Transcriber: Virginia Pes Reviewer: Eunice Tan
When I was in middle school,
I learned that the etymology of the word "idiot"
comes from a Greek word meaning "a private person" -
one without a political community,
one who was alone.
Now, when I first read this,
I felt pretty confused and offended
because I felt I was fairly intelligent
or at least not an idiot.
But I was extremely introverted.
I suffered from severe social anxiety,
and the thought of speaking in front of people in class terrified me.
And yet, here I am standing before all of you today.
And I'm standing here because I suffered from anorexia.
And I believe that my struggles were deeply connected
to my failure to understand the wisdom hidden in the history of the word,
which speaks to our need for deep relationships
and for belonging in a community
in order to live happy, healthy, and meaningful human lives.
I believe that eating disorders
truly reflect a desperate desire and failure to meet essential human needs.
And I believe that these needs are what we need to understand
in order to help people suffering through these illnesses.
Now, when I hear traditional narratives about eating disorders,
I usually hear about
unrealistic beauty expectations presented by the media,
with criticism of Barbie dolls,
with references to affluence, fad dieting, perfectionistic tendencies,
and with the desire for control.
And while I do believe there is a kernel of truth to these explanations,
I think they fail to explain
why it is that of the nearly 30 million people in the U.S.
who suffer from eating disorders,
10 million, or 1 in 3, are actually men,
according to statistics from the National Eating Disorders Association.
I think they also fail to explain
the horrifying statistics for recovery from anorexia,
with one study from the American Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
showing that up to one-third die from complications of the illness,
one-third remain chronically ill for the rest of their lives,
and only the remaining third maintain some form of stable recovery.
While a large number of complicated factors
contribute to the illness,
I'm convinced that the reason that eating disorders are so hard to shake
is because they manifest a profound, ethical confusion
about how to live a good and meaningful life.
I believe that it's not just our society's beauty standards
that make eating disorders so pervasive
but the fundamentally superficial way it teaches us
to objectively measure worth and value.
I believe that the same capitalist values
that taught me to see worth in material success, honors, and objects
caused me to perceive myself as an object
whose worth needed to be earned, proven, measured,
and compared against other people.
I believe that I couldn't have recovered without the help of others.
So I'm here today to share my story and what I've learned from my struggles,
to help not only those suffering from these illnesses
but all those who suffer
from what I believe are the deeper, spiritual causes.
My struggles with anorexia began in high school.
I wasn't very popular,
I was kind of chubby,
and I was very quiet and very insecure.
I was immersed in a hypercompetitive environment,
and when I looked around me,
I saw successful and impressive peers,
whose activities and photos on Facebook
seemed to prove that they were confident, beautiful, loved, and happy.
We all competed to attend the same elite colleges,
and we all knew within minutes of receiving a test
how everyone else in the class had done
and where we stacked up on the roster.
And growing up,
this made me feel like our worth as human beings
was something ostensible,
excruciatingly measurable,
and definitively determined
by the meritocratic college application process.
I did get good grades,
but I really didn't see the point in them.
The culture of my community
made it seem like the point of grades
was to get into a good college,
to get a good job,
to settle back down in a community like ours and have kids,
and start the process all over again.
And I realized
it was because I felt so unhappy that the idea of this future terrified me.
I'd lie in bed at night for hours,
tossing and turning with existential anxieties.
And I started to blame myself for my unhappiness,
ruminating over every mistake and flaw that I didn't know how to forgive.
I had this one particularly horrible week during my sophomore year,
where I got a C+ on the test -
which truly felt like the end of the world -
where I hurt my lower legs and had to wear a cast,
where I criticized my parents and we got in a fight
and I felt incredibly guilty about hurting their feelings,
and where I confessed my unrequited love for a friend,
which made me decide that I must have been irremediably worthless and unlovable.
I didn't have much of an appetite that week.
I skipped a few meals and sat through the hunger pains,
and I realized that it felt good to punish myself.
It felt like just retribution for my flaws and my wrongdoings.
But it couldn't eliminate my self-hatred.
And so when I looked in the mirror,
I saw a protruding stomach,
squishy thighs,
and sausage-like arms.
