Commencement

The week I was reading Anita Diamant’s novel The Red Tent, on the day I was to wear a big black tent and sit knee to knee under a much bigger white tent with the other sweating graduates and their sweating families, my period returned again. It was the hottest day of the year thus far, a wet 94 degrees. I accepted my diploma with a handshake and, instead of returning back to my seat like the others, I walked away from everyone, stashed the heap of my graduation robes, diploma, and bloody pad by the base of a tree, and jumped into a swimming hole. It was too hot and I was involved with too many tents. I would not have chosen to spend this day in ceremony, much less one whose name refers to the beginning of things.

That was the third time I got my period for the first time. The first time was the very first time. And it had been absent for a year or two when it returned for the second first time one summer. I was nineteen and on vacation with my parents, staying with friends of theirs. I saw the blood in my underwear and walked to the guest room, shut the door behind me, lay with my back on the carpet and lifted my feet into the air, catching my lower back to keep myself straight like a line and upside-down. It was one of the poses that yoga instructors tell you not to do if you’re menstruating. My body had revealed to me that it was to resume its normal functions, that I had been treating it as I was supposed to. By inverting myself I tried to reverse all that I had done to get there, before the health took hold. Then I lowered my feet to the ground. My mom and her friend searched the high shelves of her closets for tampons while I stood by, acting as if it was not my menstrual cycle that had lapsed, but my judgment. It was true that I had not expected for my period to come just then. It was also true that I had not expected it to come at all, ever.

My period has adhered to a strict schedule for years, and yet each month I still expect its absence. Many people who have late periods meet the circumstances with either dread or hope for the same possibility: that some new thing has taken root and will soon grow. A commencement. I still feel a reflexive twinge of hope when my period is late, but for an opposite possibility: that my whole self has become rootless again, unearthly, and still.

To opt out of a reoccurring biological phenomenon, and to do it silently and all by myself, felt like I had risen above the intolerable earthliness of living–our subjugation to and collusion with all that grinds itself into the mud. I took pride in the responsibility associated with having risen, which was not to elude the pain inflicted upon me just for being alive, but to wield it. It was to be my own vulture and my own prey, circling in on what I wanted to be, which I would find by eating away at myself. I wanted to be hard and uninhabitable like a man, but small like a girl.

***

When I was seventeen, I started eating frozen peas for dinner whenever I missed a real dinner with my parents. I’d rush to the freezer in anticipation of the near infinite, grabbing a bag heavy with thousands of tiny frozen morsels whose quantity began as heft and became, in my stream of consumption, a measure of time. I’d spend hours lowering my fingers into the bag and letting clusters of frozen peas stick to their tips. The morning after indulging in my frigid green kibble, I’d always be burdened by putrid, discolored shits.

A few years later, when I moved out of my college dorm, I again stocked my freezer with bags of frozen peas to have instead of the salad that I otherwise ate for dinner every night. My parents had offered to pay for my food while I was still in school, and even then I adhered to a strict and arbitrary budget as if I were trying to support myself on my 15-hour, minimum wage work week. I reduced my body to an economic system whose physiology worked like logic, and, as such, could be manipulated from the top down: diminish the grocery budget and eliminate choice to support the limitation of food intake, which increases the value of each food unit so that the body can subsist on less units of food. I envisioned, at the end, my body like a worn car that runs well on very little. Flanked by my own blinders, I’d carve a clear and narrow path through thickets of plenty, plow through uprisings of hunger and appetite.

At the time, the bullet-point science of Internet wellness articles backed my aspirations and the path to them. Many of us have studied with grim and hopeful conviction the articles that interpret the body’s physiology as mythically literal. We learned that we could make a stomach smaller, and in effect less wanting, if we’d just stop stretching it out. If you shrink it enough, even the poorest of pockets will bulge with riches, the myth said. The myth said, if you follow this diet, your stomach wall will begin to dismantle itself brick by brick, until one day it will cave in on itself, and on that day you may swallow a peanut for your newly crumpled stomach to snatch and suck happily for hours. Under scarcity’s governance, a morsel large enough to feed an ant colony can be large enough to feed you, too. The myth was a myth. It turns out we can’t shape our organs from the outside with dull tools.

I had hoped for a transformation that was purely physiological, that change would be nothing more than perfunctory accommodation of a shrunken stomach. And despite the fiction of willful organ restructuring, it appeared to me that I had achieved the physiological shift I was going for. After a few months of limiting my food intake I started to feel fuller faster and could tolerate subsisting on less. In reality, I hadn’t tightened the parameters of my biological needs, and the shift was a psychological one. Most of the fullness I felt had to have been superficial, just hot air. Hunger pangs hadn’t disappeared, but were repurposed as mileposts, the frequency of each passing pang an indication of advancing progress.

The unintended consequences: my white blood cells fled. At certain points in high school I felt high for days and was convinced that I’d smoked some infinite-release strain of weed. At the end of college I often felt like my head was floating up towards the ceiling. At some point I had mono without even noticing. I approached potlucks with lust and fear, and left them feeling sick. I compulsively sneaked other people’s food.

