The summer I turned 21 I was living in New York City doing an unpaid internship at a major corporation in Times Square, working at an ice cream shop at night, and living with my girlfriend (and her roommates) in a cramped two bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. I was coming off my first year as a student at a private liberal arts college in New England, where I had transferred in as a sophomore after starting my college career at a large urban university. To say I felt out of place at my college would be a significant understatement. I hadn’t left my home country, but it felt like I was in a different world, where things looked vaguely familiar (everyone was human, for example), but somehow incomprehensible. The language everyone was speaking was English, but I didn’t seem to understand how they communicated. People wore clothing, but the clothing was different from mine (much nicer, I thought). People generally seemed as though they were about to appear on stage, or be photographed, or compete in some kind of major athletic competition. My well worn tee-shirts, my too-big Ross Dress for Less pants, and my ridiculously puffy winter parka from the discount coat warehouse seemed inadequate for the dining halls and classrooms of the refined historic campus.
The summer in New York was hot, and sweaty, and crowded. It was 1996, before cell phones (much less smartphones), before widespread internet access, before September 11. The air in New York felt different than anyplace else I’d been. It was comforting, I think, to see so many people, who looked so different from one another, just doing what they needed to do. I loved the part of New York that I saw on the street. I felt a kinship with the blunt, no nonsense, honest attitude I found in the random people I would encounter in the city. New Yorkers at large felt like my people (I thought it was because my dad was from New York and he and my mom lived in the city when they met). But the people in the corporate office building where I was doing my internship were just like the people at my new college. They all seemed to understand the rules of engagement, and I was completely oblivious. I recoiled at the tasks I was asked to do, and somewhat incredulous that they expected me to do them (without pay, no less). Reorganizing filing folders. Typing names and contact information from the executives’ Rolodex (those were still a thing) into the new computer program that promised an easier way to store your address book. Xeroxing receipts for the executives’ expense reports. Moving furniture because one of the VPs wanted his desk to have a better view.
The woman who had “hired” me for the internship was a recent alum of my college and seemed typical of my classmates: she was beautiful, thin, blond, impeccably dressed, formal in her communication, but also smiling and seeming to be enjoying herself continuously. She had an air of sophistication that was both foreign to me and also becoming familiar because it was common amongst the people who surrounded me. I didn’t know what an “air of sophistication” actually was, but it seemed like a good way to describe what these people had that I lacked. I didn’t know how they got it, but over time I would realize they had gone to elite boarding schools, dined in fancy restaurants for most of their lives, traveled extensively throughout the Western world, read books I hadn’t known existed, attended formal parties and events throughout their childhood and adolescence, and spent much of their lives being served by others in various ways.
I felt somehow inadequate, unwelcome, ill prepared, and unsuited for the world I had landed in. I was defective in some way, unable to imitate or emulate these people, the way I had learned to mimic others I had been exposed to at different points in my life, in order to better fit into a particular environment. I couldn’t improve my wardrobe (both for lack of money and for lack of having any idea where to buy or how to select nicer clothing). I don’t think it occurred to me to improve my hair (I didn’t know anybody got their haircut any place other than SuperCuts or someplace similar). I couldn’t easily change my method of communication; it wasn’t like foriegn language immersion where you pick it up with time, it was more like underwater immersion where you can’t breath and start to panic. And so, somehow, I started controlling one of the few things I felt I could control in an effort to improve myself, to make myself more appealing to these people, to try to gain some level of acceptance, and to be less unhappy about who I was. I started restricting my food consumption. My physical appearance was a particular point of embarrassment and shame for me, massively exacerbated by the people I was surrounded with, and food consumption was the only thing related to my appearance that I felt I could alter in some way.
During the previous year at school I hadn’t restricted my eating in terms of calories, but I had developed methods of avoiding consuming food in the presence of other people. The dining hall had become a terrifying social stage, where to enter at a normal dinner hour (6:00-7:30 PM) would be to face crowds of joyful friends eating together at the large tables that had no room for me. The excruciating pain of sitting in the one open seat I could find, at a table full of people who were friends with one another (but not with me), enduring the way they would all visibly recoil as I intruded, and the embarrassment of all of them getting up to leave shortly after I sat down, was too much to bear. And so I had taken to eating rapidly the moment the dining hall opened at 5:00 PM, sneaking out several pieces of fruit for when I got hungry later. I kept bread and peanut butter in my room to avoid having to go to the dining hall for lunch. And for breakfast, I pretended to be in too much of a hurry to sit, making due by grabbing a bagel and eating it cold and plain as I walked to class.
But something changed that summer in New York. I started to get a weird satisfaction from developing an awareness of everything I consumed, and meticulously counting it, and controlling the amounts. Raw carrots had become a staple, until I overheard one of the beautiful blond women in the office talking to another about her low sugar diet, and explaining how carrots were so high in sugar that she avoided them completely. So, I switched to celery. And beans. Plain black beans from a can, cold. Rice cakes. Bananas. Apples were my biggest indulgence, and I remained happily ignorant of their sugar content. Before starting my shift at the ice cream shop in the evenings, I would go to the Fairway market down the street and buy two “energy rolls” (delicious, dense, rolls filled with nuts and dried fruit). I knew these were high in calories, but I also knew that I needed something to get through the night. And they looked healthy. Definitely better than a pierogi, or a knish, or one of the other delicious treats that visibly soaked the deli paper it sat on with grease from the melted cheese, seeping oil, or dripping butter.
