742: The Thing I'm Getting Over

Ira Glass

There's not much to the story of how Chase got injured. He was invited to a New Year's party in Philadelphia. He flies in, goes to the party, goes back to an apartment where he's staying with three other people, gets up around 7:00 in the morning.

Ira Glass

He's concussed, doesn't know where he is or what's happening. They're like, get up.

Ira Glass

At the hospital, he learns that there's trauma and internal bleeding in his spinal cord around the C4 vertebra. They tell him he may never walk again. He can't stand, or control his arms, or use his hands. It's not clear he ever will.

Somebody has to feed him. He's all alone, no visitors. He's basically immobile in front of a television that's set to Comedy Central, which those particular weeks, he says, was reruns of The Office most of the day. He said he watched from season one all the way up through the finale of season nine, and then season one began again.

And one day early in the ICU, he's in a group chat with his buddies-- which means, since he can't pick up his phone, a nurse reads to him what they are saying, and then he dictates what to write back. And they're trying to cheer him up. And they come up with a project for him, a goal, a heroic goal, an unusual goal, a goal that is the reason that I wanted to talk to Chase, this goal that really started as a joke.

Ira Glass

The nethers. Before long, Chase got physical therapy, where they planned what kind of electric wheelchair they would get him because there was a chance his arms and legs would never recover. But of course, he knew exactly where he was headed, a goal so pure that even a small child could understand it, a goal set specifically because his friends believed he never could reach it.

Ira Glass

In fact, he had three goals. Kicking Dan in the nethers was the most ambitious and pie in the sky, but the other two were no cakewalk either and also pretty idiosyncratic. Take this next goal.

Ira Glass

He thought he'd never use his fingers again. She's like, let's see, and told him to try to move his thumb. He couldn't do it, but he could move his index finger, like just a quiver, like a millimeter. And he set this goal, which he actually achieved a month and a half later with incredible effort. He was finally able to get his middle finger fully straight.

Ira Glass

His next goal-- well, Chase actually lives in California, but he'd flown to Philadelphia for the New Year's party and injured himself in Philadelphia, and was now recovering in Philadelphia. And for him, as an out-of-towner, one of the things that Philadelphia means is those steps Sylvester Stallone runs up in the movie Rocky in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Chase wanted to climb them, all 72 steps.

Ira Glass

To give you a sense of why the therapist thought it would be impossible or ridiculous-- when Chase came up with this goal, he couldn't stand. He couldn't walk. Later, they would suspend him above a treadmill with ropes, and two therapists would move his legs to get the muscles to remember what walking is. Then he would learn to walk with a cane and then without a cane. But before he did any of that, back when he was still just learning to get around in a wheelchair, they started him going upstairs to make this goal. And two and 1/2 months after he entered the hospital, he went to the steps where Rocky trained, rode in a wheelchair up to the first step, stood, and started climbing slowly, watching each foot as he planted it-- one, then the other, a physical therapist steadying him from behind.

Ira Glass

He actually posted a thing online saying he was going to climb the Rocky steps and livestream it, and he didn't expect that lots of people would actually show up in person to see him climb to the top.

Ira Glass

So, a triumph. But there was one goal left, the final goal, the most difficult goal for a bunch of reasons that we'll get to in a minute-- kicking Dan in the nethers. Dr. Emily Beus is one of Chase's physical therapists. She says most of her patients had spinal cord injuries, and they had all kinds of goals. But when Chase first told her about this one, she was like, wait, you want to work on your kicking why?

Ira Glass

Chase did recover much more quickly and completely than most of the patients Emily saw, she says. His particular injury just ended up working out like that. And so just a month after the Rocky steps, he reached his final goal and made a little video.

Ira Glass

In the video, Dan seems like the most good-natured person who has ever lived. He smiles.

Ira Glass

In the video, Dan stands there, legs spread awkwardly, one hand covering his eyes, but laughing, which I think summarizes all the feelings you could have in that moment. Chase quietly says sorry. He told me he felt bad for Dan, but he also felt like he'd come so far.

Ira Glass

He still has a way to go. He's not all recovered, still devoting his days to physical therapy. His latest goal says a lot about where he is right now. He wants to walk well enough that people can't tell he ever had an injury. He wants to seem how he used to be.

It's still hard for him to open a water bottle or change a light bulb. Chest down, he doesn't feel temperature at all. So he can feel the water from the shower hit him, but can't tell how hot it is.

