Now that I’d resolved this tremendous part of my identity, I finally felt motivated to take the risks required to get to know myself more intimately. This is when I began to tell more substantial lies to my parents, like the time I said I was staying at a friend’s house for the day so I could take an Amtrak to Philadelphia to visit Alex, a girl I had met online, and experiment with her sexually; or the several times I snuck out my bedroom window, or smuggled a girl in through it. It was all pretty harmless, honestly. But it was harmful in the way that each time I told a lie, I reinforced something terrible in my own mind: that I had to keep secrets in order to get what I wanted.
My Sister’s Encounter with Self-Harm
Unbeknownst to me, around the time I discovered I liked girls, my sister had discovered the same thing about herself. In fact, she’d been discreetly fooling around with a girl for a couple of months (I’ll call the girl “Hanna”) and was in the midst of having her heart broken for the very first time. As I found out from my sister later, Hanna was moody, mentally unstable, and perhaps sexually confused. She took Kristy on a lust-filled roller coaster ride only to eventually go back to her boyfriend, leaving Kristy in the dust. The fling ended dramatically and abruptly with Hanna being hospitalized for cutting herself.
The day I found out what Kristy had gone through was the day my mom noticed scabbed streaks of red emerging from Kristy’s long-sleeved shirt and demanded that she roll back her sleeves to expose her forearms. Kristy refused as adamantly as I’d ever heard her refuse anything, but my mom persisted until she finally forced Kristy to reveal her arms. The gasp that came from my mom next was the gasp that changed everything. My sister had cut herself deeply with a box cutter—so deeply, in fact, that she has scars to this day.
Recently, I asked my sister’s permission to include this part of the story in this book and also asked her if she could tell me more. She sent me the following in a text:
“I did it because I was in pain and it didn’t seem like anyone really knew. I was a depressed, closeted homo in love with a very disturbed yet very alluring girl. I did it because I felt trapped. Seeking support around this would have meant ‘coming out’ and I just wasn’t ready for all that yet. I wasn’t even sure yet myself what I was. At the time I was aware that in a sick way I wanted Hanna to find out what I’d done to myself. I wanted her to know how much I cared about her and how hurt I was about her hurting herself. I wanted her to see her own reflection in me. I wanted her to see that perhaps we were more alike than she knew. In a weird way, cutting myself brought me to terms with the level of pain and numbness I was experiencing. The fact that I could harm myself to such an extent and barely feel it was evidence of my suffering, and so was the blood. It was proof of my existence, and so are the scars.”
After my sister’s encounter with self-harm, there was a significant shift in my family’s dynamics. My mother and father, concerned as any parents would be, took every measure they could to prevent Kristy from hurting herself again, from an initial trip to the emergency room to getting Kristy enrolled into psychotherapy. Patronizing doctors and concerned family members asked my sister, “Why would you do this to your precious skin?” Eventually, my mom sought treatment of her own and began seeing a therapist for a time, who I think pushed her to let Kristy and I have more trust and independence. This ultimately led to my mom pulling back and giving Kristy and I more room to grow as individuals.
My sister and I came out as gay a couple of years later, and my parents actually took the news lovingly and well. But still we had this in common: our first notions of romantic love were that it involved things we had to conceal. Euphoria and joy were feelings to be ashamed of, feelings we had to steal.
Chapter 2 MY QUARTER-LIFE CRISIS
-
In this section, I’ll tell you about the events that immediately preceded what I refer to as “my big fat discreet breakdown,” which occurred less than six months into my first year away at college. It was some combination of feeling for the first time like I was free, combined with the pressures of new expectations—social expectations, adult responsibilities, etc.—which I did not yet know how to navigate. All the while I was experiencing this sense of overwhelm, I was also yearning, reaching, searching for something I could not quite put my finger on. And so I challenged everything—my sexuality, my metaphysical body, and my desires—essentially, my entire identity.
Overwhelmed by the Limitless World
The year I turned eighteen, I sought many things—freedom from my social anxiety, control over my feelings and desires, and relief from the pressure to become someone in a world that made little sense to me. In what felt like a very short span of time, I was expected to choose a four-year college, commit to a career path, assume a personality, and assert myself in ways I just wasn’t prepared for. For years, I had mastered the art of being invisible—and now I was expected to be someone? It was too much to ask, it was too much, too soon, and I wanted nothing more than to retreat into a private corner and hide.
The way I see it, when you’re a child, the world is big and that’s okay because it’s far away. When you’re all grown up, the world is smaller and more manageable because you’ve carved your shape into it, so you need only to live in that shape. But when you’re stuck in that awkward space between childhood and adulthood, it’s like being a fly in a windstorm, trying to navigate a limitless sky while gusts of wind blow at you from every direction. I was still trying to get my shit together, far too curious to commit to anything, let alone an identity. I was simply hungry for so many things I could not yet define.
Beginning to Play with My Food
It was around this time that I started to become really curious about my body. Although I wasn’t overweight to begin with (maybe five pounds at most), I saw dieting as an opportunity to escape myself, to distract myself, and to gain some handle of control over the fast-approaching demands of adulthood. I just wanted to feel like I was moving toward something measurable and meaningful without having to actually deal with real life. It was innocent at first. I started replacing cookies and chips with fruit, Melba toast, and other things that tasted like cardboard, which seemed like a commendable thing to do. I bought a couple of diet books from a local thrift store, both from the 1980s, and did my best to consume zero percent fat whenever possible.
The summer I graduated high school, I enrolled in a summer film program at NYU and lived in a dorm room by myself for a month and a half in the West Village of New York City. I had never taken a subway before, I had no idea how to get around, and I felt this enormous sense of possibility combined with loneliness and paralysis. More than anything, I remember not knowing how to feed myself. Nobody’s watching, I kept thinking to myself. Nobody’s watching me at all. That meant I could do, say, or consume whatever I wanted, and there would be no real repercussions aside from those I decided to impose upon myself. Iced coffee for breakfast? Pop tarts for lunch? Sure, if I wanted to. This feeling of being totally on my own was something I had never experienced before in my life, and I had no clue how to fill the void.
It’s a cliché I’m trying to avoid, to color eating disorders as diseases born out of superficiality that erupt in the minds of girls with low self-esteem who read too many issues of CosmoGirl magazine, but I do recall being struck by a particular billboard one evening on my walk back from shooting reels around the city. It was a billboard image of the actress Shannyn Sossamon, who was scrawny and edgy with a protruding collarbone and black eye make up that gave her “raccoon eyes,” and I remember thinking, That. I want to be that. The distinction I need to articulate is that for me, it was not the idea of being scrawny that I romanticized necessarily, but rather the idea of being broken. Scrawny was just part of what it meant to