Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [87]
Gail came in for many months. Mostly I encouraged her to talk and write about her pain. As we became acquainted, she talked more about her current life. One of her gay friends was HIV-positive. A girlfriend of hers had been raped. Another friend was using drugs and getting sick.
She developed an emergency plan for those times when she was tempted to burn herself. She would pull out a notebook and write, write, write every painful, angry emotion she was feeling. She needed to get those emotions out of her body and onto a piece of paper.
Some of this writing she later shared with me. She wrote about the snobby girls at her school who teased the poor students. She wrote about the backstabbing and pettiness, the scramble for the right clothes and the right friends. She wrote about the poverty her hard-working parents had faced their entire lives. She wrote about the faces in Somalia, old people freezing in the Bosnian winter, homeless people and Rodney King.
She wrote until the craving to burn herself passed. Sometimes it didn’t and she asked one of her parents to hold her and comfort her until she could sleep. Sometimes she called me and I talked her down. And, of course, sometimes the craving was too strong and she gave in and hurt herself. But this happened less and less as she learned to talk and write about her problems.
It helped that Gail was enjoying her life. She liked the other volunteers and many of the clients at the soup kitchen. The homeless all had stories and the time to tell them. When she saw homeless people on the streets, she often knew their names and stopped to chat. She knew she would be fixing them soup later. Even though her contributions were small, they took the edge off her despair.
By now Gail’s appearance had changed slightly. Her hair was returning and shone a lovely auburn color. The last session we invited her parents to join us.
Shelly said that Gail was laughing again and playing with her younger sisters. The phone was ringing now and she had the most interesting friends. Stephen said that he was pleased that Gail was again working on her art. The tone of her work seemed slightly more optimistic. She had rejoined the land of the living. Gail gave some credit for her changes to therapy, which she compared to spring-cleaning. “You get the dust off everything and sort through stuff. You get to throw a lot of junk away.”
Chapter 9
WORSHIPING THE GODS OF THINNESS
HEIDI (16)
Heidi arrived in my office after gymnastics practice. Blond and pretty, she was dressed in a shiny red-and-white warm-up suit. We talked about gymnastics, which Heidi had been involved in since she was six. At that time, she was selected to train with the university coaches. Now she trained four hours a day, six days a week. She didn’t expect to make an Olympic team, but she anticipated a scholarship to a Big-8 school.
Heidi glowed when she talked about gymnastics, but I noticed her eyes were red and she had a small scar on the index finger of her right hand. (When a hand is repeatedly stuck down the throat, it can be scarred by the acids in the mouth.) I wasn’t surprised when she said she was coming in for help with bulimia.
Heidi said, “I’ve had this problem for two years, but lately it’s affecting my gymnastics. I am too weak, particularly on the vault, which requires strength. It’s hard to concentrate.
“I blame my training for my eating disorder,” Heidi continued. “Our coach has weekly weigh-ins where we count each others’ ribs. If they are hard to count we’re in trouble.”
I clucked in disapproval. Heidi explained that since puberty she had had trouble keeping her weight down. After meals, she was nervous that she’d eaten too much. She counted calories; she was hungry but afraid