when the cycle breaks
Eating disorders, perfectionism, and the corporate ladder.
Author’s note: I first interviewed Josh for this story at the end of 2023. It was my first interview-based story, and I was conducting an experiment. How do I craft stories about topics that are difficult to vividly translate into words as if it is a conversation in a living room? Josh was kind enough to sit on a three-hour Zoom call with me where he was deeply vulnerable and open to sharing his story; in the year following, I listened to this interview many times to catch every detail as I crafted. A few early readers pointed out something intriguing—this isn’t really a story about body image, which is typically associated with eating disorders. Josh is also male-identifying. Crafting this story has been an important reminder to me that eating disorders don’t discriminate: the prevalence of this illness in men is high and often overlooked in society. It’s a sobering reminder to maintain empathy for all humans and that there are certain populations that are frequently devalued in their experiences.
[Name changed for privacy]
Josh’s strides down the hallway were robotic and rushed. As he walked, familiar, repetitive thoughts swarmed his head. You’re not doing enough; you’re not doing enough; you’re not doing enough. One foot followed the other until he ended up at the same, single-stall bathroom. Any consideration that there was an alternative to this routine had evaporated years before.
He stood outside the bathroom door. His first knock was pleasant and noninvasive. The tap was softly rejected by the person inside. “Occupied,” a masculine voice quipped back. Josh waited a few more minutes. Or was it seconds? He offered a second knock, this time a touch more frantic than the first.
Ten minutes went by. He worried his window of time was passing. Why is this guy taking so long? Probably playing on his phone on the toilet. Then Josh pictured a service worker who may have served him lunch just thirty minutes before and felt guilty. There was a rattling sound as the occupant turned the handle, and the heavy door swung open. Josh shot the man a look that may have resembled a death stare. He concluded it was just another techie from the familiar athleisure and went inside.
Josh let the door slam on his way out. He cleared his throat and walked back to his desk. His brain was a touch fuzzier than before, his head a bit lighter. This was nothing new, nothing he couldn’t handle. It would pass, he knew. This feeling. The slight burning sensation in his esophagus, the subtle shaking in his hands. It was just another slip on his way up the mountain. It came with the territory of being responsible for providing the information that drove million-dollar decisions, all wrapped up in an alluring slide deck.
Back in his open cubicle, the corporate world continued as usual. The sun shone on the crystal blue water outside the windows, the silvery bridge running from East Bay through Treasure Island to the streets of San Francisco. Workers in hoodies and some version of the latest sneaker trend walked mindlessly around him, carrying coffee cups and tapping away on smartphones, their necks twisted down like a flamingo cleaning its feathers. The office these afternoons was an engine on repeat, as predictable as the fog rolling through the city on a gray afternoon.
Unless he fucked up the slide deck. He pulled up the presentation that became the center of his universe for a few weeks (or months) out of each year, where if he were to meet the standards determined at the top of the corporate ladder, thousands of dollars and a competitive promotion were waiting just for him. You’d never know from looking at the graphs and figures that these were the stakes. But at least there was one thing he could control.
He took a deep breath as he began clacking away on his white, ergonomic keyboard, forgetting his actions from before. His thoughts slowed, replaced by a familiar numbness. He moved a label on a graph. He ran some numbers in Excel. He took a moment to admire a slide, the way everything lined up oh so perfectly, like a textbook picture of corporate nothingness.
A familiar colleague walked past him and smiled. For a moment, Josh wondered if the guy knew. He pressed save and let out a deep breath. Of course he doesn’t. Carry on.
It was business as usual.
When Josh describes this memory to me, I conclude that it isn’t a memory at all, but a single moment in a set of seemingly endless memories, each with a slightly different iteration.
“That was just another day, and I probably had a cycle of that a few times a week,” Josh says. He speaks somewhat nonchalantly, and I speak nonchalantly back, and I realize that it is actually quite difficult to put into words how one reaches this point of nonchalance.
