The rules were simple. Whenever Madonna sang, we strutted our stuff up and down the matted blue carpet. If the music stopped, we struck a pose in front of the full-length mirror.
“Your face is crooked!” my friend Diana shrieked.
“Your legs are 10 feet long!” I yelled back.
It wasn’t an insult; it was true. The mirror in my bedroom was old and warped, like in a fun house. We spent hours in front of it, jutting out our hips and crossing our eyes; laughing at how ugly we looked. How round and pointy, long and short we could be, all at the same time.
I don’t know exactly when it became painful for me to look at my reflection. Maybe when I was told to cover the mirrors in our house for my father’s funeral (a Jewish tradition).
I was 11 at the time and couldn’t understand how these pale lips and string bean legs of mine were here, while my dad was forever gone. So I kept staring at my body in that glass, feeling a new kind of grief and confusion rip through me.
A few weeks later, I started junior high, where looks were everything. I used a mirror so I could run turquoise eyeliner across my lids or zero in on a blooming pimple. But I got more and more frustrated by what I saw. My splotchy skin and bushy eyebrows felt untamable; my arms too long. By high school, I grew out my frizzy bangs to hide my face and wore baggy overalls with a tiny cowbell around my neck, as if I were lost in the fields and needed to find my way home.
It wasn’t until after college that I dove headlong into an eating disorder. There was no definitive moment where I said, I’m going to try starving myself today. Instead it was a gradual whittling away at my body. I became obsessed with shrinking myself down to a size 0; spending hours at the gym until I was dizzy and frantic, fueling myself on coffee and sugarless gum.
Only that damn mirror kept getting in the way. After each workout, I sprinted past the sinks and vanities in the locker room so I couldn’t get sucked into a staring contest with myself. Still, I always saw too much. I hated every inch of my flesh; every curve, every angle. I kept going back to work out again; kept crunching, tucking, sweating, squatting, but my reflection just got uglier. The objects in the mirror were always going to be larger, closer, more hideous than they appeared.
The human mirrors in my life were out to get me too — the friends who took me aside and asked why I never ate anymore; why I was sharp and bony and always running. I gave them my best lies and brightest smiles, cursing them under my breath.
When I turned 30, instead of the surprise party I wanted, my boyfriend gave me an intervention. (Note to readers: horrible present.) He told me I’d die if I didn’t get some professional help, then drove me to an eating disorders clinic. I got escorted to a pink room with fluorescent lights, inspirational posters and a refrigerator humming in the corner. There were two locked windows and a dozen defeated-looking young women, sitting with their heads bowed.
The rules at the clinic were simple. We each got color-coded menus. Blue meant you had to eat two helpings of eggs at breakfast. Green meant whole-milk yogurt three times a day. No butter patty could be left untouched, and we swore not to purge or self-harm. For three months, I followed a blue menu and made collages about body image and self-loathing. Every forkful I ate made me hungrier. Every therapy session, lonelier. Worst of all was the mirror in the lounge bathroom.
It was newly horrible every time I looked. My face was dull; my hair thin. My mouth was a greedy, bottomless hole. I tried going to the bathroom in the dark or sealing my eyes shut to blot everything out, but I was too clumsy for that to last long.
“What if I told you that your eyes aren’t reliable?” my doctor said. I shrugged. “That your brain is sending faulty signals, so you can’t see what’s really there?”
Not because of some flaw or fun house warp in the glass, but because of something broken inside me, he explained. It was almost like an optical illusion, a magic trick.
I left the clinic after three months not because I was cured, but because my mom was in treatment for leukemia across the country and it wasn’t going well. She died just a few days after I pulled into our driveway. This time, we didn’t even discuss covering the mirrors in our childhood home. Instead, my siblings and I drank our parents’ liquor and emptied out our closets, our attic, our lives. We rented a dumpster that could never be big enough to cart it all away.
On one of my last days at home, I walked upstairs and closed my bedroom door so I could say goodbye to that fun house mirror. It was dusty, and rust-stained, and showed me a wobbly, misshapen woman. If I turned to one side, the woman’s arms puffed out like sausages. If I turned to the other, her chin drooped down to her navel. If I planted myself squarely, her feet were 10 feet long.
Abracadabra. An optical illusion.
The boyfriend and I moved in together and got engaged. He cooked me huge pots of spaghetti and held me still when I wanted to run. Every day, I swore not to purge or self-harm. I also got a therapist who asked me to leave her voice mail messages after each meal. It was a slow, grueling slog. I felt stuck between broken and healed. But this was the work I still needed to do. This was the only way out.
I don’t know exactly when or if it will become easy for me to look at my reflection. I left that clinic over 15 years ago, and I’m still tempted to close my eyes.
In those 15 years, though, my body’s done some amazing things, like giving birth to three healthy children. They are wild, and bright, and love to eat their dad’s spaghetti. So, I push myself to eat with them, twirling our forkfuls and letting the sauce drip down our chins. I take selfies with my daughter and play dress up with my sons; shimmying like J.Lo. at the Super Bowl halftime show.
I try to separate the messages in my head from the reality of me, because I want my kids to enjoy their bodies and see me appreciating mine. I want us to strut our stuff in front of the mirror, strike a pose and marvel at whatever we see. At how unreliable our reflections can be and how much more we are than that shifting picture.
Abby Sher is the author, most recently, of the young adult novel “Miss You Love You Hate You Bye.”