My ability to perform is the only thing that’s keeping me from being trapped. I am trapped, a person would probably argue, but at least I’m not trapped physically, not by walls or sedatives or people watching my movements. When my feelings shift too far and when I can’t eat, I can still put my bare feet in the frozen dirt or stand outside in cold rain. I can still draw on my walls and break all of my drinking glasses, take a match to my leg and burn the hair off. It’s a kind of freedom. I think putting a sick person into an institution is like putting a dizzy person on a carousel. It usually makes things a whole lot worse.

It’s not only about the freedom. I can’t go back into institutionalized care right now because I’ve been cast in a play. It's about a boy who falls down a well. The director, the man who wrote the play, told me he liked the way my eyes naturally have circles underneath them. I like the stage makeup; lots of blacks and blues, painted bruises.

To say the play is experimental is understating it quite a lot. It’s sort of half play and half art installation, but there are lines, and acting, and to perform is what helps me keep my food down, helps me keep track of the ways in which my thoughts veer off in their own directions. It isn’t because my life has been plagued by an unfair amount of pain; it’s the moments of gray clouds and steel railways, rain jackets shoving onto the subway. The most common moments are the most dangerous, because they’re sneaky, and no one apart from me can tell that they’re murderous.

The last time I was in a hospital, it was for six weeks, and by the time I was out, the only person who would take me in was Mattie. In the few words she’s said to me over the past three months, she’s tried to remind me of this in subtle ways—that she’s living with me, that she let me move in when my roommates kicked me out and I couldn’t afford to live alone—but I’m pretty sure her mother forced her. We’ve known each other since we were children, and we used to have the kind of friendship that was everything, all at once, an entire ecosystem within itself. It was that feeling where I would go sit with her at the doctor’s office when she had an appointment, just because it meant we got to be together, sitting in those hard plastic waiting room chairs and kicking our shoes against the wall. Now she mostly leaves me to my own devices. She doesn’t mind when I make greasy grilled cheese sandwiches to make myself throw up, and she doesn’t ask when I don’t get out of bed, even though I sleep in the living room of her one-bedroom apartment.

The whole thing is a setup. Mattie wouldn't want this. We both agreed: the list of stipulations from those distant figures in our childhood homes, weekly doctor's appointments, group therapy, reported weigh-ins. I know the situation is unfair, and not to me. I know how symbiosis works.

Mattie is used to coming in and finding me sleeping whenever I’m not with the doctor or at play practice. I can feel her eyes watching the lump in my bed, me, when she opens the door after a long day at the office. Even from underneath the covers, she sounds overworked and tense. I don’t think she knows I’ve been cast in a play, but she must wonder where I am sometimes. When she comes home, I can usually hear her clanking in the kitchen and making herself food, waiting for Val, who comes over with a bottle of wine that they then take into Mattie’s room. Val is Mattie’s old roommate from NYU, who, from the beginning of their relationship, has abhorred my presence. Sometimes Val is accompanied by a boy, sometimes by two, but usually it’s just her. I listen for the voices because occasionally the boys ask about me, and I wait to hear Mattie explain me away. It's usually Val who tells them what I am.

In the play, the little boy who falls down the well is my character's younger brother. The opening scene features us walking down a road to buy candy from the general store, but it quickly delves from there into a horror-style metaphorical witch hunt. The director says most of the time playwrights underestimate their audience.

We’re currently in two weeks of dress rehearsals, which means everything has been built and the costumes have been made. The well is on stage for the entire play. It’s a big wooden contraption that is made to look like it is bricks and concrete, but in reality it isn’t that heavy. It has a straw roof that is nearly as tall as the lowest hanging stage lights, and from a bar hangs a single rope, the rope that you would use to pull up buckets of water, but since it is a stage well the rope just dangles down into the hole. They cast an eleven-year-old boy named Sam to play the lead, and after he falls down the well, he has to sit inside of it for the whole first act. The theater isn’t one that has trap doors or fancy stage maneuvers, so he has nowhere to go. I imagine how it must feel to sit and hide in front of an audience, while people are moving around you and talking and being seen.

At times I want to cut off all the parts of my body that hang loose. I want to turn them into clothes and drapes so that I can hide inside them and no one can see me—stitch together the pieces of skin and make a tent. My doctor went silent when I said that. At group therapy we once did a meditation exercise during which we were asked to visualize our true selves. We were told to picture our bodies alone in a field, and in the field there was a mirror that would show us what our souls looked like. This was back when Mattie and I were still friends, and I remember telling her about it. She sat across from me in the coffee shop and meditated, trying to picture herself. She said she saw her soul as bigger—taller, with bigger breasts and a longer, curvy figure. A dominant goddess of nature, she said, with long hair. She told me that internally she felt a powerful connection with femininity and giving life. When I did the meditation I couldn’t figure out whether or not I was picturing a woman or a man, or whether my figure was even human at all, but when I was sitting and telling Mattie about it I thought that maybe the reason my figure didn’t have a gender was because it was a child.

