I died, for a moment, after careening off a ski slope and slamming into a tree, belly to trunk, arms winged wide. I’d been rushed to the E.R., but because the pain was minimal, was discharged with instructions to rest. It was February of my senior year in high school. On a phone call the next evening—Gale and I were in hysterics, probably at someone’s expense—I felt a piercing stab where I’d hit the tree, followed by a flood of woozy exhaustion. I was still naïve about serious illness, but old enough to be scared. I called Karen, who raced me to the hospital – by then clutching my breath and hunched by pain – in her Gremlin, my parents folded into the back seat, as their vision prohibited them from night driving. I projectile vomited while staggering into the emergency room, granting me immediate admission.
I remember lying on a table, wincing as doctors nudged their fingers up under my ribs, peppering me with questions. I then viewed my body as a drone would, floating above it, watching my mother’s brow furrow as she listened to these doctors, my father’s face blanch as he absorbed their words. A hospital chaplain wedged into the curtained space. I remember feeling calm. I was still wearing my jeans, hand stitched with patches, as was the style in 1972, a skinny strip of black velvet snaking along the side of one thigh, calico scraps tacked across the other, woven trim sewn to each leg’s hem wide and colorful as guitar straps. One knee was decorated with a rose applique, the other frayed—holes were also part of the style—my pale winter skin peeking up at me as I observed.
I loved those jeans, but turned away from them, and saw what one reads about when writers describe a near-death experience: that light. At 17 I’d never heard of it, but I know what I saw: a formless, luminous space, and in the distance, a glow, radiant, and summoning.
I decided, clear as a bell, “I don’t want to go.”
I’d been informed, soon after awakening from surgery, that I’d “almost died.” I knew I actually had died, though I couldn’t articulate it for years. I had peritonitis, my surgeon explained, the result of trauma from banging into a tree with my abdomen. Internal injuries, aggravated by laughing with a friend, allowed digestive juices to seep into my system, which is toxic. How had they missed this possibility when I first went to the E.R.? Why weren’t my parents warned to watch for signs? If Karen had not piloted us through those suburban streets, I may not have had the choice to return from the light.
◆
Coming back from the light was one decision, another was made in my forties, when my brother’s cancer meant I’d soon be chauffeuring our parents to his funeral.
My parents were liberal, funny, and welcomed my friends. I’d always looked forward to visiting them in my 20s and 30s, but when I stepped into my childhood home, it was as if I’d been cast under a spell. I became peeved and sullen, withdrawing to my old bedroom with the New York Times Sunday magazines they’d stacked in a wicker picnic basket, just for me; lamenting over salads of iceberg lettuce when I preferred a mix of red leaf and bib; stomping up the basement stairs after finding an accumulation of lint in the dryer trap, demanding to know how often it was emptied. I was rude, often hostile. I was not like this with other people.
I invited friends to join us for holidays over the years. Most of them questioned why I was so mean to my parents. We’d been cracking jokes on the drive to their house, and now I was snapping at my mother when all she did was offer to refill my I Heart NJ coffee mug. They adored my parents; why didn’t I?
I was unable, then, to be as stupefied by my behavior as I am now, looking back. It was as if I were in a time warp, ricocheting me back to a fuming adolescence just by opening their screen door. I was thirteen until I was forty, harboring a dark stone in the warm light of my parents’ affection. Instead of reflecting their love, I hurled that stone.
I now recognize the irony of refusing to hold myself accountable to that behavior. I, who was two-faced with my parents, was often infuriated by the same duplicity in others. Friends knew me as warm-hearted and comical, but when it came to inconsistencies, I could turn on a dime. I seethed when those who worked for “green” organizations ordered hamburgers, chafed at those who marched for equal rights while immobilized by their own powerless choices. I was all about “walking the talk” until it came to my own secret: bulimia. I ate unrestrained and appeared slim anyway, a deception that, because it is the nature of deceit, I did not face. I challenged the world to be honest while blithely concealing a liar within.
My partners, all raised to respect their elders, were shocked when they heard me rebuff my father’s remarks or mock my mother as she prepared our dinners. Each man told me – one when I was 22, another when I was 26, another when 31—that it wasn’t right. Why was I so angry, they’d ask. They meant to be kind, but their “checking-in” only sparked my smoldering fury. Even the slightest breeze can provoke a glow of embers.
