My anorexia went by different names: perfectionist, prude, anxious, introverted, bitch, skinny bitch, wants boys to like her, wants boys not to like her, overly sensitive, infected, sick. Riddled with a parasite.

But we were only able to draw blood for the last one, so we did.

My father drove me to the appointment where we would determine what to do with the tapeworm in my stomach, the one that, in all likelihood, was not real. I’d be lying if I told you I remember what we talked about on the way there; I don’t. I didn’t talk much during high school, unless “talking” was staying up late on instant messenger flirting with boys with acne who said: sup. In the car, I pressed my face to the window, let the sun warm my skin. I was always trying, in those little ways, to feel pretty. It was spring and I wanted to sprawl on the grass beside our house.

Besides, I didn’t think I was sick, or “anorexic,” or not eating enough—I thought I was dieting, like everyone else. And after a while, eating less felt comfortable, normal, safe. The less I ate, the less I wanted, until my body became … less. There was nothing bold or bright or celebrity about my eating disorder. I hardly noticed it myself, until my thinness migrated from admirable to somewhat concerning to red alert: waste of a girl. These shifts occurred quickly, seemingly overnight.

And I could explain none of it. I couldn’t explain any of my desires or behaviors in a way that made sense. I was starving myself and I didn’t know why.

It took a while for my family to admit that anything was wrong. There were fights at the top of the stairwell: “Are you doing this for attention?”

There were the family dinners where everyone stared at me picking from my plate but said nothing. There were words like withdrawn, thin, sick, and then—tapeworm.

We repeated that one. Tapeworm.

Practically unheard of in our native New England, or in the country at all. The CDC reports that fewer than 1,000 people are infected in the United States a year. But the idea that something had taken a hold of me from the inside was too compelling, and too convenient. If proven correct, it would mean that none of this was my fault. It would mean that we could extract the intruder, and leave the daughter intact.

The horror of the experience would be followed by divine redemption: cleanness.

But mental illness can’t be scraped out.

In the waiting room, Dad and I sat with runny-nosed toddlers and wheezing ten-year-olds, and I thought, I’m not a kid anymore; why am I here?—even though a little part of me knew why.

Dad crossed his legs and folded his hands, maintaining a convincing appearance, as always, of composure. Every magazine on the table was old and Christmas-themed, covered in snowflakes, velvet, and pine. The pages were slightly sticky. I read an article about Martha Stewart baking cookies.

When they called my name, Dad asked if I wanted him to come in with me, and I wished I could have said yes. My father, who fixes things, who has saved countless baby birds from the hot Texas sun, who once literally rescued a couple from their sinking sailboat. But I didn’t want him to come in. I was scared that if he saw the number on the scale, he’d break.

The nurse called my name again, gesturing to the open door. It was a portal I didn’t want to enter. They were going to try to get it out of me, whatever it was, this thing that felt like a secret, this thing that made me feel good, and powerful, and also ashamed.

So I did the only thing I could do: I got ready to lie. And it was hardly a lie. At my most anorexic, I really believed I was fine.

I knew what the pediatrician was going to ask me. It was the question everyone asked me, hoping to give me an out, themselves an out, hoping for any explanation other than: mental illness. I was such a good girl, such a good student. As if that inoculated me from ever having problems.

“So, have you been trying to lose weight?” The “so” was there to make it casual. It gave me an opening to press my hand to my chest and say, “Of course not!”

But there was no way to answer the question honestly, because my story had different stories. If I interpreted the question literally, the answer would be yes. But that’s not how it started.

A year earlier, I had decided to get toned. In my mind, “toned” was a girl: a tan girl, in a striped bikini, with abs cut out from her skin that glistened with the sugar of her sweat.

So I told my mother that I wanted a new pair of sneakers, and starting running laps around our house, through our yard. To our neighbors, this probably looked manic. But once, in my child body, when I was alone walking our dog, the mailman stepped out of his truck and asked my name. We lived on a dead-end street—no through-traffic, just a larger, older man and me, linked to an animal nearly twice my weight. I didn’t tell him my name; this was something I had been taught not to do. So he asked for the dog’s name. “Chip,” I told him, “as in chocolate.” He crouched down on the pavement and called it over and over again, fingers snapping—“Come here, Chip”—but he was looking at me.

I turned around and started speed walking home. I was afraid that if I started running, he might chase me, like I’d been told black bears do. So you understand why I needed to run laps around the house.

In my small world, I strove for a small body. I ran in tight circles in my new sneakers and looked at the old trees. Every so often: a flash of my mother’s face above the sink, a mirage of concern and foundation. As a reward, I ate bubblegum-flavored popsicles. Practically no calories, I reminded myself. I found out, though, that everything has calories, and soon I became adept at the calculations. Who knew I could do this so effectively?

I joined the track team. I maintained perfect grades. I still ate—Caesar salads with the dressing on the side, a quarter cup of cereal with no milk. I ate a lot of mustard. Mustard has no calories.

As my bones grew closer to the surface, my vision of the tan, toned girl faded. My body hardened. I had stripped it down to its bare architecture.

