Outwardly, Susan Burton had it all—a degree from Yale, a thriving career, a loving husband and kids. Inside, Susan waged a war on herself, using food as a way to exert control over the discomfort she felt in her own skin.
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Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. When I returned to Boulder, my body was different. A summer metamorphosis was a familiar plot line in the y A novels I had once read. Often the teenage girl character transformed by growing breasts or by getting her period, something that advanced her maturity. I felt I'd been forward to even though I turned back the clock, I was no longer menstruating. But if you had glimpsed me on the street, then you would not have been startled or necessarily thought that girl needs to eat. You might have thought, as I did, then, that girl looks pretty. In my bathroom, I took off my pajamas and wrapped myself in the towel. Through my mother's bedroom door, I heard the fuzz of the shower. I waited a few minutes for her to be done. When I went into the master sweet she was in her closet choosing clothes. Morning Edition was playing through a clock radio. I entered her bathroom, hung my towel on the bar across the shower door, and stood naked on the scale. This was the white scale from Target. I could go through all the scales we'd ever had. The one with the big round dial that my grandparents had sent the first digital scale we owned, where the led readout was raised on a stick. Now Here I was on a pebbly white surface at the beginning of a new year, lighter than I'd ever been. Lighter. Everything in that word air and joy and wonder. That's Susan Burton, reading from her recent memoir Empty. Susan's is the story of an addiction invisible on the surface to a substance that can't be quit. Food. We just can't quit food. But what happened when eating becomes so disordered that everything about it consuming? Purging, starving withholding binging is a dangerous and consuming obsession that takes over a life. This is a story of hidden shame, distorted body image, perfectionism gone haywire, and ultimately what it takes to heal. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. So described for me the landscape of your childhood. I was from two places, and that feeling of being from two places really defined my childhood. I was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and grew up in a suburb of that city called Aida. It was a landscape of kind of roller coaster hills and farmland that was now suburbia. I grew up in a you know, gray house with black shutters, kind of picture perfect. My mother decorated it with Laura Ashley, so there were you know, Laura Ashley floral pleated lamp shades and balloon blinds. And I moved when I was thirteen to Boulder, Colorado. My parents got divorced, and my mother and sister and I went west. My mother had romantic notions about the frontier, and I sort of internalized that I didn't have any real understanding of the history of the American West. But I had my own amantic notions about the frontier too, because I wanted to reinvent myself in this new place. I've been sort of a nerdy middle schooler, and I wanted to be um a popular girl in this place where nobody knew me. So Boulder, you know, it was a very different landscape than West Michigan. Boulder is where the Great Plains explode into the rocky mountains. Essential skyline of the city is a dramatic rock backdrop called the flat Irons, and the white peaks of the Rockies are behind. And it took a while for that landscape to feel like home for years. Not for years, but maybe for the first year it felt to me sort of like a Hollywood backdrop. But I don't live in the West anymore, and it's now a landscape that I longed for, the feeling of being in that dry air under you know, those enormous skies and that hot sun and you know sort of the daily thunderstorms in the sun er. There's a lot about the openness of the West that I miss in both landscape and spirit. It's interesting that you use the phrase like a Hollywood backdrop, because then this sense of reinvention, for you know, self invention at the age of thirteen, starts to take root when you're a new kid in a new school, um starting a new chapter. Oh absolutely yeah. I'd been a very kind of studious middle schooler, and once I knew that I was going to be in a new place where nobody knew my history, I had this fantasy that I could be a girl like the one in the pages of seventeen Maxine, which I loved. But when I say I wanted to be like a girl in seventeen, I wasn't really thinking about body. It was more a question of personality for me. I wanted to be like a bubbly girl with like a side pony hail and a boyfriend, and I wanted to wear leg warmers and tam PACs like I It was. It was more of kind of a vibe I was after. But I think what's important is that I wasn't okay with who I was. I wasn't okay with showing my real self and that there's something I have to hide, and that I need to pretend to be somebody else in order to have friends in order to connect, in order to be okay. Could you describe both of your parents for me. Yeah. We lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, because my father was the news director of a local radio station called Wood and some my earliest memories are of sitting at the kitchen table eating an English muffin very early in the morning and hearing my father's voice come out of the radio