Ira Glass

He wants to get to the point where he's used to what his body can do at whatever level that turns out to be. He doesn't want this dominating his thoughts and his whole day. But this is the thing-- recovery means something different for everybody. Each person sets their own goals. Part of recovering is actually defining for yourself what your own recovery means.

Today on our program, we have people coming back from some very different things. They're in the same limbo Chase is in, where they're partly there, but not all the way. They're in the middle, which is this moment of enormous hope, but also a lot of other stuff too. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Naked Lunch. So today's show really came out of a question that one of our longtime producers, Susan Burton, had about something that's happening in her own life. You may remember, a few months ago, Susan told a story on our show about her eating disorder. And that was something she had kept secret for most of her life from everyone in her life, and then she revealed the secret in a book she wrote, this memoir that came out last summer.

And the book is about what it's like to have an eating disorder, not about how to get over one. Because when Susan wrote it, she was not over it. She still isn't. And over the two and 1/2 years that she's been working toward recovery, she started to wonder, what does recovery from an eating disorder even mean? A heads-up that if hearing stories about eating disorders aggravates your own eating disorder symptoms, this may affect you. Here's Susan.

Susan Burton

At the beginning of recovery, I never thought about recovery. What I thought about was telling my secret. The secret was the eating disorder I'd had for 30 years.

What was this eating disorder? It had been so many things-- starving, bingeing. It's not like you pick an eating disorder as a teenage girl and you have that one for the rest of your life. The [BLEEP] up relationship with food is what you have for the rest of your life-- or what it felt like, to me, I was going to have when, at age 45, I stepped into my therapist's office for the first time.

I'm preoccupied with food, and I don't want to be, I told her. That was the beginning. Now I'm in the middle, two and 1/2 years in. And what that looks like, it isn't easy to summarize. Easy would be, I now do X behavior instead of Y. I don't have that kind of sentence, but I do have examples like this one.

One afternoon this spring, my husband made cookies. I took one from the cooling rack, and I ate it with him and our 16-year-old son. Maybe that sounds like a small thing. Maybe that sounds like nothing. I have to curb that impulse to tell you how small these things are, how nothing they are, because with an eating disorder how you relate to food connects to and disrupts how you relate to everyone in your life.

And eating something sweet at that time of day-- for me, that's not nothing. That happens alone, in secret, because the pleasure is so intense. It cannot be seen. It cannot be shared. There will be no pleasure if it's shared.

But that day, I leaned against the counter and ate the cookie, and it felt good. It was one of so many things I didn't realize about recovery. It's not just eating intuitively. It's making food something shared instead of something secret.

Another day, my other son, age 13, came into the kitchen. He wanted me to come out to the garden so he could show me how the vines of his cucumbers were hardening as they twined. He wanted to show me now, and it couldn't be now. How could anyone be asking me to do anything now? I couldn't. No. In a second. And he went back outside.

But the reason I couldn't was that I just pitted cherries that I was going to put on ice cream. The food was incoming, on the way. It could not be stopped. I could not be intruded on.

When I finished, I went straight to the garden, and my son showed me the vines. I stood there hating myself, reflecting on how many such moments there have been over the years. I can't right now, not right now. I've done a lot of that, like a lot of mothers. And a lot of it has had to do with work.

But work-- come on, really? There's no shame in that admission. There's all this hand wringing about guilt and work and motherhood, but hard work is the most culturally sanctioned thing in America. Try revealing that you've turned your child away because of food.

Do you detect anger? Most of us with eating disorders-- volcanically angry. Also most of us-- placid or even fun girl disguised. That's part of recovery too, expressing anger, not hiding.

My body-- my body is recovering too. It's changing. My body's like those sponges my children always wanted when they were young and we were in line at the grocery store. The sponges are thin, like sticks of gum, the color of Manila envelopes. When you put them in water, they expand. That's what my body has done. It's like one of those flat sponges that expanded.

I told this to my therapist. That's an interesting word, flat, she said. It's the word I mean, I emphasized-- flat, not thin. Yes, she said. And you were flat inside too, emotionally.

And that was true. That's what the eating disorder does to you. That's part of why you have it, so you won't feel. That's maybe the whole point.

Clothes-- a blue linen dress with buttons down the front. There came a day in May when it was the right weather for it. I put on the dress, which used to be loose, but no longer was. But the difference was that I didn't want it to be loose.