And I felt like the fat on my body
embodied everything I despised about myself.
I stepped on the scale,
cried at the 10 pounds I had gained that year,
and I vowed to lose weight.
When I look back at the start of my eating disorder,
I realize that I starved myself because I needed to survive.
My life had become emotionally unbearable because of my self-hatred,
and I needed some way to improve.
I needed something to blame and something to hope for,
and I needed some goal or end to meet.
I was an atheist who needed a religion,
and anorexia became my God.
She taught me that the path to self-improvement
lay in obeying one simple moral principle:
fat is bad; skinny is good.
And unlike other religious doctrines,
anorexia's mandate to lose weight seemed perfectly culturally justified.
I felt like fat was synonymous not only with ugliness
but with laziness, sloth, and lack of discipline.
Skinniness, on the other hand,
represented hard work, virtue, beauty, lovability, and determination.
I felt that anorexia taught me
that if I worked hard enough to lose weight,
I could improve.
And I could even measure my moral progress
through the numbers on the scale.
And so I used anorexia as my religious opium.
She protected me from my fears and my mistakes
by giving me religious rituals to follow.
She instructed me to separate foods into categories of good and evil,
to count calories like they were my sins,
and to purge those sins from my body through excessive exercise
and sometimes through vomiting.
She turned me into a solitary creature who avoided social situations
and viewed all other people merely as obstacles to my weight loss
or as competition.
And still, I believed that life was better this way.
I felt like it was better to trade in my flawed and uncertain human existence
for the moral certainty
of life as a machine that merely calculated to lose weight
but who could lose weight and do it well.
And so I came to realize
that when people think that anorexics can never see how skinny they are -
I've come to realize that when anorexics think that they're not skinny enough,
it's not because they can't see the bones bulging from their body,
but it's because they never feel that they're good enough.
And they never can
so long as they are trapped in the delusions of the disease.
And the longer it is that they suffer,
the harder it is for them to believe
that there's a truer and better way to gain happiness and true self-confidence
outside of an eating disorder.
It took me a long time to achieve this realization,
but three life-changing experiences played an essential role in my recovery.
The first was the summer after my sophomore year of high school,
where I went to Cambodia to live with a homestay family.
And though the country was recovering
from one of the worst genocides in history,
my homestay sisters showed me how they lived and danced
and supported each other and their friends and their family
through every single aspect of their lives.
And though I felt moved by the poverty I saw there,
I was more profoundly moved
by the deep communal values and tradition and happiness I found there
that was absent in my own community.
The next experience came the summer after my junior year of high school,
where I returned to Cambodia to work for an NGO
that provided scholarships
to high school and university-aged girls from the countryside.
Again, I felt profoundly moved
by the fact that girls my age
had to fight to overcome so many cultural and economic obstacles
just to educate themselves,
just because they were born on another side of the world.
I taught English,
reported the cost of food.
And when I returned,
the founder of the organization made me a member of the board.
And for the first time,
I felt like I had done something meaningful
and I felt like my actions maybe could make a difference.
And this attitude and this confidence helped me recover for a while.
I learned about the University of Chicago,
learned that it was also called "where fun goes to die,"
(Laughter)
and decided it was perfect for me.
(Laughter)
I applied early,
got in early,
and the beginning of my senior year was one of the happiest times of my life.
I made so many new friends with this new-found confidence,
and I felt that college would be the key
to my deciding and figuring out how I could make a difference in the world.
But as the year went on,
I realized that I never let go of the idea
that my self-worth needed to be earned and proven.
And after my experience in Cambodia,
I felt like it depended on my ability to continue to help other people.
And I believed that in my own community,
I wasn't working to make as much of a difference,
so I started to become insecure.
And I felt like my new friends wouldn't have liked me
if I were as chubby as I was before.
And I grew terrified of the idea of gaining weight,
so I lost a few pounds to protect myself.
And then I lost a few pounds more.
And I fell back into old habits,
and by that summer,
my hair was falling out,
my nails were constantly blue,
and I weighed 30 pounds less than what I weigh today.
My doctor diagnosed me with anorexia,
and the head nurse at the University of Chicago
told me that I would not be allowed to attend school that year.