behind me. He quit that job when I was six years old to write a novel and then did sort of various I guess now we would call them passion projects at home in the study. For most of my childhood, my father was a very handsome and charismatic figure. He'd gone to and Over and Yale, both my parents had grown up in the Northeast, and he was very funny. But he had a temper, he had a darker side, and he had a tendency to isolate. You know. I think I bring up those passion projects in the study because my memories of my father are very tied to him sort of retreating, retreating into the study. In the basement, he had a dark room where he developed photographs, and he had a room he called his ham shack where he kept his ham radio equipment, and he would go down to those spaces. There was a real need to be alone, you know. He was somebody I wanted to do well for, I wanted to please. I feel very connected him. We share the same middle name, and we share similar looks. My mother and my sister are both dark haired and dark eyed, and my father and I are both fair and blue eyed. And it was just, you know, one one way that I always felt very connected to him as a kid. I'm just I'm thinking about your mother too, and not looking like your mother. It's funny, you know when I say it, it sounds slight, but it's It was the kind of thing like I remember being a kid and being in the checkout line at the grocery store with my mother and you know, and a grocery store cashier saying, she doesn't look like your daughter, which is so strange to me. Now, if you were to see my like if my mother and I were walking down the sidewalk, it would be so clear we were mother and daughter. We have very similar features, but I think the dark hair and kind of the you know, white blonde hair of of a young child maybe was so striking. So where my father was sort of charismatic and could command a room, it was literally a broadcaster, you know, holding a mic and asking questions. My mother was shyre. She always had lots of friends, but wasn't you know, it wasn't like she was like throwing dinner party. She had close friends. Both my parents were readers. My mother, more than anyone else in my life, is the person who made me a reader and a writer. I wouldn't say she was the She wasn't the kind of mother who would for example, sit down on the floor with me and play with my dollhouse. Which she was a mother who understood how potent and how wonderful it was to be a little girl playing with the dollhouse. So she she granted me a lot of like imaginative freedom and space. But they had, you know, they had a troubled marriage, and my mother's sort of acquiescence and passivity in their marriage, she sort of exploded that hall. She ended up leaving my father um when I was thirteen, and that's when we went to Boulder. So many stories of family secrets originate in shame. It is so often a shame that causes the islands in which secrets fester and grow, making it impossible or at least terrifying, to speak the truth of our inner lives. One particular evening, when Susan is thirteen, she hears her parents fighting, and she hears her father say something truly horrible to her mother. He calls her disgusting. Susan internalizes this word. In time, it becomes a weapon she turns on herself. I was thirteen, I was in eighth grade. I had a friend sleeping over and I remember waking early in the morning and I heard my parents. You know, people talk about their parents fighting. I sort of don't think of my parents as fighting, and this sounds cruel, but but I think of my father be rating my mother. And that was essentially what was happening in their room across the landing. And at one point I heard my father say, you disgusted me, You're disgusting, And then I heard him leave the room and walked down the stairs, opened the door and closed the door and go running. It was a frightening moment. I was thirteen years old. Part of me was wondering about my friend. Was she asleep, had she heard? But I really wondered what my father found disgusting about my mother. And the answer that seemed the realist to me in that moment. The answer my you know, my head sort of offered up was that he was disgusted by her body, and not just her body in general, but in my mind, it was a specific part of her body. He was disgusted by her stomach. She was often talking about how she had a little pot belly. There was a lot of focus among the women in my family on stomachs, and reflecting on that, now you know the specificity of that with which that rose up for me at thirteen. I mean, my god, was I not going to, you know, spend decades having a seating disorder where I was focused on my stomach like it was just it was all, it was all right there for me already I assumed that was the site of his disgust. Yeah, that's that's so interesting because throughout your book you write about hip bones and the different variations of emptiness and fullness, and the ideal in the midst of your eating disorders being that when you're not just lying down but actually standing up, your hip bones like a ruler could be put across them, that there would be no stomach, you know, kind of in the way, which is actually something that I feel so many young women contend with in varying degrees. And you know, I think of eating disorders as like sort of being on a slide rule in some way, or there's problematic eating or not eating, and then there's a place where a switch gets flipped and it