MINTZ: In which I abandon the worst parts of my life

Before a couple of days ago, if you were to ask me: “Casey, what’s your favorite book?” I would have answered without hesitation a book called “Wasted” by the journalist and author Marya Hornbacher.

The book illustrates Hornbacher’s struggle with anorexia and bulimia, and it’s written with a sort of artistry I could only dream to write with. The beautiful metaphors, long paragraphs of detail and numerous, romantic assertions of just how sick she was all serve to make it a beautifully written book.

I have reread this book over and over again. I could highlight different parts every time, parts that I relate to. She writes about the disease with such a fierce beauty that it sounds artistic. Brilliant. Only the best, most ingenious, most creative minds may suffer from anorexia.

And it is only recently that I realized that this is fundamentally wrong.

This is not another column about anorexia, not even a column about how I’m no longer writing about anorexia — although this time, I’m serious about that one. This is a column about writing about myself, and how dangerous that really is.

I love reading about eating disorders and mental illness. I read before I go to sleep every single night, because it relaxes me and because I believe it keeps my writing skills sharp. In my Kindle library are various books detailing different peoples’ struggles with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and sociopathic tendencies. I devour them and relate them to myself, measuring how messed up I am in the head compared to the author. The more I edge them out on the scale of “how tragic is my tale,” the more pleased I get.

But why is that? Why is being more mentally ill than another person so important to me? Why do I write a weekly column detailing awful events of my life that occurred four, three, two years ago, exploiting them so that people will feel bad for me, and that I can finally be crowned “the most tragic of them all”?

I did not realize that I did this until I accidentally downloaded the book that would change my life: “How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia” by Kelsey Osgood. Not a memoir, but a sociological analysis, the book details how and why anorexia has grown into the widespread monster that it now is. The book includes almost no details about just how sick Osgood got: no low weight, no commentary on which bones she could or could not see. It focuses instead on deconstructing the disease and seeing it as it is at its core: entirely pathetic.

“It is very difficult to recover, but remarkable it is not,” Osgood writes in one of the last passages of the book. “What would be really remarkable is remaining healthy in a world in which … acts of histrionic self-destruction are … considered more extraordinary and more worthy of attention than keeping your head above the surface of the water, than living quietly and gently.”

When I think about my history with anorexia and with bipolar disorder, I feel a sense of uniqueness. I feel as if I was chosen to suffer from these diseases, like they are the most interesting things about me. Like I am a martyr for the cause, like I am a strong, capable masochist. Like I am special.

It is utterly attention seeking. I mask it under the guise of wanting to help people, but really, it’s so that I can continue to rehash my story until I’ve exploited myself to satisfaction. But will I ever reach that point? And what will finally be the final straw? Does Hornbacher herself have to come down from her job as a writing professor at Northwestern University to tell me that, yes, I was sick enough? Yes, my brain chemistry is imbalanced enough? I was the most messed-up of all?

Well, I wasn’t, so that time will never come. This cannibalistic proselytization of my illnesses will never be good enough. I will never justify the years lost to my illness because they cannot be justified. I did not become anorexic for any “bigger” reason. I did it because I wanted to be thinner. I did not recover because I wanted to prove to others it was possible. I did it because I would have died if I didn’t. And I did not write this column to spread the word — I did it because I felt like my illnesses were the most interesting thing I had to write about.

They are, however, not. Last week, I was wrought for ideas about the bad parts of my life, so I wrote about something good instead: how good the people who surround me are, and how lucky I am to have them as friends and family. People I haven’t spoken to in months reached out to tell me how much they enjoyed reading my giddy display of love and warmth. It filled me with so much more genuine joy than writing about my mental illnesses ever did, or could.

In her book, Osgood writes, “How does clinging to the memory of a past love help us in letting it go? Isn’t remembering bound to lead to nostalgia, the greatest and most perverse romanticism?” I have fallen out of love with writing about anorexia and bipolar disorder and how achingly, pathetically ill I was.

If reading my column has helped you work through your demons in any way, or alerted you to someone in your life who may have been struggling, I’m sorry. I’m happy, of course, that there was a good effect to keeping myself anchored to my dark past for all this time, but I won’t be doing it anymore. I can no longer afford to look at the worst of my life through the rose-colored haze of well-written words.