Sam has to have bruises painted over his whole body during intermission. In the second act he climbs out of the well, covered in the bruises, and amidst the celebration at having found him safe, all the townspeople start believing him to be some sort of dark trickster, a demon or something unsightly, because he’d been thought to be dead. It’s unnatural, what you’ve done, is a line that I say to him. I’m the one who defends him to the townspeople for most of the play. The bruises take a while to paint and because he has to hide in the well for the entirety of the first act, most of the cast has to grab paintbrushes during the break and help do the makeup on all parts of his body. He usually lets me do the bruises on his neck, and I know it’s because I don’t move as quickly and I try hard not to tickle him. We’re the only two characters that have bruises as part of our costume, so I know how it feels.

Mattie used to come with me to most of my auditions. We’d run lines on the subway the whole way there and then vent about how stupid the directors seemed on the way back, usually because they’d tell me immediately after my monologue that they wanted to go in a different direction. What this actually meant was that I was thin, but not in the healthy sexual way, and so I couldn’t play the young woman. There’s usually only one young woman part. I lamented to Mattie that there weren’t more lead roles for plants, or aliens, or for monsters. When things started getting worse, Mattie would sit with me on the subway car and poke at my side, joking that all I needed to do was eat, and I’d grow in the correct places and get cast right away. My face got hollow-looking and I started acting hollow to her, and so she stopped coming with me.

I’m meant to keep a self-harm log for the doctor I see most often. She tells me to try to control my thoughts, to write down how I am feeding myself and how much I think about hurting myself, what causes those thoughts, how severe they are. I don’t have to show it to her, but I am supposed to tell her its contents. I have learned the maze that I’m stuck in well enough to know what thoughts I can tell her about and which behaviors to keep a secret. For instance, I can tell her that I forced up the mashed potatoes that I bought from the grocery store, and I can tell her that I drank half a bottle of Nyquil in order to sleep. I can’t tell her that sometimes during rehearsal I think about that rope hanging into the well, empty and inviting. I imagine that if I could float there, suspended and tethered, the well would become real, a long tunnel with a hole that someone could fall into and hide forever. I envision the child from my meditation curled up at the bottom. The doctor doesn’t care to read the log, in any case. Most of the time the book that I bring in to show her is just tallies marked all across the page.

My primary job in the play is to look the part. The director thinks himself poetic, that my large eyes with their sockets too deep-set and thin square frame will communicate a kind of profane image that suits the story he wants to tell. His play isn’t about anything other than the enjoyment of the kind of irreverent justice we experience in life. But performing comes naturally to me. I have to perform a self that isn’t sick, or starving, or genderless. It’s the only thing keeping me in the world, acting as a person that can communicate the same way as the other people here. Only in one scene in the play am I asked to truly push myself, acting-wise. After Sam climbs out of the well, there’s a dramatic moment where I’m thrown onto hot coals for defending him, called a witch. On stage, this is shown with a lot of light and sound, and I pretend to burn for an agonizing amount of time. They are, as the director explained, trying to burn the devil out of me. The worst part is that it works—the play ends with me leading the townspeople to where Sam is sitting up against the giant wooden prop. We throw stones at him until he dies, believing him an evil spirit for climbing up from the bottom of the well. That’s all performing is—acting out someone’s twisted versions of humanity, making yourself into a pawn in someone else’s fiction. A lot of people don’t like to do that: form other realities and cast off the self for someone else’s story.

Before I was put into the hospital the last time, I would sit on my bed in my old apartment and try my hardest not to call Mattie. I thought about how it must feel to have a friend who is constantly in a state of collapse, constantly needing a life source from someone else. I imagined that it would feel like being friends with a radio transmitter, one that was broken and no longer worked both ways, but simply broadcast the same message over and over. Or like Chinese water torture; gentle drops of water on your face again and again, a constant reminder that the world is hurting and that the world needs more from you. When a tree grows on top of another tree, the healthiest thing is to kill one of the trees—but do we go after the parasite or the host?