becomes dangerous and pernicious. I mean, can you talk about the first time that that switch that flipped for you? Yeah, I mean I think that you're, uh, the analogy of a slide rule I think is really smart because um so, I'll mention a couple like markers on the slide rule before I get to the switch flip. But I mean, I think one thing that's important to know is that I was always a really kind of restricted eater as a kid, and not in a way of limiting calories, although that was there too. I went on my first diet when I was nine, but I was scared of a lot of food. I was the kid who at the birthday party wouldn't eat pizza. Um. I didn't like soda. I didn't like potato chips. I had a lot of fears about tastes. I had a lot of fears that food would make me sick. So there was something kind of fraud for me with food early on. Another import and thing that happened is that I got my period when I was ten. Um So, this is in n and not a lot of other girls had their periods at ten. And not only did I have my period, but I had, you know, everything that went along with it. I had hips and breasts and waste. And I was profoundly destabilized by this. I didn't feel at home in this new body. I wanted my old body. And that feeling of wanting my old body wasn't something I did something about right away, but it was something that kind of haunted me throughout my early adolescence. So when I was a sophomore in high school, I was fifteen, I got a stomach bug over Christmas break and I lost a couple of pounds, And at Christmas dinner, I mentioned it to everyone at the table. That was the kind of thing women in my family mentioned to each other, you know, I lost a couple of pounds, and my aunt said, you know, it's just waterway, You'll mean it back, but um, I didn't. And I found that I liked the feeling of being just a little bit lighter. There was something about it that felt like an unburdening. I liked the feeling of my pants having a little more you know, air inside them, if that makes sense. I liked the feeling of emptiness, and I saw it more of that feeling that I craved. And several months later I'd lost my period. I was intorexic, and really quickly after that, the anorexia shifted into binge eating, which is a really typical trajectory. Though I didn't know this at the time, So that switch flipping happens for me, you know, kind of fifteen going on sixteen, at the very beginning of my junior year of high school. You know, at one point you describe a paper that you read in article in Psychological bulletin, and it describes binge eating as a short term escape from an adversive awareness of self. And that was like such a powerful phrase for me. I think it could actually describe any number of addictions at their root with well short term escape. First of all, it's always a short term escape, you know, it's never a long term escape um from an adversive awareness of self. And you know what you've been describing with that sense of the pot bellies of the women in your family and the way that women would talk about their bodies and your own sense of yourself getting your period at the age of ten, is that adversive sense of self that just I think like lights up all the switchboards mentally, psychologically, emotionally, for you know, I need to turn this down and find a way to not feel this or hear this noise. Mm hmmm. Yeah, I'm so glad that that line, that that sentence spoke to you because it's still to me is among the best descriptions of what it is to binge, and to some degree with anorexia too, although the quality of not eating for me is slightly different than the quality of eating too much. But I mean, the thing with a binge is that as long as I was eating, as long as my hand was on my way to my mouth, as long as I was chewing something, I didn't have to think about anything. There was only this. I didn't have to think about any loss or pain or longing. And even when it was over and there was kind of a wave of self loathing that still prevented me from thinking about anything else other than my own disappointment in myself and the first of awareness that I was trying to escape. Sure was certainly some of it was about body, but but so much of it was just about feelings of isolation or inadequacy or flawed parts of myself that I didn't want to face, lack of connection. A lot of this for me was happening in high school and college, so you know, somebody hadn't invited me to the party, or I wanted to be close to someone who didn't want to be close to me, or deeper things I didn't want to face, like my parents divorce, things that were hard to look at about my father. And then there's also your mother's drinking, which runs throughout your teenage years, and then certainly your college years becomes more serious as as you're starting to become a late teen right mm hmmm. Susan's mom hides her drinking and in a way become is a model of how to have and maintain a hidden life. Susan's binge eating is also very possible for her to maintain in secret at this point. After all, she excels academically and is admitted to Yale, but her binge eating takes on a whole new level of intensity once she's away from home and on her own for the first time. It was so upsetting to me because I thought that being out of my mother's house, being out of that kitchen would fix it. That it was so you know, it was just it was just habit, it was just setting, it was just environment. And getting to Yale and finding out