feeling lonely on the beach an arm's length away from you,
i can't imagine there's anything out past the sky and sea,
and the place they meet--
a color i've never seen before,
all those dust motes in the mouth of the universe,
yawning open.

but you say
if i held a magnifying glass to a leaf,
i'd see a dozen tiny leaves within it,
and a hundred within each of them,
and on and on
all their little veins stretching out to sea and sky
like our hands in the darkness,
blind to the galaxies just under our dirty fingernails,
the matted roots of cities
clinging to the insides of our eyes.

if i could, i would hold a magnifying glass to my loneliness.

and would i see
just me, palm open, at the edge of the ocean,
trapped within my heart,
within my heart,
within my heart,
like russian dolls?

or would loneliness include us both
in its infinity?
the sea and sky and 2 near strangers--
just old friends still unfurling
like ferns opening outward,
a kaleidoscope of skin and blues
and truths curled closed.

even now i wonder how much i have known you
through your absences,
the way the sea has carved the earth and in these carvings lives its history.
they say that cold is an absence of heat.
and i wonder, is there any such thing as an absence of sky?
and what would it look like, magnified?

if i could, i would look at your life under a magnifying glass,
till the deserts are just grains of sand,
and in the grains of sand are deserts,
and your lover's skin
and my skin,
are all just lines that run like rivers
into spirals at the fingertips.

they say we've burned holes in the sky.
and i would
spin my thoughts into string
and weave a new sky
to wrap around us.
but then we'd never get the chance to see
its absence.
under a magnifying glass, it looks
just like
loneliness.

that break of blue just before the horizon.

Here is where time spirals in on itself,
and i have known you for a week,
and also for forever,
reaching for words that are not yet born,
their syllables uncurling open.

in the palm of your hand,
i trace the patterns of your silences,
the contours of your history,
like the shape of your body next to me,
or its absence,
like water,
blues
on the sand.

Labels: By Ana, for john fromeverywhere

Long after cooking,
spices, like some memories,
stick to fingertips.

Labels: By Ana

Leaving the theater,
I feel like I'm in a film.
The music slows, so,
softly, I walk tall through the
dark halls, and look for endings.

Labels: By Ana

"Have trains ever collided?"
a young boy asks his mother.
I am watching them.
She pulls him towards the door of the coffeeshop by one hand. His other digs in his pocket for the answer.
It is an urgent question,
a question born immaculately
in curiousity,
a question that must be answered.
"Yes," she says, after a moment.
And then they are gone,
leaving me to write that there was a time before I knew of train crashes,
of crashes at all,
of tracks and streets criss-crossing horizons like tic-tac-toe games
destined to end.
There was a time before x's and o's
a time before letters,
were magic, their permutations endless.
but this was before i could count
before numbers existed,
before seasons and seconds.
before minutes and planets danced pirouettes on an axis of time
like angels on the head of a pin
before religion
before a need to explain
before death and birth, and day and night were divided.

Then, there was only the pulse of silence.
and it pounded like pencil on paper,
like rain on pavement,
like the heart of a train.

And two thoughts collided,
crashed in the criss-cross of nerves that carry consciousness!
and light sparked in the darkness of the inside of the universe!
and i lived in a body inside-out
my hands reached out, suddenly needing nothing and everything
the big bang at the beginning went off like a gunshot,
took hold like a wound
bleeding life in the middle of blackness.
The crash had caught fire,
and my eyes burst open
and began to see.

Labels: By Ana

I came to the beach to be alone.

My feet left lonely footprints in the sand,
and the sand left lonely sandprints in my feet.

To me, these patterns look tiny, like freckles or stars,
but if I were small, even smaller than sand,
they would be the crators on the moon, the grand canyon, the great lakes,
and they would make me feel so small, as I looked out over their emptiness.

But I am human, and I watch, instead,
the rain clouds blossom above me,
like a bouquet of faces,
like the family submerged in surf,
the grandmother's turquoise t-shirt washed into watercolors,
a perfect rendering of sea and sky.

