the only liar. And I wasn’t pretty or little.

It was only a matter of time before I would meet Mia. My short life had known many week-long crash diets and daunting trips to the doctor’s office, where I was told that I needed to lose weight twice a year and spent two weeks crying about it afterwards. It was a matter of time before my abundance of self-hatred and lack of self-awareness would snowball into complete and utter disorder, yet snowballing under the watch of all the adults in my life who did not look down to see the storm that had been brewing right under their perched noses. As a matter of fact, it often seemed that the adults in my life completely turned their heads away from this storm, to avoid the debris that might come flying back in their faces.

Mia and I became friends in an instant. This could be it, I thought, the dieting remedy of my lifetime. Well, it certainly developed into a lifetime, but this dieting remedy would quickly create problems and by the time that some problems were solved new ones were created and the whole time Mia was there, holding my hair and patting my back as I flushed hundreds of thousands of calories down the pipes.

I had friends in school, sure, but I never fit in with them because they were all dainty and undeveloped and I was just…different. I was just so awkward. God damnit, I was awkward before it was cute to be awkward, the cringeworthy sort of awkwardness that you don’t even feel sorry for. That was me, the nine-year old with love handles and tits, crying in the Limited Too dressing room while scrawny little blonde girls racked up daddy’s credit card bill, hands filled with sequined tops and pom-pom hair ties.

Funny, this doesn’t change.

Don’t worry I don’t shop at Limited Too anymore (Come to think of it, I recall doing more crying in that store than shopping), but at any moment when I began to feel insecure it also seemed as if I was surrounded by a swarm of girls who were much prettier, with better hair and a confidence that I never seemed to have.

I was awkward in the classroom, the third grader who filled notebooks with poetry and spent recess at the desk, drawing pictures of clothes and shoes and cartoons. That was me, the awkward sixth grader who broke a foot stool in front of her entire class during a science experiment because she was too heavy for the goddamn thing, much to the surprise of the teacher and the entertainment of the entire class. I felt like some version of Humpty Dumpty when that happened, breaking a stool and falling down into the awkward stunned silence of my classmates and teacher. Well, if you took out one of those two names and replaced it with frumpy or dumpy, or what I was called most often growing up, chunky.

Hello, my name is Frumpy-no dumpy- Chunky Dumpty. Nice to meet you.

I was different and I knew it when I was just a toddler. I was bigger than other girls. Bigger. Fatter. Chubby? Developed? I don’t know, you choose which word, because by the time that I was in the first grade, I had been described as all four of them. Maybe at first I was different because I was born and raised that way, born and raised feeling different from my parents and siblings, but soon after I met Mia I was different because I was becoming ill.

I learned to only eat only when I was home alone, after years of awkward middle school and high school lunch periods. Being home alone was my favorite. I remember the weekend trips that my parents would take to go grocery shopping and to go look at furniture, my brother away at a wrestling match, my sister off at a friend’s house.

Mia and I had the whole kitchen to ourselves most afternoons, when I could binge and purge at my heart’s desire. And the kitchen was where our friendship blossomed and where I would forget about everything that made me feel so…different. It was much easier to forget about how awkward I was when I was slumped in front of the television with a bag of Cheez-its.

You’re confused now, I know. Perhaps I should slow down and start off from the beginning. It’s like that feeling when you’re in a new group of people trying to introduce yourself, trying to give the most detailed bio possible but withholding those unwanted details that make people want to barf. Well, unfortunately mine has a lot of barfing in it. Where do I begin?

Let me break the ice. Everyone’s got a vice. Everyone’s got insecurities, and sometimes they intertwine and we find ourselves in the death cycle of padding our insecurities with our vice, wrapping ourselves in the gauze of a bad habit. The first thing I knew about myself was that I felt different. We all feel that we are different, but when feel that we are different because we are flawed, then this makes us want to retreat to a cozier place where we can nestle and forget about what’s going on outside. And sometimes, this cozier place is only cozy until it tightens its grip on you and then months down the road you’re living in complete, unforgiving isolation.

With that said, we strive to understand the greater implications of mental illness. The most we have seemed to find, however, is that mental illness is too misunderstood, largely undiscovered because it is uncomfortable and the mainstream discussion is always missing its own cornerstone, the brutally honest narrative of the individuals affected by it. We want to understand these greater social implications, the ways in which eating disorders, addiction, depression affect young men and women as they develop, but we fail to pair this with a narrative that unapologetically holds our society and ourselves accountable for it. As I surrender my friendship with Mia, almost eleven years later, I can finally see a story, rising to the surface after it was gasping for air all this time.

CHAPTER 3

Family

Family.

The word alone carries with it a complicated duality of connotation but it must be examined before we delve into the narrative of my friendship with Mia. Family is the best example, in my experience, of a force that can drive you so far into disease and somehow be so rooted in the recovery process. Relationships evolve, emerge, and deteriorate.

Then again, sometimes familial ties are better when they are severed and strengthened again, this time when you know how to tie the knot properly. Growing up, I understood family to be a multifaceted being, pushing and pulling and contorting my self-image.

My mom always believed that we choose our family before we are born, like there is a menu somewhere in heaven and we place our order with an angel-waitress before heading off…and I took the special, a sister and a brother, the three of us all smothered in piping hot Catholic guilt. But then we arrive and we grow up and our family is not the vision that we, perhaps, prematurely drafted. We look at our families, dissatisfied, and cry, this isn’t what I ordered!

But if we did choose our family before we were born, then at least there is still a purpose for us to serve in whatever type of family unit you’ve chosen. Some of us are meant to live up to our parents’ standards. Some of us are meant to hold them to theirs. And the two deepest wounds we have are always given to us by family. Guilt. Shame. The people who are closest to us, genetically, have the most power to make us feel such guilt and shame.

Guilt. Oh, guilt. Human guilt is capitalized on far too often, and too often those who actually love us but who have us bound by ropes of guilt. But we feel guilty because sometimes we are only loved under specific conditions that we will always fail to meet. In my opinion guilt is the most powerful motivator of mankind. People are not only moved by guilt but blinded by it, beaten by it, and then swept away in its undercurrent, drifting thousands of miles offshore. The worst part about guilt? That