In the kitchen, my husband reached for me. He put his hands on my waist, rounded them over my hips. And I wanted it. I wanted to be touched. That was new too.

But the way I've gained the weight-- OK, so this is mixed. Some of it-- it's not the bingeing I did for years, but there's been a lot of reaching for food all day. I long to eat in an orderly way, like meals on plates at consistent times, but I struggle to do so.

There's a specific meal that comes to mind when I think about not only where I am in recovery, but what I want from it. I want to be normal about lunch. Want to know the scene I associate with lunch? Our This American Life staff meeting, which happens in person once a week, when there's not a pandemic.

Every week, food is ordered in and laid out on a table in takeout containers. I've never once taken the food we order in for this meeting. For years, I've watched people pick up plates and just put food on those plates, and then sit down at the meeting and eat that food while we are talking. Every part of this is a marvel to me. But actually, what happens even before they get to the food, that's probably the most important part, that they stood from their desks and came to get the food, neither hating themselves for already having eaten at the wrong time nor brittle and empty because they've been too scared to put anything in.

I imagine hunger rising in a normal way in their bodies, a kind of rising hunger that's so unfamiliar. It's like I crave it in the way people maybe crave love, or touch, or something. It happens so rarely for me.

This is what I'm thinking about when I sit in a circle of coworkers with plates on their laps. I'm looking at these people and imagining what they feel in their bodies. It makes me feel very distant from them in a way that's kind of far reaching, and it extends out to other ways I relate to my coworkers and everyone in my life. So yeah, in recovery, I want to be normal about lunch.

Normal-- we all know there is no normal, that normal is being phased out. But normal stays in my head when it comes to food. Normal about food-- is that recovery?

When my book came out and I was first doing interviews about it, people would ask me, where are you with food now? I would say, I'm working toward recovery, but I felt so uneasy whenever I said this. Felt like I was throwing around a phrase I didn't understand and that my ignorance was clear to everyone who actually knew about eating disorder recovery. I just felt so out of my depth, just so new to this, to every part of it, to the working toward it part, to recovery-- which, just to say, was that the process or the end? Was there an end? What does recovery from an eating disorder even mean?

Square one-- I went looking for the official clinical definition of eating disorder recovery. I wanted this as context, as a baseline, but it turned out there was no baseline. There's no consensus about what recovery means. Most definitions include physical criteria like, are you at a healthy weight, and behavioral like, have you stopped bingeing? But there's also how much you're thinking about food, your ability to express emotions, all the stuff that has nothing to do with eating. This is where the lack of consensus comes in, over what other stuff belongs in the definition.

Intellectually, I was interested in all of this. But emotionally, what I really wanted was to talk about recovery with people who'd been through it, people further along in it than me. I wanted to talk about what recovery felt like to them, maybe as a way of imagining myself into my own version of it. And I had two people in mind. The first one was someone who'd said a single word to me about recovery that captured how I wanted to feel there, a word that I'd been returning to for months. The word was "sturdy."

If you're-- I don't know-- under 30 and you grew up watching Nickelodeon, you probably know who Jennette McCurdy is. She was a star of teen comedies-- iCarly, Sam & Cat. In her early 20s, she quit acting. It was actually part of her eating disorder recovery. And now she has a podcast called Empty Inside. She interviewed me for it last summer, which is when she said that word, "sturdy," that stayed with me ever since.

Susan Burton

What "sturdy" meant to Jennette was that she felt strong enough in her recovery to speak publicly about her eating disorder without falling back into it. And to give you a sense of what she had to recover from, her eating disorder started when she was 11.

Susan Burton

Jennette actually wrote a song about this conversation. It's from a one-woman show she's been performing.

Susan Burton

Midway through, she got to a point that sounds a lot like where I am now. She describes the feeling this way.

Jeanette's answer to my question about what she did next was essentially it wasn't what she did next that mattered. It was all the work she'd already done. In therapy, she'd grappled with a lot of the underlying reasons for her eating disorder, felt rage toward her mother, grieved her mother. Yes, she was still purging and still restricting, but way, way less. She just knew that she didn't need those behaviors as coping strategies anymore.

She developed others. She started writing, finding her own voice. That was a few years ago. She describes where she is now as recovered.

