Toothbrush full first draft

Toothbrush

          When I was in eighth and ninth grade, I had two toothbrushes. One I used to brush my teeth, and the other I found one day buried under empty cans of shaving cream and broken combs in a drawer of the guest bathroom. I took it to my room and hid it in the cupboard under my sink, tucked safely in a clear plastic cup I had gotten from the Ordway Theater. I threw the toothbrush away a little while ago because I couldn’t bear to look at it anymore. Which in retrospect is pretty stupid. It was just a toothbrush. It was a faded blue color and had some split and broken bristles. It was the really cheap kind that you buy at a Super America in Wisconsin because you forgot to pack one in your suitcase when you were going up to your cabin in Minong for Fourth of July weekend.

    After several months of struggling not to use it anymore, I finally took it down to the big brown trashcan in the garage one night. The concrete floor was freezing because I hadn’t bothered to put any shoes on. I was cold and I usually hated being in the garage alone, especially at night. Who knows what psycho rapist clowns could be lurking behind my father’s old recumbent bike and the giant plastic snowman we put on the porch for Christmastime? Nevertheless, that moment, throwing the toothbrush away, was one of the biggest reliefs of my life. Because for nearly a year, that toothbrush was the representation of a lifetime of self-loathing.

    The first time I used the toothbrush was in May of 2010. It was getting very warm, and all the girls at my school were doing this thing where they would tie their shirts above their midriffs at recess. Even my friends, who were certainly not the preppy blonde tennis players that St Paul Academy was known for, were lifting their t-shirts over their belly buttons and tanning on the big grassy hill overlooking the football field. I had always been very self-conscious in middle school. I felt out of place next to the stick thin girls with their spray tans and blonde highlights and butt-hugging short-shorts. So when this belly-bearing trend spread among the eighth graders, I was suddenly overcome with powerful anxiety. If I didn’t do it, I would look like a baby in my knee-length Capri pants and long-sleeved Old Navy shirt. But if I did join them, I would no doubt be even more mortified. Everyone would see my jiggling baby belly protruding over the waistline of my jeans. The insecurity built and built, until suddenly, I had stopped eating. This kept me going for a while, until the pressure to be perfect had completely taken my mind over. I felt like the action I was taking wasn’t providing the immediate results I needed. That’s when I got the toothbrush.

    Finding that I didn’t have enough courage to stick my finger down my throat, I opted to use an implement to ease up the task. A toothbrush seemed like the most logical and least messy option. I waited until after dinner that night, to make sure I had accumulated enough food to expel a decent amount from my system. When I had made sure both my parents were downstairs and therefore out of earshot, I went up to my room and turned on my radio full blast as an extra precaution. Then I entered my bathroom, a small room I could enter from my bedroom, and knelt down awkwardly on the floor mat in front of the toilet. It felt strange, like I was getting down to pray. I had prayed a few times before, but always about silly things, like getting the big part in a play or acing a test the next day. I was never big on religion. So doing this felt different, solemn. I carefully inserted the toothbrush into my mouth, butt end first, and committed my first purge, the first of many to come.

    After I had finished, I rinsed the toothbrush off and hid it away. I flushed the evidence of what I had done and washed my mouth out with tap water from a Dixie cup. It was all a very organized ceremony, very step-by-step. I felt a lot better afterwards and slept soundly that night. After a few weeks of doing this, I had lost some weight and felt comfortable tying my shirt up with the other girls. I felt like I had found a solution to everything.

     Of course, it wasn’t a sustainable system. The crying jags, drastic weight fluctuations and long periods of depression and guilt that followed should have been enough of an indicator that what I was doing was wrong. But I kept doing it, through the summer and well into the next year. The occasions became less frequent, once or twice a month instead of every day, as my hair had begun falling out along with other unpleasant symptoms. I told my parents in the winter; mostly because I had already told my friends and they pressured me into it. They took me to therapy, which was generally ineffective. I lied and said that it was so effective that I never felt the need to vomit anymore. I did though, saving it for special occasions; bad days and periods and the like. I wasn’t cured, and the toothbrush remained in my cupboard. 

    By the summer of 2011, the purging had faded to an infrequent handful of occasions. I felt like that was good enough. As long as it kept me thin when I needed it, I accepted it as a perfectly healthy lifestyle. People throw up, I reasoned. Why should it make a difference if I just do it on purpose sometimes? I had gotten loads of support from my friends, and I was in what I thought was a pretty good place. But one night, I was at the wedding of my cousin Christopher and everything fell apart. 

    I had been having a really good night. I had been eating pretty normally, only limiting myself a bit, and enjoying myself at the reception, dancing like an idiot with my aunts and cousins. I was, however, sick with a slight cough. I went to the bathroom and had a minor coughing fit on the toilet, then came out, unsuspecting and content. The next day, my mother told me that my cousin Cassie’s girlfriend had heard me vomiting at the wedding and that she was going to take me to the Emily Program to get help. I was hysteric and furious. Out of all the times I had thrown up without my parents knowing, they pick the one misunderstanding to take drastic action? I tried desperately to explain it to them, and I could tell that they wanted to believe me, but to be fair, there was a lot of proof against me. 

    I was taken to the Emily Program the next day and something amazing happened. For the first time ever, I was completely honest about what had been happening to me. I felt like there was no need to lie about it this time, and frankly, I was tired of hiding it. The therapists I talked to actually listened to me and believed what I was saying. I didn’t feel like I needed to pretend I was happy. I realized how unhappy I had actually been this past year. And for the first time, I truly believed that maybe, just maybe, I could get rid of this habit completely.

    It didn’t happen instantly. I went through several months of anxiety attacks, relapses and near relapses and prescribed medication. But I got better. The purging became inconstant, then very rare, and finally, in an unceremonious way, stopped for good. I haven’t knelt over my toilet since November. The feelings are still there, of course. There are times when I feel fat and ugly and worthless. But it’s better than feeling like that all the time. I don’t think I’m going to go anywhere but up from where I am now. I have amazing friends and a beautiful house. I have an excellent father and a wonderful mother and a sister and dog that love me and my own room and a closet full of pretty dresses and only one toothbrush.