The child I saw during my meditation had dirty shoulder-length hair and no breasts and no penis, no loose hanging parts and no fat, just skin against limbs. It was probably seven or eight. It had powerful brown eyes, but it was so innocent standing in the field by itself—almost as if its flesh were too soft. It didn’t have clothes on, and the hairs on its skin were raised in goosebumps, like there was a breeze. Sometimes, picturing it, I would imagine what it would feel like to move its limbs, wiggle its fingers and toes. It is alone in its state—it doesn’t seem to have parents, or friends. I think in its world it feels safe because it is the only thing alive, in that field, looking at itself in the mirror. What would seem scary in our world doesn’t exist there. That is the child I imagine falling into the well.

The costumes we get to wear are magnificent. There’s a scene in which I’m sleeping in a bed, dreaming that Sam is a bird flying over me. He’s in a suit completely covered in multicolored feathers, and he’s attached to a harness that makes it look like he’s floating over me in my nightgown. I don’t have ballet training, but because I’m thin in the monstrous way, I do a sort of interpretive dance on my tiptoes while he floats. In the dream sequence I’m dancing with the bird until hunters come and try to shoot him out of the air. They get to wear those old-fashioned caps with the earflaps and their guns make loud pops. The guy who does the lights makes a real show of it, covering the stage with colder colors during the dance and switching to red once the Sam bird is gunned down.

At first, when Mattie used to come to all of my plays, she was enthusiastic about getting me help. She called about talk therapy and found me a psychiatrist, then signed me up for an eating disorder group and went with me to the first few meetings. I didn’t improve, and I couldn’t figure out if our friendship was a casualty of my illness or a casualty of her self-care.

It seems clear to me that for long periods of time, people exist without that kind of daily sustenance. Life itself is proof that it’s possible to live for a long while without a touch on the shoulder or hand, without an understanding smile, without eye contact or any sort of knowing at all—and without those minute intimacies, it is harder to differentiate ourselves from other bodies. In the grand fabric I start to forget the way my arms meet my hips, the shape of my shoulders, whether my hair is clean. I lose the language that people might apply to me. It is only when someone comes close that I remember my body. When Mattie looked at me I could feel how thin the film is, between me and her, between all of us. It was so uncomfortable, to remember that the divides are always that translucent, flimsy.

Before opening night the cast gathers for one final meeting. Sam is nervous because he’s made a habit of messing up during the crucial scene between my character and his, the part where we are both sitting next to the well. Do you ever think about climbing back in? is what my character asks him. That’s where they want me, he’s supposed to say. That’s the part just before the climax.

Sometimes I think about my character—the one that gets burned, the one that conforms for survival. I wonder if she might think about God. I figure it might feel like wondering what is beyond the stage. When you’re confined to a specific area; when you are meant to speak the same words over and over; when all you can see is light, and beyond that light darkness, wouldn’t you wonder whether or not there was something beyond your line of sight? I wonder if she knows there is an audience there, watching her. It must feel like an invisible wall to her, a surface of last scattering at the edge of her universe that marks a boundary between the known and unknown. The bottom of the well, at least, is known—if it were a choice between the two. I think of what she might imagine to be beyond the stage lights. I wonder if she would care, after everything she is scripted to sacrifice.

After the final curtain falls the director comes up to us individually, giving each of us a personalized speech thanking us for trusting his vision. He finds me second, after Sam, and tells me plays are his religion, his testament to both optimism and original sin all in one. I’d been cast, he says, because I housed both so beautifully. As I listen my eardrums pound in my head. A stunning depiction of the brutality of hope, the reviewer from the Times has called it. The director reads the review out loud to us, in a circle. The audience didn’t see profanity in the play at all. The director hugs me before I go home, his shirt scratching at my cheek, telling me that people climb out of wells all the time.

When I leave the cast party, I walk home instead of taking the subway. I think about taking off my shoes but decide that I’d rather have my feet be warm and dry. I think about the hospital, eating those mashed starches and cooked carrots and drawing with magic markers all the characters that I’d watched on the TV in the rec room. I remember that it was a warm feeling. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

When I get home I usually listen outside in the stairwell for sounds. I wait, but I don’t hear any laughter or conversation. I unlock the door and instead of dropping my bag and getting into bed in my clothes, I walk right past the living room and into the hallway. Mattie’s doorway is open, and, unknowingly, I plant myself in it. I know she heard me come in, but when she looks up from her book, her face looks like a face that’s seen a ghost. Her eyes move over my shoulders, collarbone painted in makeup, costumed hips, my boots against carpet. I can feel the trickle of wet swallow down my throat, the infinitesimal sound of the blink. I stand there, watching her fright turn to irritation and then to alarm, all in a matter of seconds.

“I’m in a play,” I tell her.