In many cases I resorted to the depravity of sneaking because the fact of my theft and the condition of the food itself permitted no witnesses. I ate foods that were in such unfavorable condition as to qualify the foods as “non-foods,” the eating of the foods as “non-eating,” and the sum of the two non-variables–the theft–as nothing. I ate frozen things that are not supposed to be eaten frozen, like the green peas and errant raviolis. I ate old and forgotten things, stale and clumped and webby. After bussing plates at my job I’d crouch under the counter to run a finger through any streaks of dessert a customer might have left behind, before scraping the rest into a scrap bucket that would later be presented as our hand-me-down gift to an undiscerning pig. It seems like all it took was for someone to catch me, and to instruct me, directly, to stop.

But really, first, it was my choice to stop lying. When a doctor confronted me with a document of numbers, I felt like she could read my blood and all the secrets I’d hidden in it. So, when asked, I finally told a doctor that it had been nearly a year since I’d had a period.

I was then instructed, and I dutifully complied, to abandon the salad and frozen peas regiment and chart my budding intake in boxes labeled “Breakfast, Snacks, Lunch, Snacks, Dinner, Snacks.” For my first day of the food diary, I chose a recipe for black bean and beet burgers (no buns, not yet). As I mixed the beans and shredded beets in a bowl, feeling woozy from sustained activity, hands resembling a gloveless surgeon’s knuckle deep in guts, I asked for the beets to be my gory messenger, to remind my body to bleed every month again.

“Bleeding every month again.” That was the way I put it–my goal–as if the process was completely civilized, medical, simple, a little distant, mostly outside of my control. Not–“I have to stop eating shit that’s frozen/webbed with moth eggs now, and now I have to eat a hot meal every day, and now I have to eat a piece of pie, now a cookie, now an egg, now cheese, now butter. I have to eat past full five times a day, to lie on the floor and stretch my stomach out. I have to act as if I want the thickening, the promise of vigor and warmth. Now, because of what I’ve done, I have to force myself through another puberty.” Because my symptoms not only included physical illness but also my own, self-loathing behaviors, which were, as I saw it, both deplorable and embarrassingly tame, I pinned their reversal to the universal and concrete, the metronome of health.

Just as I had worn the absence of my period like a hidden badge, the marker of my importance and capability, I had also kept it carefully hidden for so long, as it was such an obvious marker of lack. The diagnosis of amenorrhea is always followed by the prescription of change. But when it was revealed that I was sick, it became the symptom that I pushed to the front–my period’s absence was all of my disjointed, sad-to-inappropriate compulsions pasted together and dressed up in a business suit, representing legitimacy for all of us.

I still cling to the same measure of legitimacy. Most of the time, I feel completely ridiculous thinking or talking or writing about my experience, like I’m devoting pages and pages to my time in clown school, where I dropped out before I could tour, when there are so many serious clowns out there who’ve spent months on the road, sacrificing every other thing, sustaining great injuries, honing their craft. Or like I’m outright lying, saying yes I swam in the pool, when the most I got wet was up to my toe.

In other words, I can’t help feeling that other people’s stories–heart attack, rehab, tubes, ten miles, one almond, dead–put mine to shame.

Given a year or two–so I tell myself–I could have gotten there. I just needed more time. But as it happened, my commitment was to a moderate starvation. The problem with this and all of my afflictions is that I cannot commit to anything so extreme as to be easily noticed, as to get in trouble, as to ruin anyone’s plans. So, I did what I usually do, I struck a compromise between my intolerance for life as it was and the many-faced apparition that encompassed everyone I knew. Rather than veering off I stayed in place and twisted and flickered.

My period’s absence consolidated my symptoms into a condition of some legitimacy. But in characterizing my recovery as an attempt to get my period to come back, I conveyed what felt like forceful change in friendlier, more relatable, and thus less serious terms. In mild form, as if I was saying something like, “I’m waiting for the geese to arrive,” or “I’m waiting for the leaves to turn,” I mostly said of my recovery–to myself, my best friend, my nutritionist, to my parents, who paid my nutritionist–“I’m waiting for my period to come back.” My striving was so innocuous that, on the morning of commencement, when I woke up to blood and told my mom that I had gotten my period, her immediate reaction was the typical commiseration. “Ugh, that sucks,” she groaned. She had forgotten what it meant.

***

A few months after my period returned for the third and final time, I looked in the mirror and noticed a couple inches of blonde growing from the roots of my otherwise brown hair. It continued to grow into a distinct, blonde streak, noticeable enough to see in photos from that time, before I shaved everything off and the blonde didn’t return. It was as if, for a time, that section of hair had chosen to communicate in the terrestrial language of seasonal change: the yellowing meant that I had fallen into orbit again.

Hannah Berger is an artist and writer based in the Hudson Valley, NY. She holds a BA in Studio Art from Bard College and completed a residency at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts in 2018. Her written work has or will appear in CLOG, Fecund, and Electric Literature.