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Sparkle (0)
Perfectly round. A circular platform encircled by a raised bar. Like a stage! The kind that lights up underneath and lifts the performer above the crowd as mist billows beneath! And indeed, I am being watched. But there is no applause and I am given no chance for a monologue. Perhaps, I think - silently, to myself - it reminds me less of a stage and more of a teleportation device. Closing my eyes, I wait for a beam of light to descend and obliterate the particles of my mortal shell, to reduce me, no more no less, to the same matter that permeates the universe. No light comes. My atoms stay rigidly arranged, the faulty DNA that is Broken Me still intact, still informing.
I wish it were anything but what it actually is: a scale.
The brushed steel platform on which I stand, obediently thinking defiant thoughts, does not look like any scale I am used to. Certainly it doesn't resemble either of the torture devices to which I have arranged my bathroom, and my life, around. (Two: one to check the other. Accuracy is paramount.) This is an industrial scale, large enough to weigh an elephant but stark enough to weigh an anorectic. Even if she is too weak to hold herself up and must lean on the circular rail for support. But not comfort. No scale has ever been comforting. The very idea of weighing and measuring a human being is not so they can be loved but so they can be compared.
I know quite well what I am being compared to. The problem is that I don't know how I measure up. The digital display that shows the all-important numbers is across the room. Across the room! And turned away so only the nutritionist can read it. Upon first entering the eating disorder clinic, I had protested vehemently at this weighing ritual. "But I'm at a healthy weight!" And then, "But I'm not anorexic! I'm here for compulsive exercise and orthorexia!" Then finally, "My shoes (large wedged heels) and my coat (thick for winter) are so heavy!" All of these things were quite true.
"It doesn't matter. This is just to get a baseline. All patients are weighed at every appointment. Please step on the scale."
"But I'm not even trying to lose weight!" My final plea. This, incidentally, was not true.
The nutritionist didn't blink. "We can't continue until you are weighed."
There was a standoff. I held out for a half hour, picking my nails, studying the pastel 80's artwork, staring blatantly at my nutritionist - a woman so thin that she must always get asked if she has an eating disorder, if she is a size 0, if she has any tips. Of course, these things are filtered through the madness of my illness. I can't see anyone in any other light except fat or thin, evil or righteous, rebellious or obedient.
The thing that breaks me is knowing my babysitter can't stay past an hour. White as a sheet, I step on the scale. The silence that had started at our inauspicious beginning continues to blanket the room. I make not a peep as my worth blinks in black and white. She makes not a sound as she writes it down on my chart, her face inscrutable. Surely, I think, she had never seen someone weigh as much as I do. Surely, I think, she is horrified. Surely she thinks I'm faking sickness. It makes me feel so angry and impotent and worthless that the only thing I can think to say when we finally sit down in proper chairs - as if one of us hadn't just subjected the other to an invasive and dehumanizing ritual - in her office is, "My shoes have solid rubber heels, they probably weigh two pounds each."
She nods, unsmiling, "I'll make a note of that on your chart." And she does. Although I do not know whether she notes it under my weight or under the "disordered fixations of patient" column. I reassure myself with the thought that next time, I will wear tiny sandals and take my coat off
