Airin Efferin
Ask me how many calories are in a pineapple smoothie. Or a bowl of noodles. Or a blueberry muffin. I can rattle the numbers off the top of my head because I am obsessed with the food I consume.
There is an app called MyPlate which helps me calculate my calorie intake throughout a given day. It breaks down the information to the macro and micronutrients level, so I can monitor if I had too much of any one element. I then average throughout the week according to suggested health guidelines, factoring exercise and water intake. The result:I never have to guess or worry whether I ate too much. I just look at the record.
This is me now, in my early 30s, implementing some heavy-duty Military Discipline.
Let’s rewind back a decade, to a Me in her early 20s.
She’s in the bathroom, kneeling over the toilet bowl. Two fingers are in her mouth, poking her own throat to stimulate gagging. Her stomach complies and starts to throw up. In reverse order, the Thanksgiving meal comes back out. Brownies, pumpkin pie, meat. The sour cream and chips which were appetizers her American hosts had prepared. They had a tradition of inviting international students over for Thanksgiving meals. Airin was an Indonesian student on F1 visa, studying piano performance in Michigan. Her fingers were long and beautiful – they looked like they were made for the keys.
They didn’t know her fingers were also adept at making her digestive system throw up every meal, every single day. On bad days, she would be hogging the common bathroom. It was common because she always lived with roommates and apartment-mates, some of whom noticed very quickly her strange bathroom habits.
Back then, I looked in the mirror and hated who I saw. The binging and purging which started in my early teens stayed with me for 10 years. I had no control over myself, my mind, my eating habits. I lost the daily war with my own beast. And it made me hate myself more.
My saving grace was a housemate who reached out to me. She was Ghanaian, and – No, I was not participating in any intentional cross-cultural living programs, although that semester many eyebrows were raised when I moved in to live with 3 African girls. They were loud, noisy, and laughed so much. They constantly fretted about their hair. My introverted Asian self was thrilled and amused, and at the same time thoroughly out of place. We’ve remained friends until now, keeping the Accra – Bandung connection alive via Whatsapp and regular Zoom calls.
She first reached out to me, asking me if I needed help. I denied everything, but she wouldn’t buy it. It also didn’t help that I left my diary lying around – for this I credit myself. At least I wrote. I wrote in my diary, and I accidentally left it on the common kitchen counter. So her Ghanaian eyes had solid proof, and her loving heart wouldn’t let me off the hook that easily.
To have other people know my flaws and harmful habits was essential to breaking that hellish prison of the mind. The next semester I started living with other friends – lo and behold, fate brought another fellow bulimic. This time, I was the one who reached out to her. Together we stumbled, fell apart, held hands, picked each other back up, and began our healing journeys. Our sisterhood has held strong over all the years until now, across the vast Pacific.
The final unseen, powerful force which carried me to my liberation was Music. With a capital M, because I believe Music is is not just sounds, or instruments, or musicians, or microphones. It’s more than what you can see on stage, on a computer screen, or on a piece of paper. It’s more than what you hear with your ears, or through your headset, or blasting through gargantuan sound systems in a stadium.
It’s something like the sweat drenching the drummers’ back, the drop of blood from the clarinettist’s lip, or the calloused left fingertips of the cellist. It’s something like the chirping birds, the deep notes of the blue whales, the shrieks of the winter wind.
It’s something like the silence after people say ‘Amen’, the unheard overtones of the harmonic fifths in the air, the rhythm of the rolling waves.
This Music is the language of the universe itself, and I was so privileged to experience shimmers here and there in my studies as a concert pianist. Being so close to such a force slowly yet steadily awakened my inner voice. The joy of a Bach prelude, the pathos of a Brahms intermezzo, the sublimity of a Beethoven sonata… The time I spent with Music continued to strengthen my inner voice, until I was slowly able to master, love, and be at peace with my one and only, dear self.