I made the decision to end this behavior while driving toward my parents’ exit on the Garden State Parkway. I knew I could stop. I was in my 40s. Their son was dying. Enough was enough. I didn’t have time to grapple with the roots of this ire, I just had to restrain it. I entered their house that day with a gentle hello, my terseness they’d long become accustomed to now abandoned along the parkway.
Kindness is a lighter tool to wield than hostility. I left our visits carrying the weight of my brother’s illness, and then the burden of their grief, added to my own, but never again with the crush of replaying my hurtful remarks.
This decision freed me from the straight jacket that is anger. Things changed: I loaded their beach chairs into my trunk without barking about the sand. I joined my dad at Shoppers, tossing the Frosted Flakes they both relished into the cart instead of lecturing him about the hazards of sugar. At yard sales, I waited patiently through my mother’s endless chats with the homeowner (this was before cell phones, which have eradicated the need to be patient). We gathered together for the PBS News Hour, the three of us deliberating over Gwen Ifill’s commentary.
They never forgave me, which I appreciated. Forgiveness assumes one moves on, without obligation, as if the infliction of pain can be allocated to history. The willingness to be hurtful – or not – was a choice I needed to assimilate in the present, not to assign, as if forgotten, to the past. And, forgiving me would suggest they were victims – but of what? My breaching the contract to be a good daughter? That was in my court, not theirs.
When I tried to apologize, they waved me off, explaining that I was human. “We’re all flawed,” my dad said, and my mother, “We love you no matter what.”
I cradled that dark stone I’d hurled at them, holding it tight, vigilant to avoid aiming it at others.
◆
Another decision, this time hiking in Nepal, 28, alone, following the Annapurna circuit. My mind as open as the vast Himalayan sky, thoughts fueled by pace, tethering to ideas as I took one step, then another. Change spurred me, despite being at an age when friends were beginning to ensconce themselves in a chosen career, progressing up the rungs of a singular ladder. This felt suffocating; a sole ambition feeling less like motivation and more like a sequestering of chance. I was still driven by imagination, continuing to concoct plans like a recent grad, valuing unchartered scenarios over employee benefits.
In college, after several semesters of cringe-worthy writing workshops, I suspended my dreams of publishing and developed an independent major in Dance Therapy, which one could do then – this was the 70s. I then designed an internship by contacting practitioners listed in the American Dance Therapy (ADT) membership guide. It was years before the luxury of “copy and paste,” so I penned each letter, licked each envelope, and routinely checked the mailbox of the house I shared with five other women. Several dance therapists responded. I visited one in Los Angeles, who announced she’d canceled her group because of rain when I knocked on her door, despite my having traveled from Rochester to observe a session; another at a state institution in Shreveport, LA, where the overt racism gave me chills. Then I traveled to Palo Alto to meet Kathy, who brewed peppermint tea in her College Terrace bungalow. I found myself sinking into the massive floor-pillows arranged by the fireplace, never wanting to leave, and returned for my internship after graduation.
I’d been introduced to dance therapy in 1974 on World Campus Afloat, an old ocean liner turned into a college, when I was circumventing the globe with 300 other students. While we were encouraged to join faculty-led tours, I usually explored ports with Patti, one of the few people I’d met, at the time, whose appetite for adventure matched my own. We both welcomed the approach of curious locals in restaurants, subways and street markets, conversations sometimes leading to invitations to join a family for dinner, or even for the night, heads shaking at the suggestion of our finding a cheap hotel. In Kyoto, we awakened to our host’s breakfast of dried seaweed and runny eggs, flummoxed by chopsticks. We tossed our sleeping bags on the beaches of Colombo, swimming in the night sea, awed by sparkling plankton dripping from spread fingers. We placed coins onto the outstretched palms of children begging in Bombay until we found ourselves surrounded, faced with the pleading cries of unfathomable desperation. We piled into a jeep, jostling across the Serengeti. Returning to Nairobi by bus, my seat mate was a Maasai, wrapped in crimson, his spear leaning out the open window. We had no spoken language, but when I offered him a cold Fanta from a roadside stand, he accepted it with a quiet, smiling nod.
