I grew paranoid. I fretted that my friends and colleagues thought I was willfully ravaging my body, and I tried to demonstrate otherwise every chance I got. At restaurants, I made sure to eat heartily regardless of whether I felt hungry. If sweets were offered during meetings—those ever-present birthday cakes!—I made a show of devouring some. Once, after I had grown gaunt enough to prompt a remark that I looked "like Anne Frank," I bought a giant, gooey cinnamon roll, the sort consumed by travelers in Midwestern airports, and polished it off during an editorial meeting. (I'm sure I looked bulimic.) I was behaving like one of those emaciated starlets who gorges on McDonald's for the benefit of the press while claiming a "fast metabolism" between mouthfuls. The irony of my behavior was not lost on me: In my attempts to make clear that I didn't have an eating disorder, I was acting like someone who did.

Why not simply admit I was sick? That, too, seemed a delicate personal matter, and not one for interoffice parsing. In any case, I wouldn't have known what to say; after numerous visits to my internist, I still had no idea what was wrong with me. When I typed "unexplained weight loss" into Google, the scary possibilities floated up: thyroid malfunction, pituitary tumor, lupus, cancer, HIV. If the world was going to believe I was ailing—and who could blame them, as it was disturbingly evident that I was—perhaps anorexia was the best of the many bad disorders to have. The other maladies so terrified me that I didn't even want to think about them. And so you might say that in my unwillingness to speak of my mystery illness, I perpetuated my coworkers' misguided assumptions.

Meanwhile, my body pressed on with its death march toward cadaverousness. I stopped getting my period. At some point, I started to avoid mirrors as aggressively as I had once sought them out. My face looked so drawn that whenever I caught a glimpse of it, Bob Dylan's lyric "the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face" came to mind. Indeed, I felt ghostlike, invisible. If I pulled my hair back, my ears looked enormous. I thought I resembled a hobbit, or some kind of wood nymph or elf.

Every couple of weeks, as I became increasingly ill, I'd visit Dr. F. (I was 23 years old, and it had not yet dawned on me that doctors might be fallible.) And here is where the knee-jerk cultural prejudice I'd been facing—that a skeletal young woman equals a practicing anorexic—ceased to be merely annoying and became troublesome, even dangerous. When his initial exploratory measures failed to arrive at an answer, he neither ordered more tests nor sent me to a specialist—and this even as I continued to drop several pounds a week. Instead, he decided I had an eating disorder, and, if I was interpreting his forbearing tone correctly, that I was a hypochondriac as well. I was causing my problems. I might even be imagining things. I needed to eat.

I can almost understand his failure to listen to me. Anorexics can be a crafty, duplicitous bunch, and I'm sure he assumed I was lying. Plus, eating disorders can wreak havoc on one's system, creating a host of physical symptoms not unlike my complaints (nausea, abdominal pain, fatigue). But why not entertain another possibility? Why discount weight loss as one of the surest signs of illness? Why not even consider that deranged digestion, rather than being the self-induced consequence of some aberrant dietary practice, might itself be a serious problem, a signal flare sent out by a body gone astray?

This Is A Developing Story

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