"Letting Go" as the Essence of Recovery from Anorexia

Letting go is the Zen classic. It epitomizes ease: Just let go of all the stuff you don’t need, and all will be well.

Letting go is what you do when you let a decision make itself rather than pretending that there’s a disembodied you to make it; when you let the momentum of a decision-in-progress carry you; when you conclude that there is no free will and no mind/body split and that everything is just playing out how it will. Letting go is what many or even most people say they are doing when they recover from anorexia.

Letting go does not, counter to appearances, mean stopping bothering with thinking and planning; many who have let go like this over the millennia have observed that it doesn’t in fact herald havoc. It turns out that when you stop forcing things, better things tend to happen rather than worse. It turns out that responsible actions still happen if you let go of morally caustic notions of responsibility (whether religious or otherwise).

Letting go can apply at the micro level of not deciding what to have in the restaurant and at the macro level of deciding whether to leave your partner. It can have radical, and radically subtle, effects. But it’s a lot harder to pin down imaginatively, I think, than the poisonous sibling we explored in part 1, letting oneself go.

If I conjure a mental image of letting oneself go, it comes quickly:

Personally, I imagine a woman who has stopped washing her hair, stopped shaving her legs, stopped tidying up, who has lost all her daily routines and structures and energy. She is watching daytime TV in a living room with the blinds drawn—and yes, she is getting fat and wearing loose shapeless clothing to conceal it, or because it doesn’t matter. The blinds are closed and they are letting some shafts of dusty sunshine into the gloom.

This is not an image that the reasonable part of me approves of. I don’t know where all that hair stuff came from, for example: I don’t tend to wash my own more than once a month, and I don’t think I care much what I or anyone else does with their legs. The point is, these markers were what came to mind when I let that socially laden prompt do its cognitive work.

This image is bound up with a strong sense of the woman at the centre of it not caring what anyone thinks—but maybe with an uneasy undercurrent of “I do care really, I’m just pretending not to because I can’t think what else to do.” The light coming through the blinds is a reminder of the world out there that’s being shut off; it’s conveying the intrusion of those gossipy gazes from outside that are fascinated precisely by the existence of someone who doesn’t care about their opinions.

Overall, this image feels like a summing-up of a process that leads nowhere except an ending, a stagnation, a nonexistence.

What happens when I try to summon an equivalent image of letting go? I find it much harder, even impossible, to create a rich situational image. What comes to mind instead are fragments: Aschenbach’s fist relaxing after being clenched for a lifetime (in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice), quoted here; the iron grip on thin air loosening. In general, these image fragments that float into my mind tend to evoke a loss of the kinesic tension involved in all the tugs of war between the should and the shouldn’t, the want and the ought. This is a potent metaphorical structure to add to the 14 I listed in a post on metaphors of illness and recovery, like journeying or warfare. Here, illness is tension, recovery is relaxation.

Why is it so much harder to find a life situation or action or set of actions that can stand for letting go than for letting oneself go? Maybe it’s harder because it’s less memetic. A meme is anything that is imitated, including ideas, songs, and pictures. Memes are shaped over time by the same evolutionary algorithm that creates genetic design without a designer: copying with variation and selection.

Letting go does have some memetic tags, like a lycra-clad Warrior Two on an Insta-friendly beach, but those accidentally self-parodying versions often have rather little purchase in real life. By contrast, with letting yourself go, there’s a rich readymade script activated by the phrase, one that makes it dead easy to be dismissive about. Perhaps it’s telling that Mann’s image, with all the memetic weight of the literary canon behind it, is one of my guiding images here; my imagination couldn’t do it without that.

Self-Control Essential Reads

When Do People Think Abstinence or Moderation Is Better?

Buddha, Darwin, and Dumbledore: How to Override Our Impulses

Perhaps there’s a temporally structural difference too: This kind of letting go is not a big one-time decision to give up on life; this is a repeated little act, a repeated affirmation of “yes, I choose, again, to let go.” And perhaps because what saying this repeated yes means is different for each of us, it’s hard to make a generalized script stick.

For myself, I have some personal recovery moments that stand out, especially moments in chemically altered states where unfraught action and reaction came much easier, and plenty of episodes of saying yes (to food) in ways that felt like relaxing into the yes. Overall, it feels like my life now is the result of a lot of intensive past letting-go topped up with enough continuing kinds to keep it extremely different from how anorexia forced it to be.

Ultimately, perhaps what characterizes all the innumerable specific letting-go actions is an attitude: a way of saying yes (but not out of weakness or obligation), of holding things lightly, of not getting caught up in circular thoughts or situations. And if so much of this comes down to attitude, I think the difference between letting yourself go and letting go must be a lot about whether this is—or feels—chosen.

Letting oneself go has qualities of both chosen and not: it may be something that the individual chooses but that everyone else carps about as a bad choice. For the person who hasn’t done it (does anyone ever think they have done it?), this makes it likely to be imagined as something that one would slide into, not realizing what a bad choice it was until it was too late. After all, the gossipers must have got something right, or if they haven’t, well, their opinions become self-fulfilling anyway, by wrecking what pleasure there could have been.

Letting go, meanwhile, is not something that we imagine people do accidentally; it must take all those years of full lotus and Warrior Three to get even close, we’re told. It can seem almost irrelevantly implausible that anyone ever really manages it.

But it’s not all or nothing. Letting go happens thanks to little repeated daily actions of mind—including noticing what bothering to let go makes possible. I scribbled these ideas mid-hike on Catalina Island, well fed on a picnic of olive bread, cheese, butter, egg, crisps, tomatoes, apple, and shortbread on a grassy seaside lookout. If I hadn’t let my body—myself—relax into the walking and then the eating, I probably wouldn’t have had these thoughts. Did “I” choose or not choose to do my day this way? The question simply doesn’t feel like the right one to ask; it sets up an opposition that never needed to be there. Letting go has, perhaps, a lot to do with discovering that.

And so, with the picnic that I ended up making and bringing and eating, we come back to food. As the Buddha discovered, and as every individual with anorexia knows anyway, the mind-body deprived of what it needs can only ever try to get what it’s deprived of, not do any number of other cool things it could do instead in the presence of what it needs.

In the end, there isn’t a real difference between chosen and not chosen. The difference is in the story we tell ourselves.

In the final part of this miniseries, we’ll take a look at how we can switch our personal stories in practical ways to free ourselves from the spectre of “she let herself go.”