very quickly that it wasn't was just devastating. I mean, I would wake up in the morning, I would get dressed in one of the you know, three elastic waist skirts I had that that fit I would put on my broken stocks because that was one thing that happened in those years was I felt again that I could not be myself and I felt I could not be kind of a slender perfectionist I had once been because I was no longer that girl, and I sort of developed this new persona to accommodate my body. I embraced being from Boulder. I smoked a lot of pot, which I hated. I was. I'm one of the people. Uh pot doesn't relax me, it just makes me paranoid. But I was so you know, disconnected from who I was in my own desires that I did it anyway because I felt it matched the person I needed to be anyway. So so I would, you know, get up, put in my elastic waistkirt, my birkenstocks, go to the dining hall resolving to you know, eat granola and soy milk. You actually develop an alter ego, right, I mean she has a name. Yes, Kasha Susan's alter ego's name is Kasha. Susan is small, almost elphin, elegant, delicate. She's intense electric as Kasha She wears birken stocks and a knee length skirt, and she walks around campus dreamily, spooning ice cream into her mouth. She is rubic and dazed, dreamy, an earth mama who doesn't care about her size, doesn't even think about it. So there's again this kind of attempt to put on an identity, to create an identity. And you actually you right at one point that Kasha could carry the weight like you. Susan couldn't carry the weight, but Kasha could, right, And you know, I wish, I wish i'd know that Susan could carry the weight, and that Susan needed to carry the weight. But I was hiding, you know, I was hiding who I was, and I was hiding the binging. And it was hard to hide the midging. I mean, anybody who's been in a college dorm situation, the feeling of never having a space to myself was so strong in those early days. UM I would kind of make my rounds of different food shops on campus, and I would almost inevitably wind up on the top floor of the stacks in the library with kind of whatever. The tail end of the binge was usually like a scone in a brown paper bag, and then I would sit up at this little steady carol beside this little arched window, and I would write. Writing for me was a purgative act, kind of this ritual purification that almost inevitably followed a binge. And I would sit up there and I would read the two eating disorder memoirs um that were in the library's collection. Then it was, And there are many more eating disorder memoirs now, but there were fewer than the librarhead too, and I read them over and over again. I felt so isolated and so alone, and I found real solace in these other women's stories. You also described trying to research eating disorders at a certain point in the library and the books being constantly checked out. Yeah. I knew I couldn't be the only one going through this, but it was impossible for me to imagine telling someone, Although that's not entirely true. As much as I fantasized about quitting, about not binging anymore, I fantasized about telling UM. So I was committed to secrecy, but I simultaneously wanted to tell so badly. But I only wanted to tell once I was over it. I had a very concrete fantasy actually about what that would look like. Freshman year of college. I would sit in my dorm room and my little Macintosh um and I would write letters to best friend cheva Um. But the letters were set in the future. The letters were written from the me six months Hence, I would be in Boulder for the summer and I would write to my friend from this future me that you know, I'd started attending this eating disorders group, and then I would sort of lay out my story, lay out what was going on for me. And I wanted to tell because and eating disorder, like any addiction, it leads to erratic behavior. It leads to guardedness, it leads to hiding, that leads to deception, to you know, not not telling the whole story. But I also desperately wanted to be known and understood and close to people. But it was it was too impossible to imagine telling until I was over it. And then once I was over it, the urge to tell went dormant for a long time. We're going to take a quick a cure for a word from our sponsor. There is such tension in Susan's story between longing to be seen and known, but feeling completely unable to share her deepest and most shameful secret. We can't be known if we don't allow ourselves to be open and vulnerable, but our secrets shut us down. Susan has a very close friend in high school, Julie, who she comes close to telling the truth, but she stops herself. The two women lose touch for twenty years, and then Susan sees Julie again at a reunion. She's now thirty seven years old. Susan thinks of finally telling Julie what she had been going through beginning in high school. After all, now Susan has a loving family and a thriving career, and all this happened so long ago, but she's still in shame's guip. That was when I had already started work on the book that became empty, on the book that tells the story of these eating disorders. But it was a very different book. It was meant to be a book that intertwined a cultural history of the teenage girl with the story of my own adolescence, and at that point I had already written a draft of it, and a lot of what had wound up on the page was about binging, was about my eating disorders. But