My Body.

*TRIGGER WARNING: CONTAINS SUBJECT MATTER RELATED TO DISORDERED EATING*

This is the hardest thing for me to write about. It’s going to be the longest post I’ve written, but just fucking read it please.

I am almost twenty-two years old, and the days I can remember when I have been free of this are rare.

I don’t know when it started.

All I know is the feeling of its grip.

Likely it chose me, wrapped itself around the nerves of my brain before I even had a chance.

I used to think I lived with it, that it was like a toxic roommate that would leave me when I decided to break the lease. But now I understand that it lives within me.

I will only ever have this one brain - this brain that attacks itself despite me.

I can’t just kick it out because I’ve grown and don’t agree with it.

All I can do is choose to fight it.

I think about it less now, but - still - everyday there are seconds, sometimes longer on the worse days, that I spend trying to pry it off of me.

Most days, I can flick it away - easy. Some days, it wins.

It is not a choice, it is a mental illness.

I was a very happy kid. That spunky, quick-witted, smart, chubby little girl everyone roots for. I love her, and she was so immensely loved. I do everything for her, because she represents everything I’ve lost, everything I’ve managed to keep, and everything I’m trying to get back. She didn’t see herself in the world, she saw the world in her - she knew it.

But I’m not writing this for her. I’m writing this for 13 year old me. Bitch, you tried to kill me - but I lived to tell the tale.

…

I started sucking in my stomach when I was six years old.

I had noticed that my body was different from my friends’. My legs were bigger, my stomach stood out a bit farther. Their swimsuits fit me a bit tighter when I would have to borrow one on a spontaneous pool day. I was more conscious of the way I looked standing next to them in a two-piece dance costume.

I vividly remember being around age seven and seeing a weight watchers commercial on tv and thinking, “I should go on weight watchers so I don’t have to suck in my stomach anymore. I could look like everyone else and never have to think about it again”.

Even then, six and seven years old, I felt trapped in my body. Every way I enjoyed life was in spite of the thoughts in the back of my head.

Seven years old. Every time I indulged in food with friends I could hear the thoughts creeping up, “She can eat this and still look perfect - what’s wrong with me that I can’t?”

Then, around age eleven, I had a growth spurt that made me look like a string bean. I was so happy about it. My legs were long, my stomach was flat, and my arms were in perfect proportion to the rest of it. I could eat spoonfuls of Nutella for breakfast and wake up thinner the morning after.

It was a happier time in my life in the way that I was finally free of it all. I could just be a kid again. I had childish thoughts, I no longer considered the shape of my body. I was free. If only it could have lasted, my path would have been so different.

A year later, twelve years old, I got my period - the first one in my circle of friends - and my body underwent a change in the opposite direction. My hips filled out, the space under my belly button stuck out, my face was fuller, my legs were thicker, and I stopped wearing tank tops because I didn’t like the way my arms looked. Again, I was battling insecurities my peers had yet to develop.

At this point, I had spent just less than half of my life feeling less-than. My brain always working overtime to override itself into its own age. I was exhausted, and I was done living by pretending.

I started restricting foods, and when that didn’t work I restricted more foods. Once I noticed the weight loss - I was done for.

It was an addiction - the compliments, the way clothes fit, the image in the mirror. The gone.

Having an eating disorder is like having Stockholm Syndrome - a prison disguised as freedom, a captor that convinces you isolation is love.

My life became a set of rules: less than 1,000 calories a day, chicken, lettuce, eggs, oatmeal, brown rice, vegetables , peanut butter, no sugar - only on your birthday can you eat whatever you want.

I dreamt about food, I woke up scheming how to skip breakfast, I threw out the school lunches my mom packed, and I spent the rest of the day thinking about how to get out of whatever she was making for dinner.

It had completely removed myself from every other aspect of my life. Every little piece of myself was sacrificed one-by-one until I had completely disappeared.

My goal was to lose weight, but I lost a lot more than I had bargained for: friends, family, happiness, and control over my life. I was no longer human, I became merely a losing machine controlled by an eating disorder that didn’t care if the next thing I lost was my own life.

My friends were too scared of what I had become to reach out, and my family couldn’t stand the irritable, food obsessed, ghost of a human being I was. My parents took me out of dance because my heart and body weren’t strong enough to do it anymore without fainting, breaking something - or dying. I had nothing, but even that wasn’t enough.

Anorexia controlled me - there were many moments where I had seconds of being sentient and saw the reality of things - but I was too far gone to do anything about it. In too deep to speak it.

Starved, I literally began to die as my body slowly shut down. My hair was falling out, my bones were showing through my skin, and my eyes were sad and lifeless. To anyone else, my image was terrifying. Oh, but when I looked in the mirror, there was work left to be done.

