In a postelection cloud of gloom I decided to stop reading newspapers and resubscribed to The Sun. “Butter,” by Mishele Maron [November 2024], was the first essay I read.
Maron describes almost exactly my experience in a psychosomatic adolescent unit in 1982, when I was nineteen. The patient breakdown was about 90 percent girls with anorexia, a handful of girls with bulimia, one girl with Munchausen syndrome, and two boys with depression. Maron’s account brought back small details in my memory, like how one girl would stand on the bathroom sink to view her whole body in the mirror while another would guard the door. We slept four to a room, and the girls with anorexia got out of bed after lights-out to do calisthenics in the closet. Just like in the unit where Maron stayed, the girls with anorexia topped our social hierarchy, but no one was really picked on—except the girl with Munchausen’s, whom we universally reviled.
Like Maron, I was a rule follower, and I systematically did everything on my treatment plan. The oldest one there, I didn’t have to attend “school” during the day, and instead I worked on painting and sewing projects. I was released after two months, only to be pulled back in a week later for threatening suicide.
In spite of practices that seem very misguided—such as lumping boys with depression in with girls with eating disorders—my three-month stint in the hospital helped me. The staff were kind, and the rules took care of me in a way that I couldn’t yet take care of myself. It was the first step along my path to healthy eating.
The social dynamics of the in-patient eating-disorder unit that Mishele Maron describes in “Butter” are familiar. I lasted only four hours before checking myself out of the hospital in 2015. As an anorexic by day, bulimic by night, I’d gone there of my own will, but many of the patients, especially those beyond the eating disorder unit, had been ordered there after suicide attempts and interactions with law enforcement.
When I tried to color in a coloring book, the self-appointed boss of the ward—a young woman with the authority of a veteran—told me I was doing it wrong. “You have to make a copy of the page you want to color. You can’t hog it for yourself.” I feel sure her choice of words was intentional. The coloring-book monitor also informed me I’d have no choice but to eat meat at mealtimes. (She was wrong.) During dinner the fire alarm went off. That’s when I left.
At my next inpatient facility the resident mean girl was so mean that she gave the rest of us a common enemy. We loathed her almost as much as we did the dreaded Ensure. But we were all in pain and longed for any sort of control, so I understood why Mean Girl wanted to assert her badass persona. I, too, clung to my identity as the funny, rule-following one (except for my ten minutes of closet calisthenics every morning and night). At some point, after Mean Girl left, we were playing a silly icebreaker game at dinner. The question was: Are you good at keeping secrets? We all burst out laughing. To have an eating disorder is to live a life of secrets.
The counselors were amazing and humble, and the two psychologists were adept and kind, but I credit my fellow residents for allowing me to be fully honest about how sick I’d become.
Your magazine has been a constant throughout most of the fifteen years my partner and I have been together. He serves in the army as a Buddhist chaplain, and while he is deployed halfway around the world, The Sun continues to shine its light for us both. I pack the most recent issues in his care packages and even include love poems he tore out of old issues and dedicated to me.
I’m stunned by the Readers Write pieces on “Timing” [November 2024]. The authors’ experiences include having an obliviously happy vacation in Israel on October 6, 2023; avoiding by minutes the notorious mass shooter in Austin, Texas, in 1966; nearly being swept away in the catastrophic Christmas tsunami of 2004; and the author’s mother escaping just in time from the 103rd floor of the South Tower on September 11, 2001. Perhaps instead of being stunned I should be reminded that we cannot know which decisions will bring us good fortune or misfortune or even untimely death. We must deal with uncertainty throughout our lives.
Your October 2024 issue was the first I received, and the first piece I read in it—Teri Stein’s essay “Penumbra”—made me cry at breakfast, tears streaming down my face between bites of oatmeal. I had an abortion when I was twenty-one and in my first year of graduate school. I now have two young children, financial stability, and a dedicated partner, and I understand that I can trace the privileged life I live back to the decision I made at twenty-one.
Not long after my husband and I started trying to have children, I miscarried—at the same number of weeks at which I’d had the abortion. It felt like a sick retribution for my previous decision. I frequently read personal essays on abortion, searching for some explanation as to why I allowed myself to mourn the pregnancy that ended in miscarriage but not the one that I chose to end. Stein’s words, written in second person, are the only ones that have given me any kind of satisfaction: “This time the feelings that matter are yours. At six weeks your fertilized egg is exactly as alive—or not alive—as another would have been had you turned out to be pregnant in law school. What has changed for you, what has changed everything, is what you want.”
Thank you for the chance to see my story differently.
Over the three to four decades I’ve subscribed to The Sun, I’ve read many breakup letters in Correspondence. Now it’s my turn. The magazine that I loved published visionaries writing about universal truths and values. Unfortunately left-wing politics has blotted out that Sun. Though your publication has always been left-leaning, it has recently succumbed to a crass worldview of Good (leftism) vs. Evil—Trump especially, but pretty much anyone the Left disagrees with. I cannot support a magazine that bashes the Right for trying to protect minors from life-altering medical procedures that aim to change their sex—most recently in the Melissa Deckman interview [“Mind the Gap,” by Daniel McDermon, October 2024]. Ideology has usurped universal principles in your pages. But I will not rage or despair. Instead I will sit quietly in meditation, reflect on what might be clouding my own perceptions, and seek wholeness, clarity, and compassion—a search I will continue without The Sun.
In “Mind the Gap” Melissa Deckman says that, as recently as 2023, 23 percent of Americans “strongly supported” the belief that “the government, the media, and the financial world in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.” May God save our sorry asses.
Todd Davis’s essay “The Next Peak” [October 2024] brought me to tears. I lost my dad this past May. Though I was a girl, he never left me behind when he went into the Pennsylvania woods. We were forest companions. He encouraged the wildness in my blood. Davis’s essay helped me shed more tears and brought back pleasant memories.
I have been a reader of The Sun for only a few months. Yours is one of the few email notifications I enjoy seeing in my inbox. Because there are no pop-ups or adverts, I can fall completely under the enchantment of the writing. You have created not just a magazine but a community. Too many other publications present writing that’s not from the heart, but rather designed to fit the fashion of the day. It has been a long while since I recall reading anything that lingered in my mind the way stories from The Sun do. Where other magazines create anxiety and doubt, yours evokes the soul. May this community grow and be everlasting.