At the cramped apartment, I didn’t have access to a scale, or even a mirror that I could see more than my face in, but I would look at my reflection in the shop windows that lined every inch of every street as I walked the dozens of blocks between my internship and my night job every evening. I would notice the bulge of my belly protruding above my waist, as if I was pregnant, I would think. As I walked past the restaurants of the Upper West Side, with all their patrons eating and drinking on the sidewalk tables, I would take pride in the fact that I was not eating a meal, and also be amazed at how thin and beautiful they all looked despite the fact that they were eating. I didn’t understand how they did it - this must have been their only meal of the day, I thought. As I observed the people who looked most important and successful, who seemed the most beautiful and confident, I became convinced that food was not actually a necessity, but an indulgence that many people would succumb to out of weakness. I was teaching myself how to be strong. How to build strength from hunger, how to resist temptation.
I wasn’t measuring it, and wasn’t mentally acknowledging it, but by the middle of the summer I had lost 20 or 30 pounds. Nothing improved. I didn’t get on any better in the office - I still didn’t understand how things worked, or accept my station in the invisible hierarchy. I didn’t know that my real job should have been to be nice and pleasant and try to get to know people so that they would be inclined to hire me when I graduated. I didn’t feel better about myself, or notice any positive change in my appearance. I felt continuously more and more inadequate, and persisted in making food the focal point of efforts to make up for my faults. At the ice cream shop, I would scoop cones and cups for people who looked just like my classmates, some of whom even wore tee-shirts with my college name emblazoned on the front. Often those were beautiful women, who, when I handed them their ice cream, would say “This is dinner”, to make sure I understood that while they were about to indulge in an incredibly high calorie treat, it was the only thing they would be consuming for the day (“and lunch”, some would add, if I smiled knowingly).
I recall one young woman who came into the ice cream shop with a group of friends. She was wearing a shirt from my college. As I served her, I asked her if she was an alum. She said yes. I told her I was a student there now, and she looked at me in disbelief. “Wow,” she said. I smiled. “Where do you live?” she asked. I told her the name of the dorm. She seemed skeptical, but also slightly nostalgic. “This is so weird,” her friend said. “I know,” she said. I served them ice cream and they left.
By the end of July, I couldn’t take the relentlessness of the city any more. The stifling absurdness of the internship, the demeaning evening shifts at the ice cream shop, the inability to afford anything the city had to offer, and the endless feeling of inadequacy. My girlfriend had gone home for the rest of the summer, and new, transient roommates had moved into the apartment. Before she left, my girlfriend tried to talk to me about the possibility of breaking up. She was the first girlfriend I had had, and I felt I was unlikely to find another. When she broached the idea that perhaps maintaining our long distance connection was too hard, I had a meltdown and she didn’t bring it up again (I recall curling up in the fetal position on the bed, digging my face into the pillow, and explaining in a childish, sobbing voice that she was the only stable thing I had in my life). I sat down with my boss at the office, the beautiful blond woman who had graduated from my college a year earlier, and told her I had to go home. My dad had cancer, I explained, and I wanted to be with him. It was true that my dad had cancer, but he had had his prostate removed nearly two years earlier and the cancer had been in remission since (he was fine, in other words).
My boss reacted somewhat worse than I had imagined. She acknowledged that my dad having cancer was a big deal, but I sensed she saw through my excuse. She seemed at a loss to comprehend the opportunity I was giving up, and then began to ruminate out loud about how she was going to manage all the tasks I had been doing. “Do you think there is any way I could get another intern at this point in the summer?” she asked her colleague at the next desk. Her colleague shrugged doubtfully. She looked back at me. “I’m so sorry to see you go,” she said. I doubted this was true, but also imagined she was not looking forward to organizing her bosses filing cabinet herself.
When I left New York on an airplane the following week, I felt like I was escaping something. I had lost my sense of self, my understanding of the world, and a good percentage of my body weight. I had lost my ability to enjoy food, or to look at it without imagining what it would do to my body if I consumed it. My eating disorder would get worse before it got better, and for the rest of my life (to date at least) I would continue to have a strained relationship with food, both recognizing its essential nature and withholding it from myself as a way to exert control and assert the strength of my will power.
I’ve been thinking about this time of my life, and my current relationship with food, as I’ve been processing my recent autism diagnosis. How are these things connected? When I think back to the social alienation that led to my disordered eating habits, I feel my undiagnosed autism was clearly the root cause. It wasn’t just that I was from a different socioeconomic class, that I went to public school, or that I was from Out West. I didn’t fit in at college because I was different. In the late 1990s, the general conceptualization of autism was constricted to the Rain Man stereotype - there was no concept of otherwise successful and “functioning” people being neurodivergent. I don’t think there is any way I could have realized that my difference was neurological. So, instead of celebrating my uniqueness, I felt inferior and turned to self loathing. Once you are convinced that there is something wrong with you, that you are inadequate in some way, or that you are fundamentally broken, I’ve come to realize, it’s impossible to think rationally about yourself, to communicate honestly with others, or to achieve any kind of balanced way of being in the world.
And so, I feel my eating disorder was actually a way of coping with my autism. On the rational side, my eating habits aligned with some of my autistic traits - the desire for routine, a meticulous keeping of lists (of what I’d eaten), deep research into nutrition and the qualities of different foods (reading about different foods became a special interest). On the irrational side, strictly controlling my eating, pushing through hunger, exercising to the point of collapse, made me feel like I was doing something - real work - to fix what was wrong with me. The fact that it was completely ineffective didn’t seem to register with me - the entire endeavor was too irrational for me to consider that truth. If anything, becoming grossly skinny and developing eating habits that were bizarre by any standard, made me seem even weirder in the eyes of those around me - especially as a straight man (I suspect the reactions are quite different for women and LGBTQA+ folks).
That summer in New York was just the beginning. In future posts, I’ll reflect on the next phase of my eating disorder and how it was eventually replaced by alcohol.