I felt like my life was ending.
I did nothing but cry in bed for a month.
But one day,
as I seriously contemplated suicide,
I looked at the music box on my desk
I had gotten from my homestay family in Cambodia that first summer.
And inscribed on its wheel were the words
"Don't forget me."
Suddenly, I felt overwhelmed by my love for that family,
by my love for the friends I'd made there,
and by my love for my own friends and family at home.
And I started to cry.
And as I reflected on the truth of the love in these tears,
I realized that this love was what made my life feel most meaningful.
And this love was unconditional.
And in that moment, I realized how much choice I did have.
I realized I could give up,
but I also realized that the girls I met,
who were trying so hard just to educate themselves,
were not.
And I realized that I never wanted them to.
I realized
that I never wanted anyone to feel as worthless as I felt in that moment.
And I realized that out of respect and love for them,
I had to try to live too.
Every bite of the nearly 4,000 calories I had to eat every day
for months in recovery
would have been impossible without determination
and without hope
that life without an eating disorder and its comforts was worth living.
And I believe that that determination would have been impossible to achieve
without love for family, for friends,
and without some love for myself
and some hope for my future.
And after a few months,
I was well enough to move around
and I was well enough to get out of my house.
And I decided
I wanted to try to make the most of the year that I had before college.
So I looked for some job advertisements on Craigslist.
And it was this final experience,
working as a canvasser for the Human Rights Campaign,
that was the key to my recovery.
At the time,
it was legal in 29 states to fire someone on the basis of sexual orientation,
and in 34, on the basis of gender identity.
It was my job to stand with a binder
on the side of a busy Manhattan sidewalk,
to wave to probably about a hundred or more people who passed by each day,
and to try to get just a few compassionate individuals to stop,
to listen to me,
to give me their name, their address, and their credit card information,
to make a monthly donation to the Human Rights Campaign.
(Laughter)
Yeah, I'm sure you know how hard that job must have been.
It was absurd.
It was impossible.
And yet it wasn't.
Because so many of the people I talked to
were genuinely shocked and horrified when they heard what I had to say,
and they did want to do something to help.
And I felt inspired by these people and empowered by my job.
And every single day,
I learned that the one thing I always have control over,
no matter what happens in my life,
is my attitude.
Those days when I felt dejected and negative
and felt like no one would give -
no one would stop for me.
Those days when I projected foolish happiness
and hope and positivity -
people would stop,
and they would give.
And this job taught me to have trust and to love myself,
and I got really far through sheer positivity.
I became one of the best canvassers in the country.
I got promoted to become a field manager
and teach other canvassers how to maintain faith in themselves,
and I got asked to direct that office that next summer.
So that next year, I did go back.
I worked 80 hours a week -
harder than I ever had in my whole life -
and I made amazing, lifelong friends.
And alongside these friends,
we managed to raise over $415,000 to help support LGBT rights.
Since coming to college,
my studies in philosophy have played an essential role
in helping me to reject recurring impulses to restrict
by understanding how they arise from existential and ethical questions
and from my insecurities -
anxieties about the future
and about my fears about my own self-worth.
But throughout my time here,
I've also come to realize
that many of my peers and many of the people I care about
suffer from the same sorts of struggles
even if they haven't manifested themselves in an eating disorder.
And I want to let all of you know
that you should never feel hopeless
and you should never feel alone,
even when it feels difficult not to.
I know that I want to pursue a career in international human rights
and to help other people
who live on the margins of their societies.
But as I've reflected over international struggles,
my personal struggles,
and the struggles of my peers and friends that I care about,
I've come to realize that the only way to end this collective suffering
is to realize that we collectively are both the problem and the solution.
When we engage in competitive, mindless, and self-absorbed behaviors,
we ignore our own deep needs and the needs of others.
But when we stop and listen to each other
and when we believe that there's a wisdom to be gained
in hearing and understanding other human beings,
we realize that we can deepen our own humanity
and we can accomplish so much more when we work together
and help others to flourish.
I don't think that anyone should feel helpless, worthless, or alone,
and I think that we have the power to make this possible.
I think it begins by listening to human stories,
so thank you for listening to mine today.
(Applause)