How to Disappear Completely by Kelsey Osgood

Author:Kelsey Osgood [OSGOOD, KELSEY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000; PSY011000 BIO026000; BIO022000
ISBN: 9781468308464
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2013-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

Lori, not surprisingly, oscillated between ecstasy at being deemed an “excellent case” and fear that she was “a pretty bad example.” She refused to eat because she wanted to make sure that she lived up to her role. In the end, her doctor decided not to go through with the project. His reasoning? “He felt I got too excited about it, and it would just make me feel good about being emaciated.

“‘But I’m an excellent case!’ I said, then Dr. Gold said this was exactly why he wouldn’t film me after all.”

New Age lovers of expression and denouncers of shame might call me severe, but I believe that Dr. Gold made the right choice. He recognized that transforming Lori into a paradigm had an immediately negative effect on her psyche and, subsequently, her behavior.

Where is the Renfrew Center’s Dr. Gold? Why didn’t anyone there consider this possibility? Or at least recognize the fact that such a public announcement of illness is bound to produce ambivalence on the part of the anorexic, whose usual reaction to ambivalence is to force him- or herself to feel only one way, to grasp control—aka engage in eating-disordered behaviors?

When I was a freshman at Columbia University, I received a call from a producer of MTV’s reality television show True Life, which highlighted issues affecting adolescents and young adults (sexuality, relationships, addiction, depression, etc.). I had reached out first by answering an ad on an eating disorders support website looking for people willing to participate in a short documentary. My motivation for doing so was multifaceted, but essentially boiled down to my hope that maybe if I proved my anorexia (to myself and to others), I could accept it as real and let it go. I was seduced by the prospect of telling my story. This was a familiar endeavor for me, the pursuit of some ephemeral legitimizing factor, clutching at moments that presented the possibility of validation, which always faded or were negated in the end. (It would take me many years after that to realize that all this was an intellectual, highly sophisticated ruse on the part of my anorexia to procrastinate beginning the healing process, to get me to lose just one more pound.)

The producer and I spoke a number of times. She was interested in my current plight, which was that the staff at Schneider Children’s Hospital, a division of Long Island Jewish, was considering transferring me to another hospital or kicking me out of the program because I wasn’t gaining any weight. (Oh, the suspense. Will she pull it together? Will she eat her hard-boiled eggs? Will she survive?) Finally, the producer told me she wanted to send a cameraperson to film me while I went about my daily activities. I panicked. My first thought: they are going see that you look totally normal, fat, even, and turn the car around. You won’t compare to the other subjects, all bony, perfect for the angle-loving eyes of a camera. They’ll curse a day of lost filming.

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