We were gathered on Mimi’s patio in the dark, passing around Emily’s elephant-shaped bong, which had been ignited by a purple plastic BIC lighter bearing the image of Snoop Dogg. The mild summer breeze was a gentle caress against my skin; the scent of pine and fresh-cut grass was a balm to my soul. It was awful to be back in my house, but it was good to be home. With my people.

In a weed-induced haze, I found myself ruminating on my Spring Quarter at Stanford, which had ended only weeks before, which had been miserable. I’d been doing so well throughout freshman year, thanks to the new environment, new people, new independence. No one telling me what I could or couldn’t do, could or couldn’t eat. I was overjoyed that the dining halls liberated me from the burden of having to cook my own meals. I had access to variety, access to food I actually enjoyed. Miraculously, I hadn’t binged all year. That is, until Spring Quarter.

Spring Quarter, I took way too many classes, one of which was Math 51: Linear Algebra, Multivariable Calculus, and Modern Applications, a notorious Stanford shitter. Math 51 was a requirement for basically every STEM major, which could have applied to me, because I hadn’t made up my mind yet, and wanted to keep my options open. After consulting my brother, I learned that MATH 51’s lin-alg-plus-multi curriculum was equivalent to what Harvard taught over the course of an entire year, but compressed into nine weeks.

I was terrified of this class. I had always been terrified of math, ever since my mom told me that I sucked at it and possessed no logical reasoning skills, and ever since that day my dad slammed his palm down into the kitchen counter, exasperated as my seven-year-old brain failed to grasp long division. “You so stupid! Why you don’t understand?”

I was determined to succeed in Math 51. I read every dense page of the dense textbook, attended weekly peer tutoring sessions, redid my old test and homework problems again and again. I would finish all my problem sets by Sunday, even though they were due on Wednesdays, because not being ahead was falling behind. When Brian and I cuddled in bed, he would often fall asleep, and I would extricate myself from his heavy limbs, reach over to the desk to retrieve my iPad, and scroll through the textbook as he snored beside me. I would be alerted to his awakening by an incredulous “Bruh…I can’t believe this.”

After the first midterm, the professors sent out an email alerting the class that our scores had been released. The median was 25.5 out of 60. Forty-three percent. I thought it said a lot about the teaching quality that the median, in a class of three hundred students, was an F.

Stomach churning with nervousness, I hurried over to GradeScope to receive my fate. The page loaded. My eyes widened. 59.5 out of 60 – I almost didn’t believe it. A wave of relief washed onto my shore, then immediately receded. That mistake you made that cost you a half point was so stupid! And it’s not like you even understand the concepts – you’re just regurgitating the homework problems. Plus, this was just the first midterm. It’ll only get harder from here. After that, I redoubled my efforts.

As I began to try harder and harder, I began to eat more and more. I ate gallons of blueberries at a time from the bottomless vat at the dining hall, which seemed to constantly replenish itself by magic. I ate so much pineapple that my tongue and gums and the roof of my mouth would drip with blood from the bromelain enzyme digesting my soft parts. I ate plate upon plate piled high with roasted sweet potatoes, smearing my iPad with grease as I scrolled through diagrams of contour plots and orthogonal projections.

The evening before my final exam, I ate thirteen snickerdoodle cookies, each larger than the size of my palm, the gluten-free dairy-free egg-free nut-free soy-free kind stocked in the dining hall’s allergen-sensitive minifridge, that tasted like the love child of Play-Doh and a Bath & Body Works candle. The ravenous demon I thought I had exorcized possessed me once again: I walked back and forth to the fridge in a trance, retrieving cookie after cookie, as my stomach grew increasingly distended and I grew increasingly sick with revulsion.

At 4:00 a.m. the next morning, I awoke with a horrifically aching stomach and horrifically explosive diarrhea. I was genuinely afraid that during my MATH 51 Final Examination, I would shit myself.

In my cannabinoid contemplation that balmy July night, I realized that normal people don’t eat thirteen ass-tasting cookies in the span of thirty minutes because they’re stressed out for a math test. I realized that I had let myself fall to pieces, and for what? It’s not like I gave a shit about eigenvectors or Lagrange multipliers or transpose matrices, and I would probably forget all about them within a month anyway. So what, then, just to prove something? Just to be perfect for the sake of it?

Emotional stability had always been central to my conception of self; it had been a point of pride that I’d withstood my traumatic adolescence and emerged unscathed. I would actually look in the mirror and marvel sometimes, Wow! I can’t believe I’m not depressed! I had never needed therapy; I had never lusted for an SSRI. I was happy and normal and fine – a gold star, a pat on the back. A big, fat, victorious middle finger to my mother, the woman who had failed to break me.

But then, sitting there, high as a kite, staring deep into the woody shadows illuminated only by pinpricks of firefly light, I realized something terrible: maybe she hadn’t failed. 

Somehow, until that moment, I had never considered that my myriad eating disorders, or my panic attacks, or my occasional urges to throw myself from moving vehicles might qualify as mental illness. They were merely little bumps on a smooth concrete plane, tiny cracks on a glossy shellac surface, minor wrinkles in a lustrous silk brocade. But now it was so painfully obvious: I had been deluding myself. I was not okay. Maybe I had never been.