Further down the people become silhouettes,
statues dedicated to the muses of finding seashells, of wandering till getting lost, of leaving footprints in the sand,
gray monuments reminding me I am not alone.
I watch them fade into the shadowed, hallowed place where earth meets sky,
the gap in the atmosphere where the universe was born, and is reborn every moment,
where lonely statues evaporate like seas, like dreams, like memories,
as words bloom in the air
like clouds of rain.

Labels: By Ana

Do old loves have ghosts
like ancestors? Do they move
like water, cold? And
will they ever fall to Earth,
like blackened leaves, melted snow?

Labels: By Ana

In Elementary school, I stuttered.
W’s were worst.
Like wolves, they leered at me, bared jagged teeth
from the pages of fairytales.

So teachers sent me
to experts in office back rooms
with flash cards, fake wood tables, books.

After several sessions, they said
my mind moved too quickly
for my mouth to catch up.

I've always chased my thoughts like raindrops
spiraling in breathless air,
scaling me, their eyes shining, scared
of shattering.

I'd watch them fall across car windows
from my car seat, stained like storms.
And as they'd race toward the edge,
I'd hedge bets.

But inside, I move slow as time,
as Earth
red rocks and rising tides
climbing down and up
in lines
you traced with your fingertips.

When you left me, you moved like my mind.
You trembled over me,
violently
crumbled me,
finally,
the darkening tranquility
broken,
fallen open,

frail as rain.

As if I, earthly, only weighed you down.

Since then, I have found
a canyon,
that sits between my ribs,
small and silent,
a spoon-sized grave
shaped like a raindrop.

And I think it’s always been there.

And if you held your head against it,
(like you used to,)
you'd hear the ocean,
gently rocking you,
washing you
away.

Labels: By Ana

I don't know if anyone's ever told you this before,
but Trying To Forget You
is a man who smells like you,
and smiles like you,
and he's really got your walk down.

He's got sandalwood and sunlit skin,
thin limbs that speak with slow, smooth movements
of his tongue,
sung along to old Doors songs
teeth grinning, earnest, tarnished,

bent

Like the pages of the books we borrowed forth and back
and never read.
They sit next to our beds
and wait for us to open,
just slightly misplaced and
oddly obsolete.

Today I shopped for new books
hoping to learn
to Take My French Further and Do It Myself!
I turned ambitions into salvations,
and stacked them close to my chest,
hoping that, with them, I could
forget Trying To
Forget You.

I saw him, though,
in "Culture and Society"
(your favorite section, tragically next to "Feminism".)

And then, again
sprawled out comfortably
sipping green tea
in the cafe.

So I walked--no, ran--away,
weaving in and out of the shelves I've found and made familiar,
tracing the spines
of titles that rise
from the worn, carpeted ground.

Kneeling, my hands opened
to forgotten names,
hoping to learn,
in their thin refrains,
how to say
all of this.
(Because maybe if I write down all the sadness, it'll disappear.)

But all I could think
was "Thank. Fucking. God
you never read poetry."

Labels: By Ana

You say that
in your mind
you stop time.
You slide between moments,
and sleep for hours,
under sheets made out of magic powers.

There’s no rush of schedule
no crush of dread
pulling you awake
so you lie in bed,
and make love,
with everyone you've ever loved.

Your kisses are stories, unfolding
and you sip your conversations slowly,
the metaphors and moonlight swishing between your teeth,
like tea.

You stroll down New York city streets,
with your hands in pea coat pockets.
the clocks are only faceless sockets
and music's sweeping, softly, through the frozen streams of cars.

The sky is full of constellations
and the seconds still as stars.

But in our conversations,
which all take place in time,
you tell me everyone you love can't die.

They will be lined
with tears and wrinkles
like years faded to torn poetry.

Time gives us our frailty.
But I,
I am grateful time will only let me know you

Briefly

like the flicker of stars
cracking open
like our lives bending, broken
our fears spoken
to music soaking in the deep night.

Like a precious dream
Bared in the light.

Labels: By Ana

They live within the worn gray walls
of tin and rain and smoke and time.
They live in the gray of their grandmother's eyes,
as she sits next to the open door,
her hands as empty and shining and torn
as the earth floor.

She tells us she's lonely
and the words break like her soft bones
stuck
in the hush of dust and sunlight,
in the dirty chair.

