Confessions of a Half-Century-Old Bulimic

By Marilyn M Mesler

This is a funny, sad, exciting, rebellious, and adventurous life story of a Southern small–town girl who just knew there was something out there in life better than being overweight and farming the rest of her life. Plagued throughout life from the age of eighteen with bulimia, a hideous eating disorder, this book documents the various trials she encountered and paths of most resistance she took, all the while battling bulimia, compounded with alcohol, among other devils. There is nothing ordinary about life for this girl who has constant drama and is always trying to figure a way out of some pickle that could have been easily avoided.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644629840

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Confessions of a Half-Century-Old Bulimic

Marilyn M. Mesler

Copyright © 2019 Marilyn M. Mesler

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2019

ISBN 978-1-64462-983-3 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-64462-984-0 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

This book is dedicated to my wonderful father, Daddy, Elton Vernon Raley, who was and is a great source of inspiration and perseverance for my life. Even with all my mistakes, problems, and errors, I believe he would be proud of me to this day.

Elton Vernon Raley

January 29, 1924

July 18, 2010

Chapter 1

A Young Girls Dream

The name says it all, I am a half-century-old bulimic, fifty-four years old to be exact, as I am writing this. I am a living miracle. According to statistics I have seen, the normal life expectancy of a bulimic is eight to ten years. This awful, time-consuming, mind-consuming disease has plagued me since I was eighteen years old. That’s thirty-six years, almost four decades. If the life expectancy is eight to ten years, that means I’ve cheated death four times already. I have lived the lives of four bulimics consecutively. Wow, I didn’t know I had it in me! I don’t! I give all the credit of my survival to the merciful God in heaven above. I’m not sure what plans there are for me or why I have been spared. Most of the time I don’t even like myself, but I feel I need to keep going for some reason.

I am writing this book to share with the world what an interesting life I have lived, all the while I have been battling bulimia. Not to say that being bulimic will give one an interesting life by any means, just to document my struggle.

I was born in Sandersville, a small middle-Georgia town to wonderful parents, the eldest of four children. My father and mother struggled to make a good living for us, utilizing a family farm handed down to my father from his mother. My father also bought a grain elevator to manage, which brought in the bulk of the income. From the time we were able to walk and hold a shovel, we manned the grain elevator and worked the farm, plowing, harrowing, and harvesting the crops, pulling weeds, digging weeds, all by hand. Daddy made homemade tools with which to extract weeds and their roots from the ground and gave us sacks to wear on our bodies to put them in until they were full of foreign material and ready to be dumped into the burn pile. If we were not working by hand, we were on one of several, ancient Farm All or Allis Chalmers tractors tilling the soil, also using outdated combines with which to harvest the crops. This lifestyle continued until we were old enough to go to college, every day after school and all day during the summers—that is, every day but Sunday, which my daddy would stop all work and take us to church without fail. My daddy was a devout Christian of the Southern Baptist denomination.

I believe I started gaining excess weight when I was in the third or fourth grade. I was very aware that I was bigger than most of my classmates. I was very self-conscious about wearing a shirt tucked in because you could see my middle protruding over the belt line. At least with a floppy or blousy shirt, I could cover it up. I rocked along through elementary school leading a rather dull life. I vaguely remember other kids commenting on my weight, being called fatty and other hurtful, snide remarks. I had a couple of good friends in elementary school, so things weren’t unbearable. I certainly didn’t have any boyfriends. The popular thin girls would get an ID bracelet from a boy if he had a crush on her; this was flirting in elementary school. I guess I had finally had enough of being fat, unpopular, and ugly around the summer coming out of the tenth grade. I made up my mind one day to lose the weight and the way I did it was to cut breakfast portions and lunch portions almost in half every day. Then for dinner, or supper as we called it, I would take one or two bites of each dish that was served and then stop. After that, I would go outside and get on my bicycle and ride up and down my street as fast as I could pedal, also riding around the block and around the small town I grew up in. After the bike ride, I would run several laps up and down the street and around the block. As it was beginning to get dark, I would go into my room and do several sit-ups and jumping jacks. In order to get psyched up about this ritual (I didn’t like to do them then, nor do I now like to run or do sit-ups), I would listen to my parents’ classical music on the stereo, dreaming music as I called it. I would float off to exotic fantasy worlds while listening to music from Guy Lombardo, Andy Williams, Ferrante and Teicher, Mantovani, and Claudine Longet, all the while breathing in the exotic and mind-altering fragrances of honeysuckle, tea olive, jasmine, and mimosa blossoms, which were all present in our backyard. Doing this would create a sort of euphoric high or rush, and I would feel like I was on top of the world. I felt like I could do anything I set my mind to or go anywhere in the world or be anyone that I wanted to be. This dreaming ritual was a pretty big part of my life growing up. There wasn’t much else to do in the small town of Sandersville. I remember my daddy telling me one day how he used to watch me as a child out in a field of clover, which we would grow each year on our farm. He said I would take the clover bloom, which is very soft and fuzzy, and rub it all over my face longingly staring out into the distance. He said he fully believed that I was thinking, There has to be something better than this out there!