To understand Josh and his relationship with bulimia is to understand dinner table conversations. He takes me back to his childhood, where he grew up on the East Coast in an upper-middle-class family with one brother and two working parents. Josh’s parents came from contrasting backgrounds, but both ended up with the same mindset: The role of a human is to work hard and be successful. In childhood, his mother was largely pushed by others to be success-driven, with the understanding that this was her responsibility because of what her parents had sacrificed. His father was self-driven and didn’t have the same intense parental influence. He was primarily incentivized to leave his small hometown and create a fresh start, in addition to “being superior to everyone else.” Josh laughs as he tells me about his father’s valedictorian speech, where he “lambasted everyone for not trying hard enough” before stepping off the stage.
Growing up, Josh’s parents primarily valued academic achievements and marketable nonacademic extracurriculars (think: the stuff that selective schools care about the most outside of grades, like fleeting volunteerism and sports giving evidence to leadership potential). He didn’t naturally excel at academics before high school, creating tension with his parents, who held high standards. “There was a lot of sitting me down at the dinner table and telling me I needed to do better, but not walking me through how,” Josh says. “I would do a million things wrong, and it began to feel like a whipping pole. Over time, I just believed something was wrong with me and I deserved it.”
In middle school, Josh trained himself to block out feelings of pain and confusion he’d developed from conversations with his parents that emphasized his inadequacy. This process of mental blocking involves entering a state of mind similar to “numbing out,” where Josh hears words and is able to use his frontal lobe but cannot experience emotion. “I am able to hold a conversation with others, but I am not emotionally responsive,” he says. Josh refers to mental blocking, or “disassociation,” as a learned survival mechanism, one that he still uses in his adult life, admitting that it creates difficulties managing personal relationships where he struggles to be fully present.
I ask him if bulimia is a replacement for mental blocking. He says it is an enhancer. “It allows me to continue the mental block and focus on food instead of all of the other types of pain my body may be fighting to address,” he says. He describes disordered behaviors as a distraction and a learned behavior of avoidance, including the all-encompassing exhaustion that ensues after purging. “It [the eating disorder] is kind of like self-flagellation. If I hit myself harder, I can continue climbing up.” He pauses. “Have you seen the BoJack Horseman clip called ‘Stupid Piece of Sh*t’?”
Regardless of the validity of his merits during his youth (which I understand to be above average, even in his competitive school environment), Josh seems to perceive middle school as a period of inferiority. He shares that he did not become a perfectionist (or develop an eating disorder) until high school. “There was this shift from my parents’ criticism to self-criticism. Then, they kind of stopped because I just became hard on myself instead,” he says. I ask if he ended up being more critical of himself than his parents were of him, if one was better or worse. He says it likely cannot be properly distilled into good versus bad. Both are complicated in their own right.
Josh’s development of bulimia is not uncommon, albeit with its own nuances. There is a generational push-and-pull and learned perfectionism from environmental factors. His household growing up was influenced by diet culture, as Josh recalls memories of being scolded for eating more than what was considered a typical portion size (particularly when he was in a growth spurt stage, where an increased appetite is completely normal for any child). He shares that his father expressed disappointment after seeing his brother gain weight and that he rarely saw his mother eat in front of them (she would usually eat full meals in private). To further critique the role of the parent and dissect childhood conditioning, though, would be both unfathomable and anticlimactic.
Instead, I revisit the present day. I ask Josh what the fear is, if he takes a break. “What would happen if you said no, even just one time?” I say. He looks at me as if it isn’t obvious. It is obviously to be the best. “It doesn’t matter if there are hundreds of people below you if there are still sixteen people above you. It’s not about what you’ve already done, but what you have left to do.” I nod as I empathize with this feeling of stuckness, of feeling like you’re on a train that only goes up. There’s rarely a psychologically comfortable way to get off, to accept grudging defeat in a game you crafted yourself.
“It’s not like you aren’t rewarded for it,” Josh adds, with the same nonchalance. He describes the corporate ladder to me, and I don’t find myself marveling in the way I would have in my early twenties when he describes the Silicon Valley version of fortune and fame.