I was too scared at that point to admit that that was the book I wanted to write. So I wasn't going to be able to sit across from jewels, you know, with a glass of wine at a table at our high school reunion and say any of this. And I also wasn't ready to admit to myself that this was kind of the story that I needed to tell more than any other story. When did you have the language for what you were going through? There's anorexia, there's bulimia, which involves purging. At one point, you describe something that I actually hadn't really considered before, which is that excessive exercise, which is something that you engaged in, is also a form of purging, the different kind of purging than making oneself throw up. You know. It strikes me and correct me if I'm wrong about this, But it seems like there are places, almost like a Van diagram, where eating disorders kind of meat and share certain characteristics or become more subtle gradations as opposed to something being you know, just clearly like in the d S M four this is the diagnosis. It's a good question I mean, growing up in the eighties inorexia and bulimia were the ones. There were after school specials in first person essays about those are the ones. I knew. Binge eating disorder. Yes, it had a name. The researchers and psychologists were writing about it in academic journals in the early nineties when I was searching for information, But I don't think I ever would have said I have binge eating disorder. I knew the word binge because that was part of bolimia, but I wouldn't have been able to say what I had. I think I would have described it as it's bolimia, but I don't throw up is probably the language I would have used. I don't remember the first time I saw the term binge eating disorder, but it was very clear to me, you know, that that had absolutely described my experience. My solution eventually to the binging was to quit food, is how I put it in my head. That was the way that I addressed it in my early twenties, and I became pretty severely interorexic. And once I got through that and started menstruating again, and you know, went on to have healthy pregnancys and physically healthy adulthood. I don't think I would have identified myself as anorexic. It took me a really long time to get to therapy. When I started therapy, I was forty five. I'm forty six now. So I started therapy, you know, a little over a year and a half ago, and it took me a couple of months to look at my diagnosis code. I just didn't want to know what it was. And when I did, I saw it was anorexia. And my first thought was, she doesn't understand. I had this impulse. I wanted to take off all my clothes. I wanted to show her like, I'm look at my body, I'm not anorexic, which I now understand is first of all, a part of the illness is not believing that you're thin enough, that you're not intorexic enough. But also, you know, even though I was underweight, I didn't look like the emaciated kind of feeding to skeletal figure that one often imagines when anorexia is a cooked anorexia is the diagnosis is no longer tied to, you know, loss of a certain percentage of body weight or cessation of the menstrual period. Um, it's no longer as tied to size as it was and instead describes like a more restrictive style of eating anyway. So it's so it took me a long time to embrace embrace the language. You can't quit food, and you have to learn to make your peace with it, and not only to make your piece with it, but hopefully to find joy in it and delight in it and nourishment and to learn to savor it. And I feel like I'm finally at that place. I mean, for so long, I just wanted to not be preoccupied by food or distracted by food. Um, And now I finally moved to the point where I want to love food. I you know, I want to take pleasure and food as much attention as there was in my family to you know, pot bellies and the size of bodies. There was also a ton of pleasure and meaning and food. My grandmother, the matriarch, she was, she owned the first Queens and Art ever made and had been subscribing to Gourmet since the second issue. And she was just, you know, a fantastic cook. And you know, I grew up with a mother who made baked bread, so there was always a lot of beauty and terror in food. And I feel like I'm at the point in my recovery where I'm moving towards the beauty part, which is a relief. Were you ever fearful for your physical safety, for your well being? Were you afraid ever that you were going to die? There was a moment where one evening my freshman year of college, I was up in the stacks and my regular study Carol, And usually after a binge, my heart raced, but this as a strange feeling where my heart felt like it was slow. It felt like something was retarding it, like something was in the way, preventing it from from beating at its regular speed. Um, I'd eaten a lot. My abdomen was extremely distended. I became scared that my stomach was going to explode. And at the same time I was having this thought, you know, I was telling myself that's not something that human body could do. You would throw up first. It's going to be okay, It's going to be okay. But it's very frightened. And when I went back to my room that night, and you know, climbed into my top bunk in my dorm room, I just prayed that in the morning I would wake still whole. It is true that somebody can eat so much. I don't think stomach explode is probably the exact thing that can happen. I'm