At sea, we attended required classes: history, anthropology, political science, all reflecting our ports of call. We also had electives, and I’d registered for Expressive Arts, not knowing what I was getting into. From the start, the teacher – Rita – had us whooping our names, sketching our thoughts, composing poetry we then had to render with choreography, challenges as eye-opening as my in-country travels. I’d whirled around my childhood living room to Broadway tunes and compiled thoughts in journals, but Rita’s classes tapped into a collective yearning for connection and vulnerability. They mirrored what I’d encountered in port, and I was riveted.
I eyed the dining room regularly for her, just to talk. She’d led groups in psych wards, classrooms, geriatric centers. She showed the class Janet Adler’s Looking for Me, a 1968 filmstrip documenting a dance therapist’s work. I watched it mesmerized, the ship rolling its way up the coast of West Africa, and decided, “That’s what’s next for me.”
◆
By the time I’d reached Tatopani on Nepal’s Annapurna Circuit I’d arrived at a three-stage plan: First, I’d return to Palo Alto to write in the burgeoning technology industry. I had friends in Silicon Valley communication firms and was drawn to being in the midst, somehow, of this edgy, newfangled thing called “personal computing.”
Second, I’d work in development for a major nonprofit. By then I’d fundraised in the grassroots sector and was intrigued by the big leagues. Third, I’d lead an alternative retreat center. This was a vision I’d spun on my walks home from elementary school, fantasizing about places where people could live together, eat together, attend the kinds of classes I thought, back then, were fun: art, music, writing, dance. By the time I was in my thirties, I knew such places existed. I wanted in.
The dance therapy internship in Palo Alto had segued into a position several years before my walk in Nepal, where I’d angled my cart heavy with a record player and art supplies along the tarmac paths between hospital buildings. In the locked ward, I assembled nonverbal patients, first drawing at tables – at the beginning of a session, their papers often bleary with black scrawls – and then rising, swaying to gentle music, collecting into a circle, unified. I’d lower the needle to the track of “Yester Me, Yester You, Yesterday,” on my Stevie Wonder LP, each of us responding in our own tempo, eliciting smiles, the random wiggle of a jazz hand, a fleeting moment of eye contact. We’d return to seated dance, their endurance short-lived, and then I’d supply them with more blank paper, which they’d now fill with colorful swirls, stick figures, a sun. In Day Treatment, participants read their poetry, fostering the courage they’d need to board a bus or apply for a job. Assigned to geriatrics, I dropped Glen Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” from the stack, patients bobbing in their chairs as we sang, the melody unlocking lyrics buried decades ago. “Won’t you choo choo me home?”
I’d loved this work, leaving it only because my position was funded through a community outreach program, which was abolished, along with thousands of others across the state, with the 1978 passage of California’s Proposition 13. Jobless, I landed a position packing food for a hiking camp. I later learned that I was offered the job not despite my wilderness experience, but because of it, as most outdoorsy types snubbed afternoons inside the windowless “Food Shack,” scooping almonds into baggies, tallying Kippers cans, and then helping kids cram it all into backpacks for three-day, or five-day, or the arduous “gonzo” ten-day treks.
I was a rookie on the trail, joining the more experienced hikers as they crouched around a topo map unfolded in the dirt, puzzling through our route by tracing fingertips along wavy black lines. I was traversing ridges like a veteran by the end of the summer, and by the next, became the camp’s director, another job available because no one wanted it. Always a prudent organization, it was now threadbare, offering discounts whenever asked, but not augmenting them with donations, and thus operating on almost nothing. When we needed to repair the wooden frames used for storm tents, we pulled the nails out of the broken two by fours, hammered on them till they were straight, and then banged them back into whatever lumber scraps we’d salvaged from the dump in town. Unable to replace cracked PVC pipe to guide the flow of spring water down the mountainside to base camp, we bought endless silver-colored clamps, as that’s what we could afford. We tightened them around every leak, the clamps shimmering in the dapples of sunlight peeking through the branches of Foxtail Pines.
As director, I borrowed the paperback Guide to California’s Foundations from the library and began writing grants. I believed in Robin Hood. Within a year we had a new truck, funds for construction, cases of donated moleskin, and cash in the bank.