She kisses our cheeks, and cries
and her tears fill up our eyes
with the softness
worn into her life
by the shadows of the fire that cooks food in the corner.

In a crack between the gray walls,
I find them-- two boys' eyes,
as small and shy and dark
as the puppies they carry, in their arms,
to us.

We wish we could remember how to say they're beautiful
as light falls through the round holes in the tin roof like rain.

*the name of the poem's subject, an old woman I met in costa rica; also means "light" in spanish, which i found to be ridiculously appropiate

Labels: By Ana

It is born cucooned
inside regret. It flutters,
hushed: the loneliness.

Labels: By Ana

We walk amidst tapestries,
their dust stories
swirling golden in the silken air,
their faces fair.

But we wear
the colors of sky cracked open,
dresses soft as eggshells broken.
And in cheap high heels,
our feet sore,
we leave apologies scuffed on the clean floor.

Alone before the microphone,
our hands shrink into pupils,
hard.
Our breaths, like sails,
tear apart
on tides of
sequined ribs and thighs,
flattery dripped
from fat, red lips,
with pearls of teeth and fingertips
strung up under marble eyes.

We sing love poems
and they just walk away
like white wine,
tiny seas swirled into storms
by heels that clink like fluted glass
when they pass
and wash their lives away
in sips.

We drown in tapestries dripping down the walls.
And our words,
like small soft faces, fall
-Ignored-
into the pools of chatter.
and shatter
on the cool glass floor.

Labels: By Ana

My father doesn’t have a home.

He was born in a New York City borough, to a house hidden between high hills and distant highways, in the days before the grass gave way to asphalt in the lot behind his house. The Long Island Expressway was built there when he was three, so he grew up in the place where the pavement met the playground, amidst engines never loud enough to silence his mother’s screams.

His mother raged at a husband who was too gentle to raise his hand or voice to answer her. She screamed about how they would leave each other. She screamed to move him, because if he moved, even to hit or silence her, she would know he loved her, and didn’t want to lose her. And though his hands had made rhythms out of plywood and car engine machinery, she screamed and screamed but could not make them move.
So my father grew up in the noise between his parents’ silences, squeezed between two older brothers on road trips to the water. He thought if he could just find a quiet place, he could hold his family together, so he looked out car windows and into television sets for a home he never found.

He burrowed into the attic of his house, at 12, and stayed there until he was 33, and all the noise was gone. In the silence, he learned to meditate, work, live alone and love.

My mother met him, loved him, and made him move.
They married in another state. And I was born there.

But my father says he met me before I was born, in a house on Cape Cod, inside himself. He was deep and quiet like the sea outside the window.

He says he can remember nearly drowning on vacation as a kid, when he sank down to the bottom of the turquoise world, and everything was finally quiet and peaceful. He says meditation is like drowning. He’s meditated for 28 years. He meditated in Cape Cod in a cottage, while his wife was skinny with a baby in her belly, and he talked to the baby, inside himself, and told her he’d find her a home.

So they moved to Florida. There, my father grew warm and happy. But he grew to despise Florida when its constant construction of houses and highways began. With everything always growing out and up, nothing was quiet long enough for him to burrow into it and make it home.

So my father gathered about him everyone he loved, all the strange neighbors he had taught to meditate and turned into friends. He said we could all move somewhere together, call it a commune, grow our own food, and there wouldn’t be any highways anywhere that we could hear.

I guess nobody ever really feels like they’ve got a home, because we all began to look for one everywhere where land met turquoise water-- in every state bordered by sea. We flew in shuddering jets, where I’d look out scratched windows to see tiny, shining houses below and see us living there. We drove toward perfect homes on road trips where I’d fall asleep between two screaming parents, hoping that if I kept them together, they would stay still long enough to notice each other.

They never did.

The search for a home began when I was three, and it never ended.

We climbed mountains and walked along rivers through the backyards of people we’d never met. We slept in dingy hotels and drove hours through desolate towns, jotting down the numbers on for-sale signs. We stayed in cold, whitewashed log cabins in winter, just to visit the mansions nearby. We befriended dozens of realtors and hundreds of home owners. But nothing they could offer us was exactly right for us, even though it seemed okay for them. So we lost thousands of dollars in non-refundable deposits on houses we determined weren’t homes.

