give up the ghost.

radical love letter #87 | on the hauntings of eating disorder recovery

Extremely Mega Content Note! This essay discusses disordered eating in some pretty specific detail, all the while maintaining that it is not an Eating Disorder Essay. Still though, I invite you to skip this week if reading about ED stuff may be triggering (as it was for me when I watched the dumb Gwenyth Platrow video that inspired this essay in the first place). See you Friday or next week if this one’s not for you! <3 

During an interview on the podcast “The Art of Being Well,” Gwyneth Paltrow reported the following as exemplative of her current wellness routine: 

“I do a nice intermittent fast. I usually eat something at about 12. And in the morning I’ll have some things that won’t spike my blood sugar. I’ll have some coffee. But I really like soup for lunch, I have bone broth for lunch a lot of days. I try to do one hour of movement: so I’ll either take a walk or I’ll do pilates or do my Tracy Anderson. Then I’ll dry brush and get in the infrared sauna. And for dinner I try to eat according to Paleo, so ya know, lots of vegetables. It’s really important for me to support my detox.” 

I watch this video then watch it again, and again, and again once more until her daily regimen is etched in my memory like a song. I hear the rhythm of it repeat like an earworm. It is singing to me when I purchase the sourdough loaf at the local bakery, when I eat half a chocolate bar after dinner. “Things that won’t spike my blood sugar,” I hear in my head the next morning. I search a closet to see if I still have my dry brush from my peak orthorexia days (I do not). I shift gears a bit when I think about the sauna: turn from considering altering my meals to raging at the rich. I settle there, but I am here writing you now, two weeks later, still hearing “do my Tracy Anderson” the way I might a commercial jingle. 

***

With great intention, I have made it my entire writerly life without penning an Eating Disorder Essay. It’s not a secret — I mention it in my book, and several times on my old food blog, and have no problem throwing in a ‘same’ when someone says they used to count macros, or add time on the treadmill if they ate a cookie, or believe sugar and gluten were literal poison, or know just where to place their finger to make the retching quieter — but even just listing everything inside that em-dash feels utterly boring. Eating disorders are outlandishly horrific and also completely banal; once I got myself out of the various loops I had throughout my adolescence, teens, and twenties, I didn’t want to spell any of it out. If you have ever had a meal with someone in the throws of an eating disorder who lacks self-awareness you will understand how boring it is to hear about food in the way people with eating disorders think about food. There are plenty of skillful authors who have found ways to tackle the subject with aplomb, but I have no desire to add to the clutter with more cataloging of eating or not eating food, purging or holding it down, sweating for pleasure or for pain. 

So, no, this is not an Eating Disorder Essay. This is an essay about how Gwyneth fucking Paltrow inadvertently bullied me to think about the nuances of eating disorder “recovery” and how we might use Avery Gordon’s concept of hauntings to better understand it. Gordon is a sociologist who thought too many researchers of social life were ignoring the way ghosts rupture the present; “ghosts hate new things,” she quotes Zora Neal Hurston here to contribute to her postmodern contribution to the field. The concept of haunting helps us understand how a narrative of progress— ‘Look, we have Oprah! And Obama! And trans people on TV!’— can still be riddled with increased police killings, with Trump, with neonazis. 

“By nature they are haunting reminders of lingering trouble,” Gordon explains. “Ghosts hate new things precisely because once the conditions that call them up and keep them alive have been removed, their reason for being and their power to haunt are severely restricted.” 

I have not engaged in disordered behavior around food or exercise, as a pattern, for many years. I have, in theory, ‘removed the conditions’ for the behavior. But, if we follow 12 Step logic, which many offer as a solution, I will always be in recovery and not recovered. I admire 12 Steppers—like, truly they are some of my favorite people, always thinking about how to be better and of service—and I am so grateful the program exists for people who say it’s saved them, but generally I find program logic to be problematic. I tend toward studies about trauma being the root of unaligned behaviors rather than predetermined brain wiring, and I especially value when those trauma studies also name how structures of oppression contribute to individual pathology. And yet, and yet: when it comes to me and my relationship to food—which is a metonym in eating disorder-land for body-related things like compulsive exercise, obsessive thinking about stomach fat, binging, purging, starving, and so on—this purgatory of recovery feels true. There is something that, no matter how long it’s been since I routinely hurled out my dinner, compels my brain to consider: “But what if you did?” 

Perhaps using Gordon’s hauntings helps us make sense of this without relying on biological determinism, and perhaps Gwyneth Paltrow is actually the perfect example of why. When I heard Paltrow’s interview, what I was hearing, of course, were the hauntings of white supremacy; as Sabrina Struggs argues in Fearing the Black Body, fatphobia only exists because of it. Paltrow is white, and I have no doubt makes a concerted effort to practice interpersonal antiracism, but GOOP, her multimillion dollar wellness company, is a living ghost of its terror. Her empire is built on the tenets of purity, of consumption, of withering away all the while maintaining an audacious sense of entitlement (an insidious skill of historical and contemporary wealthy white women). And although I am sure she is a fine and lovely person (???), her business and, I would argue, the wellness industry more generally, is specter-possessed. 

We could put this all in more benign terms; more medically, I watched a video and my eating disorder was—in an actually-accurate use of the oft-improperly used term— triggered. Evoking Gordon’s haunting, though, makes an ostensibly individual problem, instead, a social phenomenon.  And this is rich ground for combat; if it’s a collective issue, that means we don’t have to give up the ghost alone.

A few days after I first saw the video, a sweet friend whom I’ve known since my vegan food blog days posted an Instagram story with a salty comment about it. “HATED IT.” I message her in response. Even that small act—connecting with someone I know lived through the same era of diet culture messaging as me— made it a little less scary.

Perhaps all of us who have struggled with overcoming an eating disorder need to engage in a collective exorcism. Maybe the more we keep making and re-making worlds in obstinate defiance of white supremacy and hegemonic body norms, GOOP videos will feel like a sheet with two holes for eyes. And although Gordon notes the apparitions intensify when the conditions change, maybe a shifted terrain will make the things that go bump in the night have much less hold on us.

“Following the ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located,” says Gordon. “It is sometimes about writing ghost stories, stories that not only repair representational mistakes, but also strive to understand the conditions under which a memory was produced in the first place, toward a countermemory, for the future.”

…Maybe I’m kidding myself that this is not an Eating Disorder Essay; but if it is, then let it be a ghost story too.