Inertia

Creative Nonfiction by Mariah Stovall

1999

Gymnasts occasionally get stuck upside down. Not in mid-air, but with their palms on the ground. It’s a blue mat, a beige vaulting table or balance beam, or the ground is floating — a chalky white bar. In a perfect handstand she pushes through her shoulders, battered toes pointed with her gaze locked behind her. Her tailbone is tucked in, incidentally making her ass as discreet as possible. Meanwhile, she has located her center of gravity. Every once in a while she becomes so mindlessly focused and comfortable there it’s as if she cannot come back down to Earth and walk on two feet among mortals.

Achieving perfect balance is cause for alarm. Upside down is not a way you can stay. There is a limit to how much pressure you can put on the parts of your body not meant to withstand its own weight. But gymnastics leaves you believing there always will and should be new ways to contort your body, that its powers and potential are negotiable if not limitless.

Gymnasts are among the most flexible people in the world but even we go stiff every once in a while. I was a little girl the first time kinetics eluded me and left my body frozen in the midst of a moment when motion was paramount. While I was busy growing up, the inertia was silently mutating as it spread. And then it tried and tried to freeze my brain.

2011

I asked my friend A, “Do you feel like the longer you don’t, the harder it gets to talk?” We were parked in my driveway on a high school night, in a minivan that belonged to her parents. In our group of four, she and I shared the responsibility of driving. She’d drop me off last when it was her turn. We would sit there idling and listen to one more song, or engine off we would muster a few more murmurs before retreating to the homes and families that could and still can feel familiar enough to alienate. “Like you’ve been quiet for so long that you get stuck?”

At the end of our senior year, A increasingly cried in front of her teachers in private, so that she would not have to give presentations in front of other students. She did this in her French class in particular, the foreign language lending itself to public speaking. A’s mother is French, though A understands more than she speaks. While she lamented her worsening anxiety I assured her it wasn’t so strange, so much of a problem. We were the quietest two in our group of four, though neither of us is really quiet at all. Why talk, I’ve always wondered, when you can listen?

I took Spanish classes. Senior year, that was how I started my day. It was natural for me to get up and ready for school with just a few words, if any at all. I might have greeted my dog and been terse with my mother because I was tired, or because people make me tired and I was acting out of self-preservation. In my first period class, my voice grew fluffy twitches of dust, thicker with each minute from 8:00 to 8:44. I had to clear my throat every time I was called on to speak and so I prayed not be tasked with providing any insight for the benefit of those around me. I could have coughed preemptively as I crossed the threshold and steeled myself for the worst. Instead I let the dust double and hoped for the best.

It would have been later in the day when I approached my history teacher for a letter of recommendation to include with my college applications. It would have been mid-afternoon when he agreed to write the letter and then told me how I was to proceed with my higher education: “Speak up more.” Nearly every report card and mid-semester progress report I’d ever received was identical. Excellent written work. Needs to participate more in class. Once in a while, a teacher would modify participate with actively, acknowledging that I did do something from my seat, but not that there is such a thing as active listening or that observe is also a verb. The comments were afterthoughts on the far right of the page. The main event on the left was my grades — mostly A’s. My history teacher commanded, or perhaps he was pleading, “Don’t be afraid to be smart.”

In classrooms, I was driven to speak only when the rest of the room fell silent. When a question was asked and answered with blank stares, I might count to ten until the disbelief stuck. I cannot possibly be the only person who knows the answer. I assumed not too little of myself but too much of others. Only then might I give in with a calculated blurting. I could not be bothered to raise my hand or wait to be called on. I was not surprised by the sound of my voice or the evidence of my thoughtfulness, but other people were — dumb means mute, after all. I did not like to use my energy reckoning with the expectations of my peers and so it was easier for everyone if I stayed still.

2016

I have never been afraid of being smart, but always of being stupid. My husband hates when I leave questions unanswered when anyone else would take a guess. He asks me to identify the rapper whose song we are listening to. It’s a song I have heard a dozen times, or a voice I have a hundred, but I stay tight lipped not wanting to fail. I do not know the answer, it turns out, because I am not always listening.

But for him I offer guesses like sap, tapping my brain and dripping one syllable at a time, gauging his reaction and adjusting my words accordingly. I never stick with anything until I know for sure. It is not uncertainty, but premature certainty that roils my core. There is nothing wrong with being unintelligent, other than the fact that is not how I think of myself. I always believed what I was told — that I am smart. To be anything else would shatter my sense of self. Mirrors are fragile, our egos in glass.

2012

“Silence is an inkblot,” a coworker once told me at the end of a shift. He was talkative in a way I did not mind and I think he felt the same of my reticence. I later realized that he meant in silence we all see something different. But I nodded with my own interpretation in the moment, imagining a pot of black knocked over and spreading its unstoppable stain. A pool of stain I got stuck in, or that got stuck on me. I floated on the surface too strong, or was I just heavy enough, to sink.

2010

In all, 30 peer-reviewed studies written in English that used well established measures of intelligence quotient (the National Adult Reading Test and Wechsler Intelligence Scales) were identified. This review established that people with anorexia nervosa [AN] score 10.8 units and 5.9 units above the average intelligence quotient of the normative population on the National Adult Reading Test and Wechsler Intelligence Scales, respectively. An association was found between Body Mass Index and intelligence quotient, as measured by the National Adult Reading Test.[1]

I do not remember how I first learned of this connection, only that when I did it was not of much interest to me. Still, I was moved enough to tuck it away. Now I cringe with the knowledge, wanting to silence the science for fear it will nudge us further into the trap of thinking that goodness can be a corporeal feature.