The longer we searched, the harder it became, because after a while, we began to love the search itself. And we’d seen so many small towns and pretty houses, they needed to become more than that in order to be worth the sacrifice we’d make of giving up our search.

The small towns now needed gourmet restaurants. The houses needed barns and cottages and wrap-around porches. And the fields nearby needed wildlife sanctuaries, because it wasn’t worth living anywhere that could ever get ruined.

It seemed as though my father ruined everything last week, when he found us a home.

Burrowed between mountains and wildlife sanctuaries, the mansion had a barn, a cottage, and a wrap-around porch. The streets of the town below were lined by used bookstores, a river, and gourmet restaurants. As we wandered through it, we felt like we were home.

My father and I sat down next to the river, and he told me the town it flowed through would never be my home. He wouldn’t move there, and he didn’t know why. Maybe it was the mountains, he said. In between them, he felt sort of trapped.

And I thought, I feel trapped. I have lived in anticipation of an upheaval and a home that has never come, and I can’t live with the idea that it won’t. This was your dream, but it has become ours. What did you want if not a home to fill yourself with? What did you want if not a turquoise river to flow through you, that you could sink down inside? What did you want if not everyone you love to stay still with you, in a house with you, forever? And now you have us and you have found a place for us. And you won’t give it a place inside of you.

But the things I screamed were less poetic than that.

I screamed that I share a tiny room with someone who sold her house to buy the last commune we didn’t buy. I screamed about all the things his dreams and decisions were doing to all of us.
He yelled that I was selfish, and fell into silence.

And in his silence, I waited for him to figure himself out the way he always did.

But he didn’t. So for the first time, I forgot myself, and learned to forget selfishness, as I reached for him. I discovered how to find him, where he was sunk down inside himself, and staring at the scene before us.

The river and the mountains and the house were just too big for him to burrow into, and they were growing in his mind, up and out, as he realized they wouldn’t be his home.

He was drowning, and I began to drown with him.

My father had thought that he had to find a house for everyone and all the love he had for them, and hold beautiful scenes still within its sunlit windows. But now he couldn’t bring himself to burrow into the house before us because that would mean having nowhere quiet left to go when the scene outside grew houses and highways that grew away from us. We would never let a house hurt us the way we had been hurt as kids, sitting in the backseats of cars, watching the waves outside the window wash away everything but hope. Highways and arguments were always reaching higher, growing faster, in the air above our heads. So somewhere in our search we had decided to never stay anywhere long enough to hear them.

I sank into the silence with my father, and felt myself grow closer to him, when searching for all those houses, I had only grown away. Together, we saw our lives hidden in the hills and mountains that would never mark our home.

And suddenly, the scene became more beautiful than it had been before, because we didn’t need it anymore: My father has found his home drowning in meditation. It is gone only when he reaches his head above the water.

So he and I decided, in the silence that lies at the bottom of rivers and lives, to search for our own silences as well as we can, and in them, to perhaps find a home.

Labels: By Ana

I am the shape the paper takes
crammed into your pocket,
the white thorn of infant's tooth
torn through wordless socket.

I am thirst.
sharpened into sound
that carves dry rivers into white ground
you can't make whole again.

so i fold into earth's openings,
and I'm waterlily without wings,
sinking down the denim sky
smooth white-washed and tumbled dry.

Till you find I'm empty paper sea
and your hand's tired, treading over me,
threading white waves with leaden black
that you erase, replace, rewrite, take back.

till all my words sound worn and round
and I'm just the dust of white and black,
all swirled into a yin-yang pearl
inside your seashell pocket.

Labels: By Ana

I am the shape the paper takes
jammed inside your pocket,
a jagged little geometric tooth that's tearing open
a face that can't yet speak.
I am the path its tears take:
hungry, clumsy, incoherent
sinking slowly through the denim
I’m water lily without wings

a stillborn shooting star
too small to light a sky

Labels: By Ana

so
i'm skimming
thru the poetry section
(dewey-decimal 811)
and i'm noticing
great poets often wrote mediocre poems
and i'm thinking
maybe i could write one too.

