Morgan DiPrimo takes readers back to her time in an eating disorder treatment center with a story that is equal parts absurd and unexpectedly moving. One afternoon, all the patients were called into an emergency meeting — not for a medical crisis or a fire, but because someone had smuggled a pita out of the dining room in her pants and attempted to dispose of it in the toilet.
What followed was a full-scale group interrogation: staff cycling through compassionate, disappointed, and criminal-investigation approaches while the patients stonewalled in collective silence. Suspicion fell on everyone — the girl in the oversized sweatshirt, the one sitting too calmly, the one with a prior “treatment-center criminal history” involving contraband tweezers. Nobody confessed. The staff threatened group consequences. The room, briefly divided by suspicion, snapped back into solidarity the moment someone invoked the word “supplement.”
DiPrimo is clear that the eating disorder itself was never funny — the fear, the secrecy, the desperation for control were all real and serious. But the scene, she writes, was objectively absurd. And being able to laugh at what once terrified her is, years later, its own small sign of recovery. The illness may still be part of her story, she concludes, but it no longer gets to tell the whole thing.
Originally published on morgandiprimo.substack.com.
