From there, post-grad began with a car-less, jobless six months of “what do I do now.” Even with Hymnal as her go-to project, developments were slow moving and the expected tours weren’t coming. While waiting for an upswing, she had time to herself, enough time to detect an ongoing problem that had started in those previously mentioned middle school years.

That January, Amelia sought treatment for her eating disorder. I’ll let her tell you the rest.

AG: Food was my best friend and my worst enemy.

I went through two rounds of intensive outpatient therapy. It was a group of other girls, and we’d meet for about three hours. We’d have a group discussion, have a group meal, and have another group discussion afterwards. That was five days a week. I did probably five or six months of that.

I had to put everything on hold, but I really learned that a lot of these feelings I was having weren’t exclusive to me. Some of these other girls were going through the exact same thought processes as I was.

Once I got out of that program, I was kind of on my own for a little while and had to practice doing it in real life. It very very slowly got easier and took patience, which I don’t have a lot of.

I feel like there are a lot of misconceptions about what eating disorders actually are. For someone who doesn’t know much about them, the first thought might be “why can’t you just eat?” or “why can’t you just not care what other people think about you?” If it were that easy, I would have done that a long time ago. I always understood that they were very complex things, but I just never realized how complex mine was until I got into treatment and started pulling apart the pieces.

They’re very common. One in four women in this country has one, and that’s crazy. The media with its images of photo-shopped woman and skinny models, that all has a factor in it, but it’s more than that because even at my thinnest it still wasn’t enough.

It’s been kind of disorienting at times to look at who I was just two years ago compared to where I’m at now. It’s like night and day.

We talk a bit longer but basically end here, still smirking, preparing our excess coffee to-go. I gather a couple more facts before packing up: favorite album, favorite day of the week, favorite time of the day.

The Beatles’ Revolver, Friday, and a tie between early morning and late night.

Combine these with the convincing laugh, the septum piercing, the Walkman, the orange amp, the sold-out Middle East, the untouched PBR pile, the degree, the fact that she says she could never be a nurse because she likes “rocking out and smoking weed too much,” the fact that she answered when I asked in our first phone call “are you wearing socks?”, the music I heard, the experiences she shared, the reverb, and the easiness I felt while talking with her. That’s what I found out about Amelia. Leaving the shop, I run through these facts in my head. An incomplete list…But I think it’s enough to constitute my angle: getting to know a person just because.

Then, she drives me to the train station in her ’98 Cadillac Deville.

It’s called a “caddie.”

It drives like a couch.

And the tape deck is broken.