Labels: By Ana

Her house is dark,
and she says
her hands used to reach shelves higher
but now like old trees
heavied by disaster,
they have fallen down
to earth.

so
i climb up
to their storybooks
held just beyond my cereal.
a spoonful for a sentence,
we’ll spoon the story dry
till we’ve climbed so high
nobody can touch us,
interrupt us,
till we're growing
younger older faster
we can see lifetimes together
falling page-by-page across the faces of the earth.
and we’ll unearth
our secrets
in dark rooms full of pearls
that we’ll pour
past our necks
till our stomachs swirl
with stories.

Labels: By Ana

Labels: By Ana

Last night, i noticed that your eyes soften everything, even the light that falls around them, and the faces falling into them, and the walls they fall against.
From a distance, your eyes were softer than your hands
And your hands are soft like oceans
you have washed over me like ocean
and now i’m worn away.

Last night, i stood away from you on the worn carpet night, the air between us weary from years of love songs and forgetting. you danced to it, and i stood in it, in remembrance of things:

First time we met, our eyes met over breaths of confessions, making memories of loves we didn’t want anymore.

Sometimes i don’t want to love at all anymore. i wanted to tell you that last night, but i don’t like to speak in anymore’s.
and last night, i didn’t think we’d speak much anymore.

Now i don’t know.

i remembered we used to speak of things we knew would never happen. but i’d forget they’d never happen. i used to think someday we’d really lie somewhere alone together. i thought we'd lose eachother in each other.

Sometimes i even thought we did.

Last night i lost you in songs that grew the air still wearier. i grew weary in the break of rhythms that brought sweat to our silhouettes, and brought me hope. i danced until i wasn’t too worn down to dance, anymore. i danced until i forgot, in the faces lacing through the stubborn air, the loneliness i thought i’d been worn into.

Last night, i came home and dreamt i wasn’t lonely anymore.
i dreamt when we met, you were dying quickly, so i loved you fully, and it softened you. it softened us both. you died in a short breadth of time. and in that time i loved you more than things i knew would never happen, (for things never have the time to happen.) when you walked away, i was worn away, but only into sadness that stayed
the color of eyes i'd never see anymore. i loved you but wasn't lonely anymore, when i missed you.

Last night, when we were dancing, i missed you. the music was new and taut. it caught us when we jumped into it, and taught me we are dying. even in ways never see, for your eyes even lost some softness when the lights were turned back on. your hands weren't as lovely without music trapped inside their pockets.

time broke that music into rhythms that said softly into hard warm air
we’ll soon lose everything but love.

Last night, as my dream ended, i was afraid to walk up to you, walking away from me. i was afraid to touch you because maybe i would lose something. a little bit of softness, or a little bit of fullness. maybe i’d get worn down into someone you could wear down more. Maybe I’d get worn down into nothing.

Last night, as the party ended, i was afraid to walk up to you, walking towards me. i was afraid to touch you, afraid to hug you goodbye. because maybe i would lose you, or lose myself in you, forget my hands in your hands, have my eyes sink into your’s.

or maybe I would love you, and let go.