By the time I’d finished the Annapurna Circuit I’d given myself an ultimatum: to achieve my three goals, I must give up bulimia. I needed the focus; fraudulence was distracting.
Bulimia had once been a boon. It helped me out-smart food, keeping calories from betraying my concave belly with softness, my narrow runner’s thighs with the curve of a woman’s. I was victorious, but recognized it was now time to concede.
◆
I’d traveled to Nepal after a stint teaching English in Japan, where I’d rented a sunny studio apartment above a private residence. Since most classes were scheduled in the early evening, I had spacious days at home.
The bathroom was down a flight of outside steps, where the “furo” – a small bathtub, its heater ignited only at night – awaited, thin folded washcloths stacked next to the kneeling-level faucets, where tradition requires one to scrub before soaking. I’d arrive home around 11:00, after an evening of sushi and sake, and slip into the furo. I’d then climb up to my apartment, withered and exhausted, unfold the futon and drift off.
I’d flop the futon over my balcony railing each morning, mimicking my neighbors, who flanked their family’s many to my one, then brew strong coffee, and write. I wrote reams. I’d left writing behind in my young twenties, and now, these unscheduled days brought me back to a typewriter, borrowed from the school. I lived in Sendai from March through October, a flowery cool spring banging into the wall of heat that is a steamy Japanese summer. My curtains hung limp, the wafting of May’s breezes stilled by a clammy June. It didn’t bother me. I found my muse in the muggy air, and in my invisibility.
I was invisible because I was “Gaijin,” the Japanese term for foreigner. Gaijin are both captivating and forgettable, omnipresent and indistinguishable. That hot summer, I no longer required the ruse that is bulimia. Here, my anonymity liberated me from a need to be thin. I was a secret just walking down the street.
Solitude satiated me, as did my solo frequent trips, venturing to hot springs and ryokans, booking bunks at hostels in Tokyo, Kyoto, Mt Fuji. I met up with other expats along the way, harmonizing to John Denver’s Country Roads at a karaoke bar, line dancing to our reflections in a mirrored disco. We swapped travel stories. Some taught English in South Korea, others in China, planting seeds in a generation about to bloom.
Home from Nepal, I kept my pledge to give up bulimia. I had taken occasional breaks over the past twelve years, but now, I’d determined, I was ditching it for good.
It is nearly impossible, people say, to recover from an eating disorder without counseling. If the role of a therapist is to help reassess choices, the summer in Japan was my therapist. I wove the threads of those tranquil days into the fabric of a new pattern in Palo Alto, seeking the solace of my room immediately after swallowing, as that’s when eating ended for me in those days: with the swallow.
The culture was just starting to give voice to bulimia as I was relinquishing it, and I devoured every article, surprised to read of the gyrations many people used. I scorned those who had not developed my proficient technique, as I’d trained my esophagus to soundlessly reverse the journey of food, extricating it, easily, adroit, from the top of my stomach.
This act was not as repugnant as the purging one sees in films. I was never Princess Di in The Crown, hands like paws digging into a cake. Binging never even occurred to me. I ate healthy food, but it was all a threat, potentially sabotaging the roomy waistband of my Levi 501 button-ups, which beckoned ever so slightly below my navel, or the promise of a level belly in a swimsuit, even if breathing. I couldn’t abandon this body to the peril of calories, enduring what it meant to be thick waisted: that one was immediately regarded as less capable, more irrelevant, than thinner women.
The messages were clear: boys are judged for their brains, girls for their bodies. This from a daughter who was raised to be brave; to cultivate her aspirations – which I did – but I also consumed these cultural messages. I flaunted a life of feminism, all the while harboring a furtive habit in the name of patriarchal standards.
I did not have these insights, recently home from walking the Annapurna Circuit. Instead, I had resolve. It was the same strategy I used, years later, amending the hurtful behavior I’d allowed with my parents. In both cases, the decision was the same: I needed to stop.