Susan Burton

She feels more present, more able to focus, more able to feel her feelings and to tolerate the uncomfortable ones. These are all things I hope for, like, precisely. I asked her about something that might sound weird if you've never had an eating disorder, but I feel food in my body just intensely. Jennette said she understood 1,000% what I meant by this. And she said that's gone now too.

Susan Burton

Talking to Jennette, it made me think of a term I'd come across in the research I'd done about the definition of recovery-- indistinguishable, as in a person can recover so fully from an eating disorder that they become indistinguishable from someone who's never had one. It sounded almost sci-fi, like we erase your eating disorder, but also your old identity-- not even something I would want, but also something I instantly wanted. I thought I'd try out "indistinguishable" on Jennette, see if it resonated.

Susan Burton

I felt hopeful after talking to Jennette, like the freedom she feels, that it was possible for me. Here was someone who'd thought thoughts like mine, who'd felt feelings in her body like mine, who now had new thoughts and a new experience of her body. But I've had these thoughts and feelings for a lot longer time. I'm 47. Jennette just turned 29.

One of the realities of my recovery is just that I've lived with an eating disorder for so many years. And I really wanted to talk to someone my own age who'd started recovery in middle age, talk about what it had been like for them. I had someone in mind-- Anissa Gray.

Anissa wrote a novel called The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls, which I read last summer and was really affected by. The novel's protagonist is a Black lesbian in her 40s with an eating disorder, a description that explodes all kinds of stereotypes about who has eating disorders and who gets to tell stories about them. Anissa is in her 50s. Her bingeing and purging started in college. Like me, she hid her eating disorder from everyone in her life for years.

Susan Burton

Anissa agreed to get help, but only because her wife wanted her to. They live outside Atlanta. Anissa found an eating disorder center there. She showed up for her first group therapy session straight from a three-hour workout and a binge and purge.

Susan Burton

Mostly college age and 20s, one around 40 like Anissa was then. They were the oldest ones.

I didn't know anything about Anissa's own recovery beyond that she had more of it under her belt than I do. 10 years into it, she doesn't feel totally free. It wasn't what she expected at the beginning.

Susan Burton

Anissa says that one thing that was important to her in this process was watching a friend get sober. In sobriety, for many people, the idea is that you're never recovered, always in recovery. It's a process that's always ongoing, that never ends, as Anissa saw with her friend.

Susan Burton

Talking to Anissa about being OK with an ongoing thing, it helped me imagine how I might feel in the future. What I want, it's simple. Like if my son were to come into the kitchen and ask me to come to the garden while I was making food, I'd have a reaction like, oh, I'm about to eat something, but I'll come out when I'm through. Do you want to sit with me while I eat, and then we can go out together?

And when we went outside to the garden, I would just be in my body. I wouldn't feel my flesh. And if my neighbor came over I would wave and chat, and not feel fake or terrified. There would just be an ease. And if something did rise up, some spikiness, some fear, some urge to reach for food or to reject it, I'd be able to handle it. And if, despite my best efforts, I submitted to it, I'd be able to tolerate the disappointment.

I don't know if that would feel like recovery to me. I don't think I can know until I get there. But I think it would feel like sturdiness.

Ira Glass

Susan Burton, she's an editor on our program. Her memoir about her eating disorder is called Empty.

Coming up, people in bars ask a question that Dr. Fauci has not weighed in on yet-- which COVID vaccine is the most likely to get somebody to make out with you? That's in a minute on Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "The Thing I'm Getting Over," stories of people who are in the middle of changing their lives, figuring out the puzzle of exactly how they're going to get from where they were to where they're heading. We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, Shot Girl Summer in the City.

So this past spring when more and more people started getting their COVID vaccines, this phrase kept popping up when people talked about the country getting back on its feet.

Ira Glass

Shot girl summer-- it's the idea that, this summer, people who got the shots and have all this pent-up energy from over a year of isolation will be out there hooking up like never before. It all got started as a Twitter joke and ended up as something they were actually covering on local news. And I think it got all this attention because it is a very understandable way to measure how far the country has come in its recovery from COVID. But you know, what's reality here? What is shot girl summer like, really, for the people living it?

Elna Baker looked into that. Quick warning, if you're listening with kids-- there's nothing explicit in this story at all, but it does acknowledge that sex exists and is a thing between adults. Here's Elna.

