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| A picture of me. 100% Katie Berger. 2008. |
Cracks.
You attempt to draw road maps back to the inciting action of
your self-destruction, your therapist handing you the necessary sketching
tools. Surely there must be one great
moment of trauma. One villain forcing
your hand and starving your mind.
You meticulously unpack suitcase after suitcase of emotional
baggage. Sorting through memories
instead of sleeping. Searching
desperately for a cause. Because if
there’s a cause, there’s an enemy to fight against. If there’s a cause, this will make sense. If there’s a cause, you are once again in
control…the very addiction you are trying to break.
After months of trading one obsession for the other, you
start to realize the ugly, horrifying, truth.
There is no one moment. There is
no one plot twist, one gaping hole in the wall.
There are millions…millions of miniscule moments, looks, words,
questions, feelings…each one contributing to tiny, microscopic cracks in your
confident finish. They span years. The sight of the foreign language scrawled
across your father’s neck from his radiation treatment, which you are unable to
decipher but constantly reminds you that there are things unknown. The buzz in
your brain the first time you throw away your uneaten home-made sandwich after
working through your lunch period, opting instead to perfect your music theory
assignments. The look of shame and panic
on your friend’s face as she shoves spoonful after spoonful of peanut butter
into her mouth, the words “gym tomorrow, gym tomorrow, gym tomorrow”
practically vibrating off of her skin.
The feeling of directors undressing you with their eyes, anxiously
wondering how old you really look, even though you can’t order a glass of
Merlot without being questioned (not that you would anyway). The dozens of times you walked down the
halls, hearing “frail” as the highest of compliments and “sickly” as the
ultimate goal. You steel yourself
against it, having been raised to love yourself, exuding with worth, never
falling prey to peer pressure. But like
any successful brainwashing, repetition is key, and before you know it you are
the unspoken example of emaciation. A
demi-god of deprivation. You hear
whispers and shoot back dirty looks, high on the strange power you’ve
cultivated, forming an addiction to the fact that you are the only one capable
of the self-control they all so desperately yearn for. Forming an addiction to loneliness.
These cracks are countless and
overwhelming. The task of piecing the
broken shards back together seems absolutely impossible. There’s no way you can find them all, let
alone glue them into some semblance of normality. You obsess (because that’s the only thing you
know how to do anymore) over how to perfectly plaster over all of these pesky
cracks, and just like when you discovered the seemingly neverending moments of
destruction, you begin to uncover moments of creation as well. Shockingly, the process is similar because
they are so infinitesimal. The feeling of
your voice soaring above the same notes you were once too weak to sing. The look a stranger gives you when you smile
while passing, their focus on the hope in your eyes, their gaze never wandering
down to your collarbone. The sound of
your coworker casually telling you how pretty you look, after spending and hour
agonizing over the fact that surely your face has swollen to three times its
normal size. The mornings you wake up
free of guilt, your brain buzzing – not from hunger fog, but with ideas. These moments are the dabs of glue making the
process of putting this puzzle back together possible. Piece by piece the shell that was weak enough
to break in the first place is cobbled together to form something that is so
magnificent, so imperfect, so strong.
The bits of broken glass are slowly soldered back together, and when you
step back, you don’t see a wall, a shell, a battlement. You see a glorious stained glass window, and
the light is unabashedly streaming through.
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| Getting there. Piece by piece. |
"Through the cracks our voices rise..."