My parents did everything they could to attempt to save me. At thirteen years old I was in therapy with an eating disorder specialist four hours a week, a nutritionist one hour a week, and an anorexia-specialized doctor every two weeks. That was my middle school experience. EKGs, Osteoporosis tests, routine bloodwork, nurses unable to hide their scared looks while checking my vitals, targeted questions, and weigh-ins with my back to the scale - a lab rat.

My lowest weight was 97 pounds. I was 5’6’’.

Every time I stood up I blacked out for a few seconds, on the verge of passing out. Every time I managed not to lose consciousness was another reason to convince myself I was doing just fine.

The first time I passed out I was alone in my bathroom. It was only a few seconds because the pain of my hip crashing into the corner of my shower woke me up. I never told anyone about that bruise, it was black and bigger than a baseball.

The second time I passed out was because I had allowed myself to eat a larger portion. My body couldn’t handle it. Thankfully, I was with my mom and my sister. They tried to rush me to the nearest bathroom (fill in the blanks there, I’m vulnerable but not that vulnerable). They were basically carrying me, I could feel my heart rate grow slow enough to stop. I knew I wouldn’t be awake long enough to know if it would or not. The edges of my vision faded to black.

I remember wanting to get last words out, to tell them that I love them and I was sorry, but my brain was failing to allow me to form words - I could only think them. The last thing I felt was the pain of my knee hitting the concrete. I woke up a minute later to the two of them screaming and crying. They thought I was dead, and I didn’t know why I wasn’t. That was the first time I really felt life slipping away. Still, it wasn’t enough.

I may have been dying, but I was also charming, intelligent, manipulative, and far too good at gaslighting. Outpatient treatment was clearly too easy for me to worm through, so I was taken out of school and sent to an inpatient treatment facility.

That was hell. Every single second of my day was monitored. Three meals a day - observed by four staff members - that if one crumb was left on the plate I would lose “points”. Points were accumulated to obtain one privilege - being able to take a walk outside around the perimeter of the building; however, if you got walking privileges and tried anything “bad” like doing lunges or running you would be banned from outside walks and your “points” would be taken away.

We were allotted group trips to the bathroom, twice a day, with staff members watching and timing.

Everyday we had two group therapy sessions, one private therapy session, and one private session with their psychiatrist.

During my first session with the psychiatrist - I’ll never forget this - she read facts about me and followed it by asking, “So how does a good girl like you end up in a place like this?”

For the first time in years, I stopped thinking about food. All I could think of was, “How the fuck do I get myself out of this hell hole?” I knew, deep in my bones, that I did not belong there. So I told my mom everything, and she pulled me out.

After that, I realized there were three ways out of this: end up in a hospital bed with a feeding tube up my nose, die, or just start eating again. So, naturally, I chose eating. I chose life.

I thought giving up would make me weak. Turns out, giving up was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. To let go takes a powerful person.

It took a year of “recovery” before I was dismissed from outpatient therapy and considered “in remission”. I haven’t had a serious relapse since.

…

I blamed a lot of things, because it’s much more vindicating to be a victim of circumstance rather than a victim by your own hand. I blamed dance, I blamed my mom, I blamed my genetics, I blamed god. But all of my scapegoats spent years in my crossfire trying to save me from myself. It still hurts to know that many of them hold guilt for my lost years.

Destroying yourself, it’s not poetic, it leaves so much shame to carry. And the suffering - the suffering is contagious. People think the illness is what hurts the most - the physical, the psychological symptoms.

The hardest part about suffering is watching the people you love’s hearts break for you. The worry drains them until they are shells of themselves. And when you look at the ghosts of them, you know you are the one who killed them.

The hurting is temporary, the knowing stays with you forever. It sits deep within everyone who was close to you, revealing itself whenever you look it in the eye for too long.

…

I wish it didn’t happen, but I don’t regret it. Those years completely changed me, especially recovery. It’s true what they say, “It takes getting everything you’ve ever wanted and then losing it to find out what you really need.”

We are meant to go though change. How we process it is how we develop character.

I've made peace with the fact that I will never know what I really look like. Every time I see my image, my brain distorts it. Now, most of the time, I love what I look like. But what I think I look like and what you think I look like will never be the same.

I can’t close my fingers around my arm anymore, but I still show them. I have stretch marks, but they’ve faded. I have cellulite, but I still show my legs. I’m over 100 pounds, and the world is still spinning.

I am imperfect, but I have been loved. I do not have everything, but I am enough.

It gets better.

EATING DISORDERS HELPLINE:

https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/help-support/contact-helpline