Chapter One When Lena climbs off the bus in the predawn dark of a small mountain town she doesn’t know the name of, she’s not thinking about her home now some seven hundred miles behind her; she’s not thinking…
I insist I need a corset for under my dress. A wedding. My cousin’s. A purple strapless with a layer of chiffon. My mother is outside the dressing room. She asks if anything fits. I stare down the mirror.…
When I was in my mid-twenties, I suffered from an eating disorder. It’s an odd expression: “to suffer from.” If I’m being honest, it’s more accurate to say, “I inflicted upon myself.” This eating disorder. The language is important: the agency it gives or strips away. And I felt, in the moment, that I had agency. This is what scares me the most: the lucidity I remember. The thought that: no, I don’t have an eating disorder, I am just playing at having an eating disorder. I can stop at any moment. I am in control. Well. I wasn’t. And I didn’t. The summer I’m writing about here is the summer I realized I was not at all in control. I was sick. Eating hardly anything and throwing up everything. Running. Whiskey. That summer, I was hospitalized for dehydration. That summer, I remember this specific moment in the dressing room, and eventually the realization that no matter what my body looked like from the outside, I would always hate it on the inside. It would never be the right shape. I would never be satisfied. To realize something like this is exhausting.
I have written about my eating disorder before. Many times over. I have exhausted it. And yet, sometimes a moment like this resurfaces and demands to be written. This piece was written during a SmokeLong Quarterly workshop for a prompt about changing bodies. I think often about changing my body—still. Except now, I want it stronger, more capable. Not exactly thinner, but sometimes thinner. Call it societal expectations or the double standard of being a woman. Blame the outside. But I know it has everything to do with the inside. I know that this is where the real work needs to be done.
But what I really want to say is this: those women who confronted me about my disorder. Those women who called it what it was. One woman, in particular: Sarah Goodman. I hated her at the time. I was embarrassed and furious that she had the nerve to confront me. But as I eventually grew and healed, it was her voice in my head that kept me going. Not every day, but some days. The way she said, “I love you, and—” The way she used her words to show me that yes, she did indeed see me. I was not invisible, no matter how much I shrank.
This essay doesn’t contain a lot of what we creative nonfiction writers like to call reflection. It is in-scene. It is what I remember happening translated to the page. It is brief. It is painful—the writing of it, the experience of it. If only I could go back to that young woman I was, if only I could tell her what I know now. If only I could be the one to say the word disorder.
ALLISON FIELD BELL is a multigenre writer originally from California. She is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in fiction from New Mexico State University. Allison is the author of the poetry chapbook Without Woman or Body, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in June 2025, and the creative nonfiction chapbook Edge of the Sea, forthcoming from CutBank Books in Spring 2025. Her prose appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, The Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, West Branch, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Passages North, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @afb16.