Without realizing it, I had started working towards something else— something I could hardly articulate. The hunger became less and less my own, if it was ever mine to begin with. So we named my hunger a parasite: something in me but also not me. If my anorexia has taught me anything, it’s that we always name hunger something else.

I didn’t tell any of this to my doctor, of course. When she asked if I had been trying to lose weight, I said, “No, definitely not. It must be from joining the track team.”

But I knew there was another question underneath her question, the question everyone secretly wanted to ask: how much of this is your fault? And could I possibly answer? I still don’t know if anorexia is something that was done to me or something that I did to myself or something that is done to everyone who lives in a thin-obsessed culture that calls certain foods “clean” and markets hundreds of ways to rid ourselves of “toxins,” where everywhere we look, we find new ways to starve ourselves. I know now that it can be all of these things, but I didn’t know then. I was starving myself and I didn’t know why.

The doctor looked at me just long enough so that it felt uncomfortable. But I smiled back at her and blinked all big like those dolls whose eyes shut when you pick them up too fast. My blood pressure was low, but she credited it to my running. It was the lie that kept on giving.

My doctor was perplexed. I was a good kid—no sex, no drugs, no drinking, straight As. And apparently in good mental spirits (starving, paradoxically, comes with surges of adrenaline). It was hard to pin down what exactly was sick about me if you, too, participated in the fantasy that I had accidentally lost a fifth of my body weight in less than a year. But perhaps that’s easy to ignore. I was a skinny girl in honors classes. A role model.

When my doctor signed off on the blood test to see if I had a tapeworm, no one cast a sideways glance.

The white room was readied for me with a bag hanging by the side of the bed that would collect my hopefully tainted blood. It was more believable to a room full of adults and medical professionals that I had an incredibly rare, New-England-indigenous parasite feeding off of my flesh than that I, like millions of other people, had decided that something was wrong with my body and found a makeshift way to fix it.

I thought of my body like a spill; I had to contain the mess. I worked hard. I had the discipline and enthusiasm of a magazine cover in the grocery store. You can do it! Fit for the summer! Eat less—and stay full! I simply took this ethos to its logical conclusion.

Sometimes I wonder what started the panic. At what pound? At what clothing size? Some days I got compliments—I fit into every outfit, the magazines said I was right. And other days I was wrong, all wrong.

The way that I got my body revealed the violence of its production. It showed the bones underneath the brightly-colored swimsuits and the hunger pangs after the happy plates of carrots. It made us all cringe.

If I had managed to stay on the edge—that fine edge of thin but pretty, thin but with a little ass—would we have thought I was sick at all? But there was always my mind—my neuroticism, my obsession, my ick.

I sat on the crinkly-papered chair, wrists up, staring at the cold blue rivers underneath my skin, waiting for my father to join me. Despite everything, I wanted the doctor to be right. I wanted a worm to slither up the plastic tubing, and into the blood tube. I wanted to watch it die right there. If something was wrong with me, I wanted to see it. When I looked in the mirror, I saw nothing. I saw the world, passing through me.

Everyone was convinced that I was okay, other than the one messy thing that was not okay. Maybe if I imagined with them, I would be convinced, too.

I still don’t like going to the doctor’s office.

I didn’t want to go to a gynecology appointment two years ago even though my vagina was on fire and I needed antibiotics. I didn’t want to go because I knew I would have to be weighed. I have put off finding a general physician for the same reason.

I’d cast all scales from my apartment years ago. It was like dumping hard liquor down the sink, like throwing cigarettes into the toilet. But that was in the privacy of my home. It took far longer to say to a nurse, “Can I close my eyes on the scale?”

It took only one nurse saying, “But you’re so skinny already,” for me to leave the appointment crying. It took me one nurse saying, “I wish I had a body like yours,” to allow myself to be angry.

I didn’t go to therapists for years because the first one I’d ever met with had listened to my panic, handed me a prescription, and said I had anxiety. The second therapist I saw told me that I should keep a food diary. A food diary? As in, the obsessive notes I’d been keeping in the backs of notebooks and school planners since high school? My friend, a recovering bulimic, had gone to the same counselor. And she was told the same thing.

I don’t want to go to the doctor’s office because I don’t want to be weighed, measured, or evaluated. I have been weighed, measured, and evaluated for my entire life, and I have never been officially diagnosed with an eating disorder. Society has given me alternate diagnoses: virgin, overworked, type A, skinny bitch, no ass, older child, uptight, lighten up, live a little, great legs, infected, infected, infected.

Tapeworm.

Maybe this last diagnosis was in fact the closest. Maybe there was something inside of me, something nestled in my muscles and surviving off my wastedness. But to admit this would make us all culpable.

Dad sat next to me before the needle went in. He donated blood all the time.

“Does it hurt?” I asked him.

“Not much.”

I still believed him. He’d told me that we would get ice cream afterwards, and I wanted, for the first time in a long time, to be able to do that. I wanted, despite my lying, not to let anyone down.

The nurse asked me if I was ready. What else could I say but yes?

My father’s hand lay in mine. We waited for the tube to fill with color, hoping for the thin, gelatinous white of a parasite. When my blood emerged, it filled the tube with red, the most ordinary red. We caught each other’s gaze, knowing there would be no easy way to fix me. But out loud, we lied. We said, “Thank god.”

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