Sheltering in place with an eating disorder.
*This essay was originally published in the zine, Eighty-Sixed, in 2020.
Being a quarantined pastry chef with an eating disorder has been really hard.
As the world shelters in place, I find myself quarantined at home with my family, lots of food, and lots of downtime. Rationally, I know I am lucky to have a place to stay that’s full of food, an appropriate amount of toilet paper, and parents who don’t ask why I am home, they just ask how long I can stay (with the hopes that the answer is forever). But I am also quarantined with Ed, my eating disorder, and he is making it hard to feel grateful.
Just a few weeks ago, I was working for a James Beard-nominated lady chef in Falls Church, Virginia, and I was feeling really comfortable. After growing up hating my body because it was too tall and too thick, I found a sense of strength in cooking food for others. I could hide amongst the crowd of chefs and easily disguise endless hours of working my body as “passion,” and never be questioned about my food intake because we were all there to feed others, not ourselves. I learned how to manipulate my fear of food into making the best versions of it, and it not only got me promotions and praise, it gave me an essential sense of control. The higher the quality of food that I made and the more hours I spent dedicated to making it, the stronger I felt never eating any of it. I felt safe in my pastry career-nook, hiding my eating disorder in plain sight.
In quarantine, there is no room for me to engage with the little pieces of my eating disorder that I’ve been grasping onto for over ten years, little pieces that my pastry career has never asked me to let go of. I miss being able to skip lunch without anyone questioning me (almost no one stops for lunch when you work in a kitchen). I miss being able to spend extra hours at work on those days when my body dysmorphia tells me that my expanding thighs don’t deserve to sit down. I miss being the head cook in my apartment, preparing two separate meals for my partner and I—one bowl with chicken cooked in butter and a healthy portion of pasta for him, one bowl of chicken cooked in PAM spray with a healthy portion of broccoli for me.
This unforeseeable quarantine planted itself right in the middle of my parents selling their home of twenty years, a home so dedicated to enjoying each others’ company around the kitchen table that it seems designed for this moment of sheltering in place. While my partner tries to settle in with his virtual law school in tow and my parents navigate moving out of this home that they’d prefer to be staying in, I have put myself in charge of their needs. So I watch Netflix's Love is Blind with my mom when she needs a break from packing, and I make bacon, egg, and cheese bagels with my partner, watching him eat his meticulously, trying to savor each moment free of reading or analyzing legal theories. All the while, Ed is there to remind me that I am doing things all wrong, that I am not living up to our agreement. I am caught in a storm of should’s—I should play Scrabble with my parents because they need a break from packing up their lives. I should go run the stairs by the dam for a few hours because I have been so lazy lately. I should eat a cheeseburger because it’s going to raise suspicion if I don’t, and everyone is already stressed out enough. I should eat a plate of roasted cauliflower and broccoli for dinner because I know those are low in calories but make me feel full because of all of the fibrous gas. I feel paralyzed between the two worlds and completely incapable of making my own decisions.
In quarantine, I don’t have my usual set of tricks to deal with Ed. Time is in control of itself. It rushes day to night while I’m lost in endless games of euchre. It turns seconds into minutes as I eat, dragging every bite out so that I can follow the food as it expands my body. Meals these days are hardly ever organized neatly into breakfast, lunch, and dinner, making it impossible to “skip” any of it. My mom, procrastinating the decisions of what to do with the closets full of photos and arguably inconsequential keepsakes, might show up at my desk with a mid-morning chicken salad sandwich to share with me, less of an offer and more of a plea for distraction. My dad, overwhelmed from organizing a move into a new home when we’ve been ordered to stay in the homes we’re in, suggests an afternoon car ride to get out of the house, maybe a pit stop for ice cream from the drive-thru window. Fried eggs with biscuits and bacon gravy are as likely to make appearances at 7am as they are at 7pm because my mom is the chef of the family, and she loves breakfast almost as much as she loves her children. It’s hard not to recognize the beauty of my family and their devotion to enjoying food together, but as someone who’s been hanging onto the last comfortable threads of her eating disorder, it’s also a certain kind of nightmare.