2017

Our bodies are more malleable than we realize, for better and for worse. Your stomach calls out to you three or more times a day because you have trained it, Pavlovian, to expect to be fed. You may miss a meal or two, fast piously, eat emotionally, or take dieting to some extreme, but for the most part you always have and always will sustain yourself with this simple system of call and response. Moving through life with a mind and body that work in tandem is a miracle I took for granted. So little is remarkable before it is gone.

It is not that people with anorexia possess insipid superpowers of clipped appetites and preternatural self-control. They were born normal, underlying risk factors and genetic predispositions aside, but then something made of so many stark and invisible somethings happened and now they are stranded in alien territory. No one can go there without getting stuck and yet it is a place where no one belongs. It is not a home.

2017

2014

There is nothing wrong with being fat other than the fact that it is not how I think of myself. I always believed what I was told — that I am petite. It was not information I clung to as tightly as I did to the measure of my intellect, but the older I got the more people pointed it out and the more traction it gained. My size became a sacred thing to be protected, revered, fiercely upheld. I began erring on the side of caution and making way for some imagined, impending bodily error. With nowhere to go I was determined to go down, the meager high of starvation haphazardly propping me up.

I still harbored some hope of escape (or was it rescue?) until something masquerading as me tenderly sawed my head open and removed the lid of my skull. But there was no liberation in the lack of a ceiling and I was filled with the unyielding torrent of a thick concrete pour instead. So much for moving, for getting out of there, then.

The concrete came slow enough that I could feel it, fast and heavy enough that it could not be stopped. The small lunch I’d planned to eat that day, a plan I’d made days in advance and dreaded for just as long, was interrupted. The pendulum between I may eat this exact amount of this exact type of food at this exact time, and I may not swung slightly towards the latter. An apple I’d lusted after was off limits though I held it in my hand. I could lick the striations in its skin, not daring to bite down. Other times I could chew, too timid to swallow.

I knew better, I was smarter than this. I tried to claw through the stone wall that the writing was on but I could not make a dent. Not really moving at all, I resigned myself to it. Anxiety, failure, hunger, anything soothes when it is familiar. My body thought better of wasting its energy pleading for food while I thought better of opening my mouth to ask for help because when you are lost, stuck, or stranded, it might seem best to stay right where you are.

I hated the stereotypically feminine bent of my predicament, twice over because I had once been a gymnast, thrice over because I still came off as shy. Ashamed to be a woman, I wondered if I were still human at all, fighting myself and chasing my own tail. When we are miserably, placidly devoid of desire — what kind of animal does that make us, when we stay so still? Plants bend towards the sun for feeding. Cats pounce on their prey.

2010

A descriptive comparison of these results suggests that those recovered from AN [anorexia nervosa] score higher on IQ measures (mean IQ ranged from 109.3 to 118.1) than groups with current AN (mean IQ in current AN ranged from 96.1 to 116.8 and 96.5 to 117.6 using the NART and WAIS, respectively) and norms. Along the same lines as the conclusion above, this very preliminary result may indicate that those who recover tend to have higher premorbid IQ. More research in recovered samples is needed in order to clarify this observation.[2]

There is a neat logic to this conclusion, a final standard to twist around and measure ourselves against. Score a BMI low enough to earn the diagnosis. Craft an IQ high enough to inch towards the badge of recovery.

1999

For all the time she spends perfecting her handstand, a gymnast does not want get stuck upside down — to have so much control that she loses it. A handstand is a part of a routine, a precise series of movements to be executed, judged, and scored. A gymnast who is stuck is wasting time, cutting into the moments she must fill with jump sequences and tumbling passes, elements of dance. She dreads fatiguing the audience if she does nothing more than balance upended, a simple column of a handstand when she should be moving in more unnatural ways, paying tribute to the women whose maneuvers she’s studied. She’s always marveled at what their bodies, her body, can accomplish.

Now the audience marvels at her. But when she gets stuck their awe melts into boredom, burned out like her muscles. When she is frozen only she truly knows it and she is scared statuesque. But sooner or later she will fall without flailing. She will stay stiff and graceful when she remembers how to surrender and finds the motion again, the bend in her knees.

2017

Our muscles have remarkable memories, for better and for worse. Now I can speak without thinking, though it’s often to say I’m not hungry, no thank you, I already ate. I have not forgotten how many calories something contains, regardless of whether or not I’m still keeping count. I do not believe, or am not ready to believe, in complete recovery. I refused the help I was offered. But I keep dreaming of signing up for a gymnastics class. I want to use my body for good again. I have every reason to believe I still know what to do.

[1]Lopez, C., Stahl, D., & Tchanturia, K. (2010). Estimated intelligence quotient in anorexia nervosa: a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature. Annals of General Psychiatry, 9, (40). http://doi.org/doi: 10.1186/1744–859X-9–40

[2]Ibid.

Mariah Stovall’s writing has appeared on Literary Hub and in Joyland Magazine. She is writing her first novel. Follow her @retiredpunk.

Inertia

Creative Nonfiction by Mariah Stovall

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