I started slowly. I’d finish a meal that, in the past, would obsess me until it was ejected, emancipating me with emptiness, but now, full, I’d lay prone on my bed, still. I’d placate this impulse, hands resting on my belly, reciting soundlessly that I was ok, food is ok. It’s ok to eat. I was changing a decades-old pattern, a fixation calcified by mastery and time. I’d relax into memories of that peaceful Sendai apartment. I’d had no need for bulimia that summer, evidence, I assured myself, that I could exist without it now.
It took time. As much as I had once refused to keep food in, I now denied, day after day after day, the urge to remove it. Years later I would learn that, in meditation, one observes thoughts, greeting them, letting them go. That was my tactic, back then. Hello, restraint, I would say to myself, spine flat against blankets. Hello, feeling satiated. Welcome.
I did get softer, which I detested, but I’d made my decision. And, I had my goals, which eclipsed body-shaming.
I’d met my first goal as a Kelly Girl, when a client was swayed by my having lived in Japan and hired me to write about Japanese manufacturing techniques being implemented in Silicon Valley. I stopped in my tracks in the middle of an assignment at this job, realizing I’d proceeded through my day—interviewing, researching, editing—without the compulsion to be emptied. I’d given up bulimia, though I cannot say, writing this, that I ever completely renunciated the chagrin that is having a female body, or that I still don’t yield to patriarchy. As my father once acknowledged, we’re all human.
I realized my second goal, as well, moving to Cambridge, MA, for a position in development at Planned Parenthood. On weekends I joined colleagues on the dance floors across Boston, rocking out to Aretha Franklin Who’s Zoomin’ Who, or drove to Wellfleet, sandwiching myself for long walks between the Atlantic and towering dunes.
One spring morning I flipped open a catalog from my office mailbox and stared, stunned, at the architectural rendering of a lakeside campus. It was as if I were a drone again, flying above this illustration as I had my body in the emergency room, recognizing this campus as the one I’d envisioned for my third goal on the walk in Nepal. I dialed the number in the catalog, interviewed the next weekend, and stayed for eight years.
This was Omega Institute, located in New York’s lush Hudson Valley. It still hosts hundreds of workshops focusing on the arts, spirituality, and what was known (this was the mid-1980s) as “self-help.” Then we were a pioneering retreat center, expanding so fast that I no longer needed to search for something different; at Omega, the unconventional came to us.
The Omega staff ate together in a sprawling dining hall. One night I recounted the myriad of tasks I’d completed that day: brochure copy mailed to a graphic designer, the coordination of advertising placements, the editing of a press release.
My new friends listened, and then one said, “You know, Sarah, we’d love you even if you didn’t get so much done,” and I, completely baffled, responded, “Why?”
“We’d love you for who you are,” one answered.
“Just for you,” another echoed, asking, “Is that possible?”
My mind goes blank as I dredge up this memory, as blank as it was when the question was posed. It’s an excellent inquiry: can we be loved just for who we are? Not for our achievements, our identities, or our bodies, but for this nebulous thing called “who we are.”
◆
I’d headed to Japan because I’d craved something new after serving as camp director.
I’d looked up English Language Schools in the yellow pages and found one led by someone who’d made enough connections teaching in Tokyo to open an American school, hosting Japanese businessmen in the heart of Silicon Valley. They stayed in chain hotels and wandered the aisles of the nearby Sears, played Pac-Man at Stanford’s Tressider Union, peeked into the inaugural Victoria’s Secret’s store, its iconic back wall staircase lending itself to their imaginations.
He’d charged me a fee to be recommended to the St. James English School in Sendai, which I’d readily paid, trusting it would land me a job. It did. To prepare, I’d joined him as he’d steered students through the craft of small talk. In my mind, he did practically nothing.
The men wore identical blue suits, entered the classroom in a unified chorus of “Good Morning,” nodded in synchrony when he’d invited them to sit. He coached them on American customs: eye contact, acknowledging women in a meeting, curtailing whispered side-talk.
I watched and decided, “I could do that.”
I’d thought the same thing years later, staring out the window of a ferry between Orcas Island and Seattle, where I was freelancing for a friend’s communications firm. I’d just spent the weekend at Doe Bay, kayaking chilly waters as the inquiring faces of harbor seals popped up alongside my boat. I was 43, soon to be 44 – this was 1998 – and had instructed myself, as many single people do, to stop aching for a partner to launch the family that by then I so yearned for, and instead to embrace the life I’d already created. I’d been diverted from what I had by what I lacked, and hoped to reframe my life to be unencumbered by longing.