not, yeah, I'm not. I'm not a doctor, but you know, it could compress, it could compress something, or cut up circulation to your intestines. But that was a singular incident. For me. I did often fear that I was messing with my health. It's not good for anybody to eat thousands of calories at once. My thousands of calories. You know, people binge on different things, but for me, it was sugar. It often felt like the injection of a drug that the body isn't designed to process. Like it like it. It felt bad. But but I don't think I ever thought that I was going to die. Um, except for that that one moment where I was scared. I did think that I was, you know, driving my life into the ground, and that I was not doing good work or being a good person, or a good friend or a good daughter, or you know, taking advantage of the enormous privilege of Yale education. But that night was the only night I ever really felt like I might tip over into like real, real peril. I mean, anorexia, you know is the far more perilous illness, and you know has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder. And I feel very lucky that I climbed out of it before things got really bad. We'll be right back. I keep thinking about the description of addiction from the Psychological Bulletin. The language seems so apt, a short term escape from an adversive awareness of self. But sometimes the short term escape doesn't work, and when that happens, a deep and terrible anxiety sets in in the form of panic attacks. This happens to Susan halfway through her sophomore year at Yale. A hallmark of panic attacks is that the person suffering from them doesn't know what they are, has no language for what's happening. Panic feels like a bottomless chasm. It feels unsurvivable. One evening, when she's home, it's so bad that Susan, at the age of nineteen, crawls into bed with her mother. I've been experiencing panic attacks. It was my sophomore year of college. I didn't know what they were until I described them to a psychiatrist. I've been I've been seeing on and off at the Yale Child Study Center, and I felt so disconnected. I mean as one does in a panic attack. I felt so disconnected from my surroundings. I felt disconnected from my own body. And you know, I think something that is common among people who struggle with eating disorders or other kinds of addictions is that one thing that is scary about uncomfortable feelings, are uncomfortable emotions, is that you think they're going to last forever. And that's one thing that the substance does. It takes away that uncomfortable feeling that you think is going to last forever. So panic attacks were especially terrifying for me because I felt like this was going to last forever. I was going to feel disconnected from my surroundings forever. I was going to feel like I was, you know, to use the phrase I would have used then, going crazy forever. And one night, lying in my bed, I just felt so lost and so scared that, you know, I went down the hallway to my mother's room. I was nineteen. I knocked on her door. Um, I hadn't gone into a room for years. She was drinking heavily in those years, and it was something I didn't want to see, but I needed her so badly that night, and I climbed into bed beside her, and you know, there was something so comforting about being beside my mother um in that moment, she was the one who knew me first and best. And then the next day she did something that I really appreciated at the time. She gave me a book of essays by Oliver Sacks. And you know, those essays were about people, most of whom had some neurological injury, but who saw the world in ways that were not typical. And I just loved that she hadn't tried to say, oh, nothing's wrong with you. By giving me this book of essays, she had acknowledged that something might really be wrong, and and also showed me that there could be beauty and meaning in that and that that was a moment of real reunion with my mother, with whom I had had a contentious relationship with for the several years prior. Yeah, I'm so glad you told that story. I think books are also where we can so often find ourselves, especially those of us who are grappling with secrets, because it's impossible to share the secret but in a way it's like you're sharing the secret with the book. Yeah, in the same way as you were doing your freshman year when you were reading the couple of eating disorder memoirs that were in the you know, the Yale library right right. I would wager that books saved Susan as much as anything else, from the memoirs she read in the stacks of the library to the copy of Oliver Sacks, to her own book, the one she wrote in a blaze of truth telling, the kind that takes no prisoners, least of all oneself, the kind that sets us free. So often, I think, possibly even especially with addiction memoirs as a genre, there's a sense of having reached the you know, the pinnacle of the mountain on the other side of recovery and telling a story from there, and that always really drives me crazy and also feels like hubris. There's a moment near the end where you write, by writing this book, I've moved not from illness to recovery, but from secrecy to telling. I am in a liminal stage. This is a vulnerable position to write from because I know there's a lot I still can't see, and that really struck me, Susan, because I feel like that's it's the truth. And in a way, I felt like you had in mind the person struggling who might