Read Online Diamond in the Rough by Shawn Colvin - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Shawn Colvin
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I felt supremely in control, but really I was losing it, figuratively and literally. I lost the job at the Bizarre and a couple of other jobs after that. I would binge-eat and -drink once a week or so and then not show up for work out of remorse.
I returned to Carbondale and moved back in with my parents, with the idea that I would study fashion. The truth is, I couldn’t take care of myself. I had failed at living away and alone and needed to go home, but an academic plan sounded so much better. And I probably I wanted someone to see I was sick. But you couldn’t tell me anything. You couldn’t make me eat.
Breakfast was half a container of yogurt. Lunch was an apple. Dinner was a broiled skinless chicken breast and a tomato. My mother made that for me every night, because I would eat it. As we sat down at the dining-room table, my mom and dad at either end, my sister and brother on one side, and me on the other, they would all tuck into their lasagna or pot roast while I picked at my pathetic little meal.
I rode my bicycle to school, jumped rope, and ran. My favorite class was tailoring, because we had to make a suit precisely fitted to our own body, down to the last inch. Mine looked like a little boy’s outfit. I bottomed out at eighty-six pounds. Minor cuts wouldn’t heal. My hair was falling out. I don’t know how I beat it, I really don’t. I like to say I was hungry, unlike a lot of anorexics, and that was a big part of it. I was hungry and all I did was think about food.
Fortunately, my parents found me a psychiatrist, an infinitely kind man named Anthony Berger, who assured me from the start that he would not try to take my thinness away from me, that he knew it was too important. I have no idea if anyone was thinking of hospitalizing me.
The whole episode lasted about a year. I don’t know why I was so lucky that it didn’t last my whole life. The major crisis passed, and I was no longer starving, although whatever issues were underneath the anorexia weren’t really dealt with. I began to think about singing again, and I suspect that was the ticket. My voice had healed, although it was quite weak, and I got a couple of gigs around town. I began to eat. And eat. I made up for lost time. At any given sitting, I could consume an entire box of cornflakes, an entire large pizza (Quatro’s, the best deep-dish in Carbondale), a half gallon of cheap ice cream, or a loaf of cracked-wheat bread, toasted, with butter. A six-pack of beer was not a stretch either. And this is when I fell in love with alcohol, really and truly. So, basically, I traded one problem for another.
At a bar with Mom and Dad, 1978
(Photograph courtesy of Marti Cruthers)
I gained sixty pounds in three months and looked like a whale. I was twenty-two and fat and drunk and living with my parents, a far cry from the girl who just a few years back had seemed so full of promise. To top it all off, I got a job taking care of rats in the university vivarium—the place where they kept animals for experimentation. I needed money to get myself out of town to go somewhere, anywhere. I would wake up in the morning and put on the only things that fit—a pair of ratty sweatpants and my dad’s T-shirt, and head out to clean up rodent shit. It was a low point, to be sure. But something was coming alive in me, because I would sneak off from rat duty and write little tidbits of lyrics. These weren’t the musings of a teenager attempting to imitate a hero. I had grown up a bit and had something to say about it.
No one ever said it was easy.
I’ve always been along for the ride,
Thinking there would always be
Someone to take the wheel for me,
But I was helpless sitting passenger side …
Not exactly brilliant, but it was me speaking, reflecting, trying to get at something. It was new. But it would be many years before I started to believe I could really write.
7
Out There on Her Own
Like I said, fat and drunk, 1979
I am weaving like a
I returned to Carbondale and moved back in with my parents, with the idea that I would study fashion. The truth is, I couldn’t take care of myself. I had failed at living away and alone and needed to go home, but an academic plan sounded so much better. And I probably I wanted someone to see I was sick. But you couldn’t tell me anything. You couldn’t make me eat.
Breakfast was half a container of yogurt. Lunch was an apple. Dinner was a broiled skinless chicken breast and a tomato. My mother made that for me every night, because I would eat it. As we sat down at the dining-room table, my mom and dad at either end, my sister and brother on one side, and me on the other, they would all tuck into their lasagna or pot roast while I picked at my pathetic little meal.
I rode my bicycle to school, jumped rope, and ran. My favorite class was tailoring, because we had to make a suit precisely fitted to our own body, down to the last inch. Mine looked like a little boy’s outfit. I bottomed out at eighty-six pounds. Minor cuts wouldn’t heal. My hair was falling out. I don’t know how I beat it, I really don’t. I like to say I was hungry, unlike a lot of anorexics, and that was a big part of it. I was hungry and all I did was think about food.
Fortunately, my parents found me a psychiatrist, an infinitely kind man named Anthony Berger, who assured me from the start that he would not try to take my thinness away from me, that he knew it was too important. I have no idea if anyone was thinking of hospitalizing me.
The whole episode lasted about a year. I don’t know why I was so lucky that it didn’t last my whole life. The major crisis passed, and I was no longer starving, although whatever issues were underneath the anorexia weren’t really dealt with. I began to think about singing again, and I suspect that was the ticket. My voice had healed, although it was quite weak, and I got a couple of gigs around town. I began to eat. And eat. I made up for lost time. At any given sitting, I could consume an entire box of cornflakes, an entire large pizza (Quatro’s, the best deep-dish in Carbondale), a half gallon of cheap ice cream, or a loaf of cracked-wheat bread, toasted, with butter. A six-pack of beer was not a stretch either. And this is when I fell in love with alcohol, really and truly. So, basically, I traded one problem for another.
At a bar with Mom and Dad, 1978
(Photograph courtesy of Marti Cruthers)
I gained sixty pounds in three months and looked like a whale. I was twenty-two and fat and drunk and living with my parents, a far cry from the girl who just a few years back had seemed so full of promise. To top it all off, I got a job taking care of rats in the university vivarium—the place where they kept animals for experimentation. I needed money to get myself out of town to go somewhere, anywhere. I would wake up in the morning and put on the only things that fit—a pair of ratty sweatpants and my dad’s T-shirt, and head out to clean up rodent shit. It was a low point, to be sure. But something was coming alive in me, because I would sneak off from rat duty and write little tidbits of lyrics. These weren’t the musings of a teenager attempting to imitate a hero. I had grown up a bit and had something to say about it.
No one ever said it was easy.
I’ve always been along for the ride,
Thinking there would always be
Someone to take the wheel for me,
But I was helpless sitting passenger side …
Not exactly brilliant, but it was me speaking, reflecting, trying to get at something. It was new. But it would be many years before I started to believe I could really write.
7
Out There on Her Own
Like I said, fat and drunk, 1979
I am weaving like a
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