Labels: By Ana

Maybe Johanna Kandel’s life is just another Dreyfoos alumnus’ success story: she got the body and skill she needed for the career she wanted in professional dance.
But that was not her success.
“To Johanna, success means helping even one person avoid going down the same road she has,” says the website of the organization she founded, The Alliance for Eating Disorder Awareness.
There, at eatingdisorderinfo.org, are resources about eating disorders, including a long list of the statistics Kandal once embodied: 11% of highschool students have been diagnosed with an eating disorder. Over half of females between 18 and 25 would rather be run over by a truck than be fat. 51% of nine and ten year olds feel better about themselves if they are on a diet. The most common behavior that will lead to an eating disorder is dieting.
Yet in a way, Kandal’s story of developing, suffering from, and overcoming Anorexia Nervosa, began years before she ever dieted, at the age of three, the year that she began to dance.
“I knew I was going to become a professional ballet dancer, no matter what the expense and sacrifice,” Kandal writes in her personal story at eatingdisorderinfo.org/Johanna.
For her career in dance, Kandal sacrificed her health:
She first dieted at 13 to fill a position in a production of The Nutcracker. When she didn’t get the part, her dieting intensified.
“Success in ballet depends on the development of a wiry and extremely thin body,” said a March 2002 Reuter’s Health Report on Eating Disorders. Yet ballet is not the only pastime with an “occupational hazard” (Kandal’s term for work-related encouragement of weight loss.) Endurance and performance athletes, like runners and gymnasts, are also at risk. Estimates for episodes of eating disorders among such athletes and performers range from 15 to over 60 percent, Reuters reported. In fact, the term, “female athlete triad” is now used to describe the serious disorder affecting dancers and athletes that has the combined presence of three main components: eating disorders, osteoperosis due to weight loss, and Amenorrhea (absence or irregular menstruation).
Kandal developed all of those traits.
Yet the cause of Female Athlete Triad, namely the pressure to perform, explains why many performers, not just athletes, are in danger of disordered eating. “I would think that [eating disorders are more prevalent] in dance, drama, musical theater and even… the choral department,” said musical theater teacher Craig Ames. “In those areas [where] your body is the instrument of your craft… the pressure is greater to have an instrument that conforms to those of your peers.”
Kandal’s dance department peers supported her dieting and exercising, even as it grew less healthy, and more dangerous. “The anorexic condition may be encouraged by friends who envy thinness or by dance or athletic coaches who encourage low body fat,” explained Reuters Health. When people began noticing Kandal’s weight loss, in her sophomore year at Dreyfoos, “I was getting compliments…particularly in my dance classes, such as, ‘you look so great’, ‘you have lost so much weight’, or ‘I wish I had your discipline,’” wrote Kandal.
Kandal’s discipline drove her weakened body, often collapsed on the mat, to get up, and continue working. Thinner and physically ill, she got a part in that year’s Nutcracker, although she admits her weight may not have been the reason.
“Professional ballet companies want their dancers to be thin. There’s no question of that,” said Dreyfoos dance teacher Jeff Satinoff. “[But] these days, [dance company] directors want their dancers to be athletic and physically fit [too]… It’s less about [being] a rail, and more about strength.” Satinoff believes that with weight standards in the world of professional dance changing for the better, pressure has eased in Dreyfoos dance studios as well. “We have had issues in the past with eating disorders,” admitted Satinoff, “but in the dance department… the weight issue is not a big issue for us… anymore.” At least one anonymous dance student disagrees. [quote from dance student saying something else.] Yet, according to Satinoff, the dance department does not encourage their students to lose weight.
Whether or not Dreyfoos teachers discuss weight in their dance classes, the pressure to be thin certainly transcends their department. When I attended Dreyfoos, the biggest misconception was that dancers were the only ones with eating disorders, said Kandel. Today, persistent stereotypes surround the dance department, while students in all departments suffer with disorders. Eva*, a Dreyfoos junior, developed Anorexia in 8th grade; Kelsey*, Dreyfoos sophomore, had both bulimia and anorexia in middle school.
Neither of them are dancers.
According to Dot Sparks, DSOA school nurse, “Eating disorders are probably more of an issue [at Dreyfoos, in all departments,] because we tend to have overachieving people here, already.”
“I was [always]… a perfectionist… a straight-A student, a type-A personality, and a control freak,” wrote Kandal, “…what you call a textbook anorectic.”
In the February [insert year] issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, researchers found that perfectionism seems to increase the risk of developing eating disorders, but not other psychiatric problems. “Part of the drive for perfection is…attaining some ideal image of thinness,” reported Reuters Health.