Elna Baker

I've heard this summer compared to the Roaring '20s or the '60s Summer of Love. I've read articles about people making out in the streets. I've seen the viral picture of a condom shelf at Walgreens in New York City that is so empty it looks like it's been raided. And I've heard waxing salons were booming with lots of people prepping to be naked in front of one another for the first time in 15 months. So I decided to stop by a salon, Sugaring New York City. I talked to a waxer named Parminder, who said, yeah, this is true.

Elna Baker

This is another waxer I spoke to, Corina.

Elna Baker

The staff at a cafe and bar on the Bowery called Short Stories confirmed the trend with the most television-ready quotes I've ever heard. Are people acting bolder and hornier this summer?

Elna Baker

That's Tom, the late night manager.

Elna Baker

I asked him, what's his proof?

Elna Baker

For the record, six years ago, my friend Ayesha's birthday.

Joey, the beverage director, has been watching people try to get back in the game. One of the things she notices is how quickly people cut to the chase. The most common pickup line, which vaccine do you have?

Elna Baker

People at the bars did seem to have a lot of vaccine brand loyalty. One woman told me she had Moderna, which she liked best because when you say "I'm Moderna," it sounds like you're saying "I'm a modern woman."

Elna Baker

I spent a couple nights outside of bars talking to dozens of people, looking for evidence that hookups are on the rise, asking for stories. And I have breaking news for everyone-- shot girl summer is a sham. It's one of the oldest lies in the book, straight out of a high school locker room-- lots of people talking about having sex, but no actual sex.

Elna Baker

Friends, that's not a thing. Having sex in a long-term partnership is not the post-pandemic bacchanalian free for all we've all been hearing about.

Elna Baker

One night, a friend and I were out at a hookah bar, talking about how none of the single people we know are hooking up during shot girl summer. We named names. It was a long list. We turned to the table next to us, a bunch of attractive 20-somethings dressed for a night out, and I explained I have this theory that everyone is saying we're all having casual sex right now, but nobody actually is. Is this true?

They told me no, I was dead wrong. This summer is wild. This is the summer to be single in New York. They've been going crazy.

And I was like, oh, OK. So you guys are having sex? One by one they each said no, no, no. I started recording.

Elna Baker

Of all my friends, if anyone was having a shot girl summer, as in hooking up, there's one that had to be. Her name is Mads. She's 25. She goes out almost every night, travels in a pack of single girls. I asked her if this is the summer of hookups for her or any of her friends.

Elna Baker

This tracks with my experience. Recently, I went out with this guy whose profile said, I'm just coming out of a long-term monogamous relationship and not looking to get back into one. I interpreted this as code for hookups only.

But then when we went out, he talked to me for three hours about all the inner reflection the pandemic had led to and how he couldn't be with someone until he sorted out his demons. I, in turn, told him how sick I'd gotten, how it took me a full three months to recover. It was sweet, but not as advertised.

I've been out with five other guys since. It starts hot and ends feeling like I've been to a support group. It's confusing. Mads agrees.

Elna Baker

I thought it would be a sign of recovery if people were moving on, cutting loose, leaving the past year behind. But instead, it seemed like they felt very aware of what they've been through, what everyone is feeling. That decision to not look away, to embrace the sadness, that's a sign of recovery too.

Ira Glass

Elna Baker is a producer on our show.

Ira Glass

Today's program was produced by Lilly Sullivan and Susan Burton. The people who put together today's show include Bim Adewunmi, Elna Baker, Sean Cole, Noor Gill, Damien Graef, Chana Jaffe-Walt, Beth Lake, Mary Marge Locker, Tobin Low, Miki Meek, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Ari Saperstein, Alissa Shipp, Jessica Suriano, Christopher Swetala, Chloee Weiner, and Diane Wu. Managing editor, Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Special thanks today to Anna Barone-Cone, Andrea LaMarre, and Ashwin Deshmukh.

If you want to see the videos that Chase Friedman made of kicking his friend in the nethers, and the Rocky steps, and giving the finger, and other stuff, they're at his TikTok account. His handle there is @chasegetsbetter, all one word, or on Instagram, he is @chaseunfiltered. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, you can stream our archive of over 700 episodes for absolutely free. Also, there's videos and lists of favorite shows for your summer car trip listening and tons of other stuff there too. Again, thisamericanlife.org.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He is the worst person to tell a joke to. Knock knock. Who's there?

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.