After her mother’s death, Jennette wrote that she was glad she was too upset to eat. “At least I feel thin and valuable and good with my body,” she wrote, “my littleness.” But when she went to dinner with friends not long, she ate everything she ordered and dropped a bottle. When she later realized that she could just throw everything up, she reminded herself to feel “victorious”, thinking it was “the beginning of something good.”
Drinking heavy to help her bulimia became a habit. Like filming Sam & Cat Washed down in 2014, she only began to assume that she would have a bulimi-induced heart attack. “It’s hard to admit it,” she wrote, “but some of me actually wish I would. Then I wouldn’t have to be here anymore.”
She realized that she binge and cleaned five to ten times a day and took eight or nine shots alcohol each night. In identifying the red carpet anxiety as one of her triggers, her eating disorder therapist began to accompany Jennette to events – which for a while followed a pattern: Binge food behind the stage and crying in the car on the way home.
Eventually, she fired that therapist over text, still uncomfortable to immerse herself in her childhood trauma. Bulimia continued and Jennette’s teeth began to rot. To spit out a molar in the bathroom on a flight to Sydney, Australia, to press for Netflix-followed by the Uber driver who played Ariana’s “Focus on Me” in the car at her arrival-being an alarm clock. Her next therapist assured her that relapse was normally on her way to long -term recovery.
