‘Laboratory Rat’
Honbacher parallels herself to a ‘laboratory rat’ : “I became bulimic at the age of nine, anorexic at the age of fifteen. I couldn't decide between the two and veered back and forth from one to the other until I was twenty, and now, at twenty-three, I am an interesting creature, an Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. My weight has ranged over the past thirteen years from 135 pounds to 52, inching up and then plummeting back down I have gotten “well,” then “sick,” then “well,” then “sicker,” and so on up to now; I am considered “moderately improved,” “psychologically stabilized, behaviorally disordered,” “prone to habitual relapse.” I have been hospitalized six times, institutionalized once, had endless hours of therapy, been tested and observed and diagnosed and pigeonholed and poked and prodded and fed and weighed for so long that I have begun to feel like a laboratory rat.” The symbolic ‘laboratory rat’ is apposite considering the treatments that she has withstood since she was nine. Her body has borne polygonal medications due to the convolution of her eating disorders. Handling both ‘Bulimia and Anorexia’ concurrently must have taken a toll on her body because there was no utter assurance that the disorders would vanish promptly. The ‘hospitalization and institutionalization’ are causative of the actualization a ‘laboratory rat’ because all that emerged necessitated the subjection of her body to assorted prescriptions to exterminate probabilities of degeneration.
Mirrors
Mirrors personify Honbacher’s grueling fixation on her body: “I remember my entire life as a progression of mirrors. My world, as a child, was defined by mirrors, storefront windows, hoods of cars. My face always peered back at me, anxious, checking for a hair out of place, searching for anything that was different, shorts hiked up or shirt untucked, butt too round or thighs too soft, belly sucked in hard. I started holding my breath to keep my stomach concave when I was five, and at times, even now, I catch myself doing it. My mother, as I scuttled along sideways beside her like a crab, staring into every reflective surface.” Honbacher is factually confined to mirrors; thus, they were indispensable in delineating how she considered her body. Consulting mirrors would stimulus the appraisal of the ideal nature of her exterior.
Dionysus
Honbacher alludes to Dionysus to explicate the mania that is in-built in eating disorders: “Many of us were lost and turned to art for direction. What we craved, in many cases, was religion. Had we a god, it might have been Dionysus. We, his followers, imagined ourselves maenads, half-believing in divine possession, half mocking it. Either way, it was a Dionysian sort of time. Dionysus/Bacchus, it is said, was driven mad by his education…A few too many of us fell for the old romantic story of the mad artist, the genius made idiot savant by the swells and falls of music, language, color on canvas, ceaselessly, manically, playing inside his head. We wanted to be that genius, that idiot mad with the world of his mind.” Eating disorder-related mania subsidizes to delusions that offer patients the impression that they are divinely possessed by the disorders. Although Dionysian mania is unreservedly interrelated with education, its life-threatening passion manifests among eating-disorders patients. The delusion that arises from the craze persuades patients that their ghoulish habits are exhibitions of inventiveness which should be channeled through art.