pick up empty and see herself. When I was struggling and found solace in other people's stories, the sections I read and reread were always the parts where they were struggling, over the parts where they recovered. So these illnesses are so isolating, and I just needed to know that, um, that I wasn't alone, and that was more important to me in that moment than than knowing that somebody had come out of it okay. And as far as writing that for myself, I just felt like I needed to write this book now, and I just wanted to be as plain as possible about my position as as a narrator. I keep on thinking about shame and the silence that is the legacy of shame. You went from being unable to tell even the people who asked you direct questions to reaching a point where you felt ownership of this experience such that you could right this story, tell the story in great detail of what it is that you've gone through, and what do you think gave you the capacity to do this? At this point, I mean, I think a couple of things. So first, writing was always the way i'd um tried to process this aspect of my experience, this this eating stuff, like, writing was always my way of understanding it. So in that sense, it was very organic. But as far as it being a story that I felt like could be a book that could be published, it was really my editor, Hillary Redman, who encouraged me to do it. I signed this a contract to write this book so long ago that I went through three editors, and Hillary was my third editor, And when she read the manuscript, which was sort of a hybrid of the book I had been contracted to write a cultural history of the teenage girl and then the stuff about my eating disorders, she was like, your this is the story. You need to tell the story of your eating disorders. And I I still had so much shame that I really needed somebody to give me permission to say, I see you, I understand you, this is what you need to tell. Do it. And I think that until then I had felt I felt like I couldn't admit that that was the story I wanted to tell that I felt like a story about an disorder. Somehow wasn't worthy, or that I needed to apologize for wanting to tell it. So that was a big step. But then, you know, writing, as you know, like writing is a very solitary act, and the most important thing that writing did was to get me to start talking about it. I didn't start going to therapy until I was done with the manuscript. I didn't tell my husband, whom I've known since we were seventeen, we've been dating since we were we've been together since we were twenty. I didn't tell him about the binge eating or about kind of the depth of what I struggled with m during my adulthood until I was done with the manuscript. So the manuscript was kind of the writing was my gateway to talking. What has talking I felt like because your husband seems and the way that you describe him like a very adorn worrying and open and wanting to know, really wanting to know you and questioning at various points. You know, when you became too sin, when you were in aorexic after um, after you stopped being cheating, and yet you didn't tell. It's the difference between telling, which is this intimacy, and being with oneself on the page. What did it feel like when you were finally able to do that? I mean, I was so scared to tell him because if he had come to me and said, you know, after years of knowing you, I need to tell you this thing that I've never told you before, I mean, I would have a whole range of feelings. I might be hurt, I might be scared. I hope I would also have compassion and sensitivity. But I didn't know how he would react. And I remember the night it was um one of my elder son was at his first concert. He was at his first rock concert, and our younger son was like in the bathtub and he had the tub on really loud. So I felt like there was privacy in space. And we sat down at the table, the dinner table, and I told him it wasn't a surprise to him that I struggled with. I mean, obviously, like issues around control and food and being too thin, like that stuff had totally come up during our marriage. But the binging to me was this deep secret that revealed, you know, that I had so much shame about and that revealed me to be, you know, somebody. I didn't want him to see me as and and that night when I told him, you know, I think initially he was confused. He didn't know what binge eating was, and at that point I had very little experience talking about it, and I felt sort of inept and tripping over my words and speaking in half sentences. And it wasn't until he read the manuscript that he understood. And I will say, you know, it's going to sound like a cliche, but it has been really transformative. Like I said, we have known each other for so long, but there is just this amazing new vulnerability and a desire to tell him more and for him to say more to me. I don't recommend keeping a secret from your partner for decades, but in its wake, it feels like a really special time for us. Now I feel really fortunate about that. Family Secrets is an iHeart media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and Bethan Michaluso is the executive producer. We'd also like to give a special thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight secret zero, that's secret and then the number zero. You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Family Secrets Pot. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.