By the end of the tenth grade summer, I began to see a difference in my appearance not only in size but my face changed. I was actually becoming pretty. The eleventh grade started and I was ready. It seemed like my life changed overnight. I was asked out on dates, something I thought would never happen. I could wear clothes like the other girls and actually look good. My sweet, wonderful father was as excited as I was, constantly praising me for the willpower and stamina to accomplish such a daunting task. He was so proud of me!

I metamorphosed into a different person, and my self-confidence went off the scale, and I actually liked myself. I went from being an introvert to an extrovert. During the eleventh grade, a combination of things directed me to skip the twelfth grade and decide to go directly into college. I hated high school because of the turmoil in the school I was attending. I had extremely high grades in spite of everything. I watched as one of my classmates went to college on an early admissions program, totally skipping the twelfth grade. I made up my mind I was going to do the same and I did. I passed ten hours of math by taking a CLEP test and was enrolled directly into Georgia College in nearby Milledgeville, Georgia, never entering the twelfth grade of high school. This would be the beginning of my bulimic life.

Chapter 2

The College Years

Ientered college at the age of seventeen, never having lived away from my parents and family. I lived in an all-girls dormitory on campus. Now, life was really about to begin for me. I had no restrictions, no curfews, no one telling me to study, wash dishes, go to the farm, or go to the grain elevator. I was in a totally different world from anything I had ever experienced. I loved it! During the first year in college, I made lots of friends and had a most wonderful time. I began dating someone that was really into water skiing, and we and friends would go to the lake and ski and swim every day after class. At the end of the day, everyone would be famished, and we would go to the local McDonald’s for quarter pounders and french fries. This is where I pinpoint the start of the bulimia. I loved hamburgers and fries, but it did not take long to see myself beginning to put on weight. I was enjoying my new life way too much to ever go back to the old one. I’m not really sure about the thought process that led me to start throwing up my food, but I knew that I enjoyed eating and interacting with my friends and did not want to give that up. At the same time, I did not want to go backward and become an overweight, unpopular girl again.

I believe it was as simple as knowing I could still enjoy the lifestyle I had embraced and eat heartily every day and at the same time stay thin by purging my meals, and this was the way I was to live for the next thirty-six years and to the present.

This became an everyday part of my life. It started out with purging one meal a day and progressed over time to two and three meals, and eventually it would manifest itself any number of times daily. I started this to maintain my weight, and over time it became ingrained in my lifestyle and was something I had to do every time I ate. I could no longer eat normal portions and stop with a reasonably full feeling. I had to binge, indulge, and gorge myself so I could enjoy every last bite and then some and, of course, get rid of it before it had a chance to turn into fat.

I was in my first year at Georgia College when this started. I proceeded to live my life just as normally as I could, going to class, going to parties, dating, socializing, etc., all the while, no one knew my little secret. I would find ways to keep everything under wraps, always making excuses for leaving a room to go to a bathroom or even the woods if away from facilities and desperate. Despite all this, I had a wonderful and