Quarantine is forcing me to stop accommodating my eating disorder and, instead, to face it. When I allowed myself to indulge in a pancake breakfast, I was met with a dozen shouting voices in my head, telling me that each buttery, griddled edge of that pancake is going to resurface on my thighs as dimples, symbols of my gluttony. Every time I had another bite of food that day, even the ungarnished sweet potato and undressed spinach, those voices were there to remind me that I had not earned the right to be eating anything more. There’s no quieting those voices like I usually would, moving my body all day in the kitchen, rolling out extra rolls of wafer cookies to give my jiggling arms a little extra work. I don’t have the privacy to turn the hours that I would have been working into hours lunging around the house’s perimeter, and I”m left asking myself why this desire feels like something to keep private in the first place. I am overcome with remorse for my perceived laziness, overcome with fear that I will start to enjoy this relaxation too much and my body will never recover.
For someone who still thinks she doesn’t deserve to skip yoga and play games with her family because sitting insinuates laziness which insinuates the dreaded “fat” word—quarantine feels hard. For someone who loves her mom’s cheesy chicken casserole in all its canned soup glory but knows the wrath of Ed that will be waiting after eating it—quarantine feels hard. For someone who’s terrified of those moments between slumber and awareness when she almost defies Ed and agrees with her mom to a pancake breakfast—quarantine feels hard. For someone who has been half-assing her recovery for ten years and now feels challenged to finally go all in—quarantine feels hard.
Before this global pandemic interrupted my life, I thought I was close to being rid of my eating disorder. I see now that I’ve just gotten really good at hiding it, building my career into a shielding wall. Instead of challenging Ed, I’ve been making endless bargains with him, little compromises like letting myself eat mayonnaise with my french fries, but then working extra hours without lunch the rest of the week. I have used my time at work to settle my debts, working off anything I have done that Ed has not approved of.
In quarantine, there have been moments when I feel strong for letting myself rest, for eating the cheesy chicken, thoroughly enjoying every gooey bite. At times, I can even admit that it’s hilarious to say I am afraid of cheesy chicken. There have been many more moments, however, when my stomach burns with shame for letting myself indulge. Not being able to satisfy the balance between Ed’s feelings and my own is weighing on me. I am being challenged to face how I treat my body, how I fuel it and how I feel about it. I am forced to consider how I feel, not Ed, when being fed regularly and moved gently, because this quarantine has broken down my wall of work in one clean sweep.
No one knows what post-quarantine is going to look like. I certainly don’t know if my career will be there waiting, and maybe that makes now the perfect time to consider what a life without Ed really feels like. Being forced out of my career has led me to finally address the painful source of my “passion” for baking, to question if it’s all worth holding onto. Even typing this out now feels impossible to me, because the past ten years of my life have been defined by my pastry career and my eating disorder. I know that Ed will continue to remind me that I won’t survive a life without him. It scares me how consumed I am with my eating disorder in this time of stillness. It scares me how, in this time when all of my virtual friends are telling me to take care of myself, I am completely unsure about what that actually looks like for me.
Lately, I feel like I am finally getting to know myself, and when you’ve spent so many years relying on someone else to tell who you are, that feels impossible. But I am also recognizing a new kind of strength when I do something Ed doesn’t like and then ignore his pleas for reconciliation. I am starting to hear my body speak up and request things like leisurely walks to soak up spring’s unreliable warmth, capped with a strawberry shortcake. I am starting to feel my stomach grumble with a little more vigor when I’ve neglected it for several hours while wrapped up in episodes of Tiger King. I guess this time in quarantine might have been exactly what I needed. And I guess I do feel grateful, too, because I really do love that cheesy chicken casserole.
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