Anorexia is linked, not just with perfectionism, but also with many other mental traits and disorders, including Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). OCD is defined by the presence of rigid, compulsive behaviors and recurrent ideas or mental images. According to Reuters Health, up to 33% of women with bulimia and up to 69% of women with anorexia suffer with the disorder.
These figures once characterized both Kandal and Natalie.
“When people think of OCD, they think of hand-washing and jumping over the cracks in sidewalks,” explained Kandel, “but it’s also [about] thoughts…[and] most people with eating disorders have obsessive thoughts.”
“There [was] a time when all I would think about was my weight, and if I was skinnier than the girl sitting next to me,” said Eva. “It was so consuming. It completely takes over your life.”
Reuters reports that “Some experts believe that eating disorders are just variants of OCD.”
“[Buhlimia] made me feel like I was in control,” explained Kelsey.
“The [control of] food is just a sublimation,” said local psychologist Dr. Suzanne Kaplin. “You [must] numb the feelings of inadequacy with something, and food is the easiest [substance] to get.”
The perceived inadequacies that lead to an eating disorder often stem from troubled pasts. Studies have reported sexual abuse rates as high as 35% in women with bulimia, according to Reuters Health.
Yet soon the eating disorder is something else in the sufferer’s life rapidly becoming out-of-control. In that way, “an eating disorder is like any other addiction,” explained Kaplan. Kandal, too, sees a link between addictive behaviors and eating disorders, and is currently working, as a dual diagnostic therapist at a treatment center, with people who suffer from both addiction and disordered eating.
Like addictions, there may be a genetic cause for eating disorders. A National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) study is taking place right now to investigate the possibility that Kandal’s anorexia formed in her genetic code, long before she began dancing, and before she was even born. According to Reuters Health, anorexia is eight times more common in people who have relatives with the disorder. Yet the cause of that trend may not be genetics, but psychology. One study found that 40% of 9 to ten year olds lose weight at the urging of their mothers.
“I have a mother who is very fit, and I was envious of her,” said Eva. “Knowing that she was anorexic as a teenager, I thought in order to be thin, it was something I had to do.”
Kandal believes a gene gives someone a predisposition to an eating disorder, but that an environmental factor triggers the disease, itself.
Many people believe the Western media is such a factor, that it encourages eating disorders in its display of often unnatural and unattainable thinness. The National Eating Disorders Association reports that the average fashion model is 5’11” and weighs 117 pounds, while the average American woman is 5’4” and weighs in at 140.
Yet, according to Reuters Health, the societal causes of disordered eating go deeper than the pictures on the pages of magazines: not only does the media market the emaciated ideal, but also the ‘junk food’ that makes rampant obesity a national reality. “In a country where obesity is an epidemic, young women who achieve thinness believe they have accomplished a major cultural and personal victory; they have overcome the temptations of junk food and, at the same time, created body images idealized by the media,” said Reuters Health. “Few people living in this overfed and sedentary culture eat a meal guiltlessly” the report continues, “one can nearly make the sweeping generalization that everyone who lives in a developed nation is at risk for either obesity or some eating disorder.”
Yet within developed nations, females are at greater risk of developing eating disorders than males: 90% of eating disorder cases are in females, reports Reuters. Kaplan believes this gender discrepancy is due to imbalanced societal pressure. “Girls are taught they’re supposed to be beautiful, and thin….and lately, they’re also supposed to be smart,” she said. “That’s a lot to handle.” Kaplan believes the rising rates of eating disorders among men can also be traced back to gender-based pressure. “As women have had to change their roles in society, men have had to acclimate to that change,” she said.
Sexual orientation also seems to affect the occurrence of eating disorders among men. According to Reuters, in one study, 42% of men with bulimia said were they homosexual or bisexual.
Yet all sufferers of eating disorders, regardless of gender or sexual preference, develop certain symptoms.
“[When] I was fifteen years old…although I was literally at the point of [being] nothing but skin and bones, when I looked in the mirror, the … person [I saw] was extremely heavy (maybe even obese),” Kandal wrote. She was experiencing distorted body image, or body dysmorphia, a symptom of both eating disorders.