Promotion cycles at the company are like a fleeting piece of gold you have to grasp before it whisks away, each one building in intensity. Steps up the ladder typically begin with two-year stints in low- to mid-level roles until one passes a certain rung. Then, the climb begins to present more complex obstacles. Rarely does one simply find complacency on a single rung, like wading in a still pool. You either move up or you move down. Or, you’re out. You’re replaceable until you aren’t, or maybe everyone is, because that’s how a corporate organization is optimized, free of risk. The top fifty percent eventually dwindle to the top ten percent, then the top one percent, until one is closer to the selective club of those who can afford the castle-like houses that sit upon hills in the Valley and first-class seats on planes to towns in Italy with views of turquoise water. In Josh’s case, he is not yet at the top, but he is now far from the bottom.
After Josh’s fourth promotion, he made it past the managerial ranks, his salary went up by over one hundred thousand dollars, and he felt “disgusted with himself.” He squints his face and says, “I didn’t like what I had to do to get that.” We talk about the power behind the ability to feel disgusted, that perhaps disgust is a necessary feeling to properly acknowledge the abnormality of what humans do to make it in today’s hierarchical workplace. Is disgust the boundary, in this case, to prevent further damage? I ask Josh how he defines damage, and he expands the metaphor from the status of his social well-being and physical health to the demise of his entire identity.
As an adult with an incredibly successful career, Josh seems at odds with his accomplishments, and he isn’t able to accept their existence in a straightforward way. He fixates on the concept of perfection. “There’s a saying that ‘nobody’s perfect.’ There’s two ways of interpreting that statement. My interpretation, most of my life, is that everyone makes mistakes and that’s a huge problem.” He tells me the goal should be perfection, then backtracks his statement, saying it is actually more logical to him now that everyone makes mistakes. “I think that is what it means to be human. I’ve only recently learned this,” he says, and wonders aloud if he is late in life to this discovery compared to other humans.
The last question I ask Josh is just as much of a conversation opener for inward reflection as it is a half-attempt at defining a dead-end conclusion: “Where do you go from here?”
Josh seems to analyze the relationship he has with bulimia in conjunction with the sacrifice of time. The pursuit of perfection can only really be measured in time, because perfection doesn’t inherently exist, though a human can continue to try through sheer effort to move closer to the illusion. “If there is a way to succeed, then sacrifice your relationships, sacrifice your happiness, and sacrifice yourself to do it. Everything in life takes time,” Josh says. He continues to speak in an even tone, analyzing every answer to my questions through a logical lens. “It’s interesting. When I’m not working in this intense environment, I discovered that I don’t binge and purge.” It’s a sobering statement. He is alluding to a period of time where he fully unplugged for more than a week.
He shares his growing desires to rearchitect his career, still unsure what success looks like between two extremes: working at his current level or simply not working at all, at least for a period of time. He pauses in his reflection, acknowledging that his ability to even contemplate an alternative path is a privilege in itself. “Most people can’t do this. They just have to keep working.”
I ask him what would push him to redesign his life, whether it is a short-term adjustment or a long-term shift. He’s admitted that it is possible financially and that he could even hire a career coach. It’s clear to me that he’s earned his track record and can effectively demonstrate his accolades for future opportunities. It’s not that simple, though, and we both know it. Money can’t fix the mind (even if it helps provide the right tools). The mind becomes accustomed to success and perfection, and recovery from his eating disorder intertwines with the ability to reconsider perfection. It means understanding (and actually believing) that taking a step back or slowing down is not a signal of failure, that one can exist in their own sphere of chosen fulfillment instead of through constant comparison.
“But that is what is confusing,” he says. “The people above me—I don’t really aspire to have their lives.”
It’s a conundrum for many in Silicon Valley and the broader tech world when one begins to realize that the window of breath becomes smaller, that there is always more. You realize that if you aren’t actively working towards more, you are raising a cultural white flag, admitting that maybe you are just “less.” Less than the person next to you at lunch; less than the person you meet at a house party near Dolores Park who just got accepted to a prestigious startup incubator; less than the idealized version of yourself you may have had in your head when you first entered this world’s all-consuming sphere. But what kind of life is one really seeking?
The answers may be found when the cycle breaks.
The words and tone of an eating disorder voice are not entirely dissimilar: