Pretty in Pink

and in hindsight

Content warning: disordered eating, sexual assault

How much do I love the 1986 movie Pretty in Pink? Every other girl in my 1990 class was finding prom dresses out of Seventeen magazine made by Gunne Sax and Jessica McClintock and others, with fake exaggerated lace tops and poofy, shiny bottoms, and dyed-to-match pumps. I found this dress, which looked like one of the two Andi (Molly Ringwald) thrifted and Frankensteined to make her own dress for prom, and I was in love.

I still love this dress, in all its 1950’s froth and layers and fake flowers on its bodice and skirt. And its removable cape! For crying out loud, the dramatic Gidget Goes to Prom cape. I had style, damn it. (Except for the bangs. Someone should have told me that wavy hair shouldn’t be banged. Lunatic fringe, indeed.)

I wish I had known how lovely I was, with my wavy hair and big green eyes and curvy figure. I had no idea.

Caroline laughs and it's raining all day
She loves to be one of the girls
She lives in the place in the side of our lives
Where nothing is ever put straight
She turns herself 'round and she smiles and she says
"This is it, that's the end of the joke"
And loses herself in her dreaming and sleep
And her lovers walk through in their coats

She's pretty in pink
Isn't she?
Pretty in pink
Isn't she?

All of her lovers all talk of her notes
And the flowers that they never sent
And wasn't she easy?
Isn't she pretty in pink?
The one who insists he was first in the line
Is the last to remember her name
He's walking around in this dress that she wore
She is gone but the joke's the same

Caroline talks to you softly sometimes
She says, "I love you" and too much
She doesn't have anything you want to steal
Well, nothing you can touch
She waves, she buttons your shirt
The traffic is waiting outside
She hands you this coat
She gives you her clothes, these cars collide

Pretty in pink
Isn't she?
Pretty in pink
Isn't she?

—The Psychedelic Furs

Yeah, I didn’t know. At all. I was socially awkward, and undiagnosed autistic, and not knowing that, I assumed that awkwardness translated to my looks. Even though I had taken ballet classes for thirteen years, and therefore had a graceful line and control over my body, I saw only fat and felt no control—not in my body and not elsewhere. That’s right, when this photo was taken, my senior year, I was about a year into an eating disorder. I’ve discussed it on the podcast (Episode 36: Chasing That Skinny), but the basic details are as follows.

In the spring of junior year, I was anorexic. In my senior year, I learned how to be a purging anorexic. That’s a disorder subtype that means that when I needed to eat, either from health or social needs, I would then throw it up as soon as I could. The endorphins that rushed in to fix the damage I had caused were, I’ll be honest, amazing, better than the drugs I have been given in my pain management journey. I was a behavioral addict, and that is the truth.

When I was at Yale the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I fetishized the food I did eat, almost completely subsisting on—and dreaming about—the fountain Coke and the thick butterscotch pudding made fresh daily in the Ezra Stiles College dining hall, and Lance cheese crackers in my dorm room. The dreams of butterscotch and Coke rivers were hallucinatory. Butterscotch pudding and Coke for breakfast, both served out of the same glass containers. I feel a little queasy now thinking about it—I don’t even drink soda anymore—but it was marvelous then. More than once I was tempted to mix them, to swirl the sweetness of my fetish, but I didn’t want to know how far the rabbit hole went, and I didn’t want to gross out and lose any of my new friends.

I had no idea I looked like this, this bad. I find this photo to be haunting.

My eating disorder continued into my first year of college, and got worse. Graphic warning here: I lost the ability to make myself sick with my fingers. The handle of my toothbrush worked nicely, and quickly, but hurt my throat more.

I hate to admit this, but full honesty and disclosure. I weaponized my disorder against my friends when they would try to help. They would ask me to meet them in the dining hall or would take me out to eat. I would refuse to cooperate in response, taking mean glee in my ability to hold out while they ate in front of me, in telling the waitress I wasn’t ordering anything, in even their dismay. I felt so…strong.

One time, two of my friends tried to make me soup, and one of them tried to feed it to me when I refused. I am ashamed to admit I slapped him. I only meant to slap the spoon away…I think. The memory is hazy because I was so unhealthy, and perhaps because I do not want to remember.

This is first year of college, Halloween. My roommate made me cobble together a costume. I was a…a word that isn’t commonly used for the Romany people anymore, the title of a Fleetwood Mac song. Yes, that is a knife in my teeth. My roommate wanted a rose, but said that would have to do. (That white poster behind me on the closet is from the Yale Summer School Film Festival, but that is for another essay for another day.) Look how large the arms of that dress are on me. it’s pinned together behind me with hair clips; my roommate said it was way too big on me. It fit when I bought it for school. I’m 18 and have dark circles under my eyes.

You’re going to have to excuse what sounds like my flippant tone here and coming up. It’s time and space; I was 19 and 20, and am now 51. Plus, CPTSD will do that, create disassociation for what has happened to me. I also don’t remember a chunk of this.

The second year, I moved into my own apartment. Having control of my own space helped immensely to quell the urges. So did nearly losing it, and my life, to the ex-boyfriend who assaulted me and then stalked me. (See: “Hounds of Love”, linked and below.) There’s nothing quite like being choked into unconsciousness to get your attention and to get you to stop hurting yourself. He was my prom date, by the by. He took that pretty in pink girl to his prom and my prom. He looked like Cary Elwes ordered from Wish dot com, which makes enjoying that nice man’s movies difficult sometimes. Lady Jane (also 1986) was a favorite long before this happened in 1991, and I refuse to lose its beauty to his memory. Fuck his face, you know? That one’s mine.

He also feeds into this. Sorry for that. See? In high school, he called to tell me his parents wanted to invite me to dinner at a fancy restaurant to formally meet me. Then he warned me not to agree to come if I was not going to eat, that it was prix fixe, and that his father would be pissed if he paid and I didn’t eat. I cried myself into a migraine, at his cold tone more than anything, and he just…listened. No more reaction than that. Money and his father were more important than my pain. (The invitation was rescinded, by the ex-boyfriend.)

So. As I said, it did get better as I finished undergrad, but it still took so much time to shake the secondary symptoms. It took years to be comfortable eating in front of friends—it felt like I was committing a crime, no exaggeration—and even longer to be comfortable eating in public. The best way I can describe it is that feeling of being a developing adolescent; it’s called the “imaginary audience”. An example would be when you don’t want your mom to drop you off in front of school because everyone’s watching, having no concept of the fact that not only is no one looking at you, but everyone else’s mom is dropping them off as well. That’s how it felt to eat with anyone around, even friends, for quite a while, like every bite and sip was being noted and scored. I got stuck in that feeling when it came to food because of the damage I had done to myself.

I also continued to be in a rut with my diet. Once I was comfortable with something, that’s what I wanted to eat, all I wanted to eat. There was a restaurant in Boston that made incredible deep dish Chicago-style pizza with this really comforting, soft crust, and they sold ready-to-bake personal pizzas to local stores, like the corner bodega in Kenmore Square, right there by my brownstone apartment. I’m sure that store owner thought I was either mad or pregnant because I bought so many of them during my time there.

The flip side of this was that I also became anxious, almost paranoid, about food—is it still good, has it expired, was it sealed properly? The rut has gone to a certain extent, but the anxiety remains.

I’m 51 now. Order pizza at a con and I’m in, right there in the hotel room with you, in my messy sweats. I might even do my imitation of The Ramones’ eating pizza from Rock ‘n’ Roll High School—“see they just slither it”—if I am in a certain cheeky mood. But my body’s first line of defense when I am under a great deal of stress is still loss of appetite, as if that’s muscle memory. And I guess it is.

And this here still pisses me off and saddens me. It’s my yearbook pic from my first year of college, at NCSU. You could choose to have a normal portrait, or a personality portrait. I chose the latter because why not, and they even blew it up in the book. There I am in my Yale semaphore shirt, in the lotus position, and I remember waiting and waiting for the kid to finish taking pictures, feeling less and less confident about what I had chosen to do, wilting in the awkward wait, and the lighting guy said something to him about hurrying up

…and the photographer cracked over his shoulder, “I’m not exactly working with a flat surface here.” Now, today, as a middle-aged woman, I know he meant my figure. Boobs. He was a kid, after all.

Then…I heard fat. Fat arms and fat thighs and fat me and I was mortified. Now, I look at my small thighs and arms and wrists in that photo and I just feel sad and flustered and frustrated for 19-year-old me.

But now I know I am pretty in pink, and more. And I know in my John Hughes movie, I might be “the basket case” in black in the back of the room, not fitting in with the rest of the group, but I don’t need “the princess” to give me a makeover in the last reel. I will make my own dress, just like Andi did, but I will take my own damn self to the prom, whether or not I leave with Duckie. No Blaine this time, by God. And I will definitely eat from the buffet, and eat well. And it will definitely be awkward—I will most likely drop my napkin or even my cup, and not know where to sit. But I will be pretty in pink. As I always have been.

That teddy bear—and my first ballet recital—is another, and more cheerful and funny, story. I’ll share that later.