For eight years I was actively anorexic with a side of bulimia and over-exercising for good measure. I ârecovered,â but did I? No, I learned to adapt. I started eating and stopped vomiting, but those habits are right there always, right beneath the surface bubbling and waiting to reemerge. Itâs very much like being an alcoholic: Recovery is ongoing and you are never cured. Iâve spent my entire adult life trying to âcureâ myself, but that has included a lot of letting go of unrealistic expectations and overcoming my natural instinct to strive for perfection.
Once I had my daughters, I knew I never wanted them to go through what I had gone through, so I actively made efforts to embrace self-love and body positivity even when I wasnât sure I believed it myself. I just kept trying to love my body for what it has done for me rather than how I perceived it has failed me.
Ever wondered what it's like to have an eating disorder?
It's sad. If the eating disorders don't kill you, the loneliness will. The truth is that having eating disorders alienates you from everyone who cares about you. Itâs the only way to keep doing the thing that is essentially a slow suicide. I would stand in front of the mirror and see myself, but not really. I just knew that I hated the person in the mirror staring back at me, and nothing she did was ever good enough.
I hated the liar I had become. I was ashamed if I ate because it made me feel weak. I was ashamed if I didnât eat because I knew what I was doing â I was being a coward. When life felt out of control, this is how I asserted my dominance in the situation. Even if I felt powerless, I had the power to restrict.
Nothing was as it seemed. Once I gave myself over to the idea and fully committed, there was no turning back. I soon fell down a rabbit hole of disordered eating and thinking, and I was sinking faster and faster to a place where nothing logical made sense. My only concern was controlling my food intake, obsessing over my weight, and exercising to make myself feel better. I don't want that for my daughters.
For instance, at 5â7â and 103 pounds, logically, I knew that I was too âskinny." When the khakis that I wore to work were so big that I had to wear long johns under my uniform to not alert my friends and coworkers to my anorexia, I knew rationally that I was severely underweight. But a little voice inside me said, âJust five more pounds and you will have proven yourself worthy.â Worthy of what? Worthy to be alive.
I was anorexic. It wasn't a secret to me.
I couldnât admit that I had a problem, not even to myself. Admitting that I was at an acceptable weight or below without feeling happy, complete with myself, meant failure: failure at keeping control of my life. I knew that if I lost the tiniest bit of control of the runaway train that was my life, the entire thing would derail.
Itâs hard to go full-on all the time. At the peak of my battle with anorexia, I was going to university full time and working full time while living in a large city away from all of my family and friends. I was so overwhelmed, but I wasnât ready to admit that anything was wrong. I had eating disorders. But at the time, Iâd rather have died than admit failure.
When I went to university, I left behind my entire life: my family, my friends, my boyfriend. I did all of this to run away from my life, thinking that if I got far enough away from it all, everything would work itself out. But it didnât. Nothing worked out the way Iâd planned it to be. No matter what I did, I couldnât get it all back on track, so I restricted and micromanaged in the only place I still had complete control: my food. I clung to my eating disorders for dear life, which is ironic since they were killing me.
Being the girl with eating disorders became the only description of myself that I recognized.
It defined my existence. I started restricting my food intake when I was around 17 years old. I'd been caught once vomiting. It was mortifying and I promised to stop, but I never did. Eating disorders make you into a liar.
I couldnât stop because if I wouldâve let the chaos in for a second, my entire world would have unraveled, and it was pretty much held together by a stick of bubble gum and a prayer. For eight years I hid what I was doing. I felt like a fraud, and that made me hate myself even more.
It was the one secret that I couldnât share with anyone because theyâd try to save me from myself. I didnât want to be saved. Or maybe I did, but I wasnât willing to turn my life over to someone else to save. I thought I had it under control. I didnât.
I spent my days hiding the real me from everyone who cared about me. This made me bitter and angry. Why couldnât they just accept me as I was? What if they try to change me? Why must they try to stop me? Didnât they realize that this was the only thing that had gotten me through? I wore my thigh gap with hard-earned pride, so why would they try to take this small victory from me?
My eating disorders made me feel in control.
I needed to restrict to feel normal, and the threat that someone would try to make me stop sent me into personal seclusion. I'd become prone to crying inexplicably and blowing up for no apparent reason. Most days, I straddled between the reality of my disease and the delusion that it would all end up fine. Stupidly, I held on to that delusion like I was drowning and it was my only hope.
To let reality in, to let anyone in, meant to face the fact that I had already lost all control. One day, when I was at my lowest, the delusion was sweeping me away and drowning me, but reality kept whispering in my ear, âThis will be the last time. This is your last chance to save yourself.â
That's when I knew the eating disorders had to end.
I relinquished control. It wasnât taken from me. I gave it up. My only real choice was that I had to give myself over to something bigger than myself, to be honest, and start fresh. Eating disorders are lonely and isolating. I just wanted to be free of the shackles of the lies.
Hopeful, I wanted to live and love and grow old, and that was not going to happen if I didnât give up control of my runaway life. Embracing the chaos and facing my fears was my only option. None of that was going to happen if I was dead.
