Episode 5: Cloth, Stitches, Snaps

“Rachel, do you want these old overalls of mine? They’ll be baggy but I think they’ll look cute on you!”

I was about to leave my parents’ home in St. Louis after a recent visit. It’s always at this moment, when my luggage is packed to the brim and my departing train or flight or carpool is on schedule, that my mom decides to offer me, more or less, everything in her home.

“Do you need a toaster? Do you have enough mugs? You can never have enough mugs! Do you need a TV? We still have grandma’s old TV! Do you want it? Do you have enough deodorant? Wayne, can you take her to Sam’s Club for deodorant?”

No, I don’t need a toaster, I have both a toaster AND a toaster oven so I’m set. You actually CAN have enough mugs, and I currently only want mugs with my cat’s face on them. Nope, I don’t need a TV; I’m a millennial, so it’s all Netflix on my Chromebook. I just, gosh, I’m not sure there’s time for a trip to Sam’s right now, momma…

But yes, I’ll take the overalls. They sound fun.

Cue the nightmares.

My mother is a beautiful woman and always has been. She has birthed three children, she has gone through menopause, and she is a few sizes bigger than I am. Thus, it makes sense that the overalls would, indeed, be quite baggy on me, and potentially very fun. I intended to throw them on to tackle chores, or to wear them as a cover-up at the beach. Totes adorbs, as they say.

Instead, I was paralyzed by fear and left the garment scrunched in the back of my pants drawer. I was afraid they would NOT be baggy, afraid I wasn’t as thin as my mom thought, afraid I had somehow inflated by multiple inches to fill-out the hand-me-down. To compound my fear, I regularly had nightmares about trying the dungarees on. In my dreams it fit perfectly. Fearing that I was no longer thin, I awoke from these dreams in a panic.

This item, nothing more than cloth and stitches and snaps, sat unworn in my possession for months. Finally, I roused the courage to put the overalls on. Sure enough, they were baggy and slouchy. I looked photo-ready for a Kriss Kross album cover. Fully attired, I sent my mom a snapchat as I stood before the full-length mirror in my practice room. She doesn’t totally get snapchat yet so I didn’t get a reply.

By the way, this all happened a few weeks ago, fifteen years into recovery.

Plenty of anorexics suffer from distorted body image. It’s one of the forces that sets us in the direction of invisibility; we do not accurately see how thin we have gotten, thus the pursuit for weight loss continues. In treatment, we worked to overcome this discrepancy between what we saw and what was real.

One day, my individual therapist tasked me with The String Assignment. What IS the string assignment, you ask?

Step 1. Receive a long strand of string.

Step 2. Select a body part that you think is fat/ugly/gross. For me: my wrists. (Rather a strange spot, right? Aren’t we women supposed to think our butts and tummies and thighs are too big? Eating disorders don’t make sense, just go with it.)

Step 3. Cut the string to the believed circumference of the offensive body part. Set aside.

Step 4. Receive a new long strand of string.

Step 5. Actually wrap this new string around the body part you selected in step 2 and snip to size.

Step 6. Compare the lengths of the two strings.

Desired Outcome: SURPRISE! Your body part is actually much smaller than you thought it would be!

It’s a rather straightforward exercise: an anorexic person will likely believe the body part to be bigger than it actually is and cut too long a string. She is then forced to confront empirical evidence of the difference between her own perception and everyone else’s reality. I was certain, however, that I was the exception to this experiment. Surely my wrist was actually the way I saw it: thick and unfeminine. To save myself the pain of facing this truth, I cut the string even longer than what I thought my wrists’ circumference could possibly be.

When it came time to compare and contrast, there was a vast difference between my amplified interpretation and my actual wrist size. Because of my over-cautious exaggeration, the distinction was particularly dramatic. I breathed a sigh of relief; my actual dimensions were, in fact, much thinner than I had anticipated. Unfortunately, in taking the err-on-the-big-side approach, I robbed myself of a potential moment for honest evaluation, one that was designed to aid in my recovery.

At present, I battle not just distorted body image but a distorted sense of ability. Rather than a fear of being overweight, this frequently presents itself as a fear of being audio recorded. I have an unwillingness to record my violin playing, a hesitance in listening to past performances, and an unrelenting fear of submitting an audition tape.

Let’s be clear: I love performing. I love being on stage; the more listeners the better. Judge me as you will, but I thrive at the center of attention. Recording is somehow different. Recording is permanent. Every mistake is forever. A judge can hit rewind and listen to an out-of-tune-pitch ad nauseum. A reviewer can switch on the metronome and hear all the rhythmic errors, the rushings and the draggings. If they want to, listening in the privacy of their own homes perhaps multiple states or even countries away, the critical listener can laugh at botched shifts and mangled articulations. Maybe even worse is this; when I am the listener, I am forced to confront my own pitch, rhythm, and articulation inaccuracies.

I have waited years before listening back to certain recital recordings. I might practice for hours in preparation for a recording session, then invent a last-minute excuse to cancel. I would rather rank my abilities off the response of a subjective live audience than with the objective tool that is a MP3.

When I do wrangle up my courage and listen, it is with an ear that hunts for mistakes the way my eyes searched for flaws on my body; as I searched for fat bulges and ugliness pockets on my physical self, so do my ears seek wrong notes and scratchy tones. On repeated listenings, my out-of-tune moments seem to get even more out-of-tune, just as my withering body seemed to get fatter and uglier as I repeatedly assessed it in my dorm room mirror.

This avoidance of audio archiving has probably harmed my growth as a musician. For one thing, listening to recorded performances or rehearsals is a great way to hear mistakes that can then be quickly corrected. For another thing, my recordings tend to be pretty good, or at least better than I expect them to be! This is not unlike the big reveal of the String Test: after all the anxiety, my body wasn’t as grotesque as I thought it would be. However, I’m typically listening to recordings of well-rehearsed performances, and I can’t help but wonder how I might be aided if I were to listen-back during the early stages of my preparation process. Lastly, I’ve quietly passed on opportunities that required a recorded audition. I didn’t participate in prestigious summer programs during my college years, I haven’t thrown my hat into the rink for high-ranking orchestral auditions, and I’ve yet to complete an application for a doctoral program.

I am afraid of the seemingly inevitable rejections that will result from my imperfectly recorded sounds, so I keep the overalls in the dresser drawer, fearing that they might fit.