Bulimia is also characterized by a promiscuous attitude, broken blood vessels in the eyes from the strain of vomiting, tooth decay from stomach acid, dramatic weight fluctuations, poor self esteem, poor control of other impulses like drinking alchohol or spending money, and wearing tight clothing.
As an anorexic, Kandal developed different symptoms: she noticed her hair was falling out in clumps, her skin was yellow, and her body was growing a layer of fine hair, called Lanugo, which served to warm her, and compensate for a lack of insulating fat. Other symptoms of Anorexia are dizziness, fainting spells, exhaustion, mood swings, excessive excercising, and very poor self-esteem.
Kandal developed all of those symptoms. Her dance teachers, friends and family members began approaching her with concerns, but her parents still didn’t notice her disorder, due in part to another one of its symptoms: secrecy.
“When an individual has an eating disorder, he or she becomes very good at hiding it,” Kandal wrote.
Yet, in one moment in the middle of her junior year of highschool, Kandal’s lies stopped working. She was changing out of her dance clothes, and had left the door cracked open, when her mother walked by, glimpsed her ematiated body, and became horrified. “She began shaking me,” Kandal wrote. “She was crying and yelling at the top of her lungs, ‘You look like you just walked out of a concentration camp…You can see all of your bones and muscles.”
Kandal’s mother then took her to a doctor, who found that even with the layers of heavy clothing she had worn for the occasion, her weight was extremely low.
Kandal believes the first step to eating disorder recovery is seeing an MD, and getting a blood test to determine eloktrolyte and nutrient levels, and an Electrocardiogram (EKG) to measure heart damage.
At the age of sixteen, Kandal, who had never gotten her period, found she would also never be able to have children; she also had osteoporosis from lack of protein, and massive kidney and heart problems.
“[In anorexia-induced starvation,] the body will start to use its own tissue, including muscle and organs, for energy, since [it] has no food to use” reported the Eating Problems Service (EPS), at eatingproblems.org/epsefffect. “The heart muscle…can become thin and flabby,” according to the EPS, “and heart failure [may] occur.”
According to the South Carolina Department of Mental Health, (DMH), about 20% of people suffering with anorexia will prematurely die from complications related to their eating disorder.
Bulimia also has serious long-term consequences. “I have esophogitis, and a hiatal hernia,” said Natasha*, a woman in her early 20’s who still suffers with bulimia. “If I eat too much, [food] automatically comes up without force,” she continued, “It is [an] embarrassing… and constant reminder of the harm I have done to my body.”
Bulimia, too, can be fatal in some cases, notably when the esophagus ruptures, esophageal cancer develops, or long-term dehydration leads to kidney failure.
Eating disorders have a higher death rate than any other psychiatric disorder.
“One day my mom literally broke down because she thought I was going to die,” said Eva. “I didnt want to die.”
The next day, after previous relapses, Ava began to truly battle her disorder.
To recover, an eating disorder sufferer must first break the barrier of denial they have built. But even after overcoming denial, many eating disorder patients relapse, often because of stress.
Kandal relapsed once she was accepted into a dance company. Yet she went on to prove that relapse doesn’t mean there is no chance of recovery.
Kandal found that, for her, recovery meant “doing the unthinkable”; it meant quitting ballet.
For Eva and Kelsey, recovery is a day-to-day struggle with their weights and their minds; and for Natasha, it is still elusive.
Although many eating disorder patients never achieve a normal weight, or lose all weight-related mental criticism, “[they] can develop positive tools that help them…supplement negative behaviors,” said Kandal.
She recommends never keeping negative thoughts inside, and for help, seeing an eating disorder specialist.
She, herself, was in out-patient therapy, and seeing a nutritionist, when she realized she “wanted to help others deal with eating disorders.” She enrolled at UCF, and worked at recovering, volunteering with the International Association of Eating Disorder Profesionals, and earning a degree in Women’s Studies and Psychology.
After graduating, Kandal realized, “I wanted to create my own association…and help make eating disorders understood by the teenage population and every other age, gender, class, and race group.” With this goal in mind, Kendal founded the Alliance for Eating Disorder Awareness, at age 21.
Today, Kandal runs the non-profit Alliance from a small office in West Palm Beach, with private donations, one full-time employee, and five part-time volunteers. She answers about a hundred e-mails a day, mostly from people suffering with eating disorders, their loved ones and their caregivers. She does interviews with teen magazines, and radio stations to raise awareness. She visits local middle schools and high schools, workshopping and lecturing.
And everywhere she goes, she tells her stor- knowing it will never be a typical Dreyfoos success story, but hoping it will change typical standards of success.

Labels: By Ana