I emphasized the positives: gratifying work, travel, friends. I dulled desire with hilly weekend runs, after which I could only fall into exhaustion, too spent to feel the persistent clawing of unrealized dreams. This had been successful until I stared out that rain-splattered window at the Puget Sound and then down at a discarded newspaper, where my eye caught an article by a woman who’d gone to Russia to adopt a baby, and was now writing about the joys of raising her son alone.
“I could do that,” I thought, and hopped on AskJeeves the moment I returned home. It took just a few minutes to identify my obstacle: adoption fees and travel amounted to $25,000. This seemed impossible, but the idea endured.
My morning jogs circled the top of Queen Anne Hill, taking me through dawn-lit neighborhoods plush with the colorful gardens of a mild Seattle climate, ending at Kerry Park, where I stretched as the city awakened, below. I ran with this question: did I want to adopt to provide respite to my loneliness, still a relentless scourge despite my engaging schedule, or did I want to adopt to raise a child?
I knew what single parenting might entail. I also knew there was a dam around my heart ready to release a reservoir of boundless mothering love. I could only adopt, I coached myself on those sunrise runs, if I was doing so to unleash this love, not to appease the loneliness.
I made the decision to adopt in April, clueless to how I’d meet the costs. In May, I was breezing into the Omega dining hall on a visit back east when a friend motioned to me. He’d been awarded a book contract, he explained, but needed a ghostwriter. Was I interested? He’d pay me $25,000.
I submitted a deposit to the adoption agency that week and completed his book by Random House’s December deadline. (It’s still on amazon: The Essentials of Yoga). I also threw myself into paperwork, which was relentless, but doable: immigration clearances, social worker approvals, medical screenings, forms for the Chinese government, the American government, the District of Columbia, where I’d made my home. My agency gave me a list with due dates, which I attached to my refrigerator with a magnet, checking each one as the months went by. It was a gestation of sorts. By March, 1999, my dossier was in a FedEx box on its way to China.
The next November, seated in the back row of a conference in the Old Executive Office Building, next to the White House, I noticed the door opening slightly, letting in a sliver of light. A colleague tiptoed to me, whispering that a FedEX envelope from my adoption agency – my colleagues knew I was waiting for this day, for this envelope – was on my desk.
◆
It was winter when I brought Evan home. One hushed evening, dishes washed, the carpet strewn with board books and my son peaceful in his crib, I thought, “This is my life.” It was what I’d thought several years before adopting, when my brother died of cancer: this is my life now – a life without him.
As my brother’s caregiver, I had put one foot in front of the other: toiling up the impossible incline that is seeing a loved one suffer, stepping gingerly as he lay dying, the ground shifting under my feet. After he’d died, I’d wandered aimlessly, trying to circumvent a pain to which I’d finally succumbed, descending into darkness, immobilized.
Now, home from China, life was no longer about loss. I could rise to the wonder of gain just as I had once buckled under the shock of grief. Pain is beyond our control, forcing us to experience its anguish, but we must opt to recognize pleasure; to welcome its presence. It’s another decision. With pleasure, we choose to come alive.
Evan and I met an hour after my arrival. There was a knock on my hotel room door, and when I opened it, I was greeted by five adults, shoulder to shoulder, two on each side of the one extending a baby.
Evan was sleeping. They placed him in my arms and trailed me into the room, a translator asking if I had any questions.
“Sure,” I said, wrapping my arms around my boy. “What does he like to eat? Is he healthy?”
They answered quickly (he likes rice cereal, and, yes, yes, he’s healthy, yes) and then hurried on. I peered out the door to wave goodbye and saw an orderly line of orphanage nannies along the wall of this endless hallway, all snuggling babies, waiting to hand them, as they had mine, to the Chinese officials rapping on the doors of other anticipating parents.
“Now what?” I wondered.
I lay down and he splayed across my belly, his lightness rousing a dormant tenderness that’s been awakened in me ever since. I expected him to cry when he stirred, as I was a stranger, but he didn’t. He lifted his gaze, and our journey together began.
