Kitty’s true tastes.
Whatever the cause, what I want to know is simple: Will she ever again eat the way she used to?
As October proceeds, Kitty goes to school most days, if not eagerly then at least willingly. She spends part of her sessions alone with Ms. Susan. She seems livelier, more interested in the rest of the world. She still complains about stomach pain every time she eats. But she does eat everything we put in front of her.
One day she comes home from school with news: one of her friends is joining the school gymnastics team, and she wants to join too.
I love seeing her excited about something. One of anorexia’s most devastating consequences is isolation. But gymnastics? Everything in me says no. Gymnastics was part of how Kitty got where she is now—the emphasis on form and line and how she looked in a leotard. The hours of strenuous practice. The constantly sprained ankles and pulled tendons. The stress of competing in meets.
And something more: my sense that the coaches, however pleasant, however good with the girls, saw them as gymnasts rather than children and teens. What I mean is that they saw them as interchangeable elements of the team rather than as whole people. There wasn’t much warmth, despite the fact that most of the girls, including Kitty, spent ten or fifteen hours a week at the gym, spent years training, practicing, and competing.
All last spring, as Kitty began to slide, her coaches never raised the issue of an eating disorder, not to her and not to us. When I called the head coach to tell her that Kitty was in the ICU, I asked if she’d ever known a gymnast with an eating disorder before.
“Of course,” she said. “Unfortunately, it’s fairly common.”
“Did you know Kitty had a problem?”
The coach said cautiously, “I’m not surprised.”
“Why didn’t you say anything to us?”
Did they think we’d dismiss their concerns, get defensive? Did they worry that we’d pull Kitty off the team? Or maybe they didn’t consider it a big deal. Maybe eating disorders are so common in gymnastics, they’re not even worth discussing.
I really wanted to know. But the coach said nothing. “She won’t be coming back,” I said, and hung up.
“Just say you’ll consider the high school team,” begs Kitty now. That night Jamie and I talk it over, going around and around. My gut tells me it would be a mistake to say yes. She’s still way too thin, and emotionally fragile. We haven’t seen as much of the demon in the last ten days or so, but we have seen a lot of tears and anxiety. Jamie argues that maybe gymnastics will motivate her to recover. Plus, it’s hard for him to say no to something she cares about so passionately. It’s hard for me, too; I don’t want to be the killjoy. Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I’m letting my own fear get in the way of her recovery. Or maybe the emperor truly has no clothes.
Eventually we come to a compromise: the high school season doesn’t start for another month. We’ll let Kitty go to the gym once or twice a week to practice with her friend, as long as she keeps gaining weight. And we’ll ask Ms. Susan what she thinks of the idea.
Over the next few days, Kitty’s anxiety becomes palpable. At dinner one night, the demon digs in its heels over a plate of chicken Parmesan. Not-Kitty pushes the plate away so it skids into the middle of the table, chicken and buttered noodles flying everywhere. “Why are you doing this to me?” she shouts, her voice rising to an eerie scream, dripping with rage and self-loathing. The demon’s voice is relentless and reptilian, its vocabulary poorly developed but effective. I’ve heard this voice in my own head, though it’s more like me talking to myself—a mean version of me, sometimes a downright cruel me, but still me. Whereas the demon in Kitty seems so other, so different from her.
This concept may not be as bizarre as it sounds. More than thirty years ago, psychologist Julian Jaynes suggested that consciousness is a function of neuroanatomy—specifically, of the corpus callosum, the fibrous band that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain.* His theory was that thousands of years earlier, before the two halves of the brain evolved a connection, they functioned independently. He pointed to the many biblical and literary references to earlier peoples hearing voices or seeing visions, which they