My body has, for some reason, decided to completely give up on regulating its temperature.
Continue readingHot and Cold
anorexia recovery
Highs and Lows
Overall, things are good. Really, really good.
Continue readingThe Trauma Crutch
I’ve been through some shit. If you know me, or have been following this blog for a while, you know the history of my sexual and substance abuse. I group them together this way because they are closely intertwined.
During my senior year of high school, I “dated” a boy, A, who used to hit me, demean me, and force me to do degrading sexual acts for him because I thought this was acceptable, and because I wanted attention. No one knew what was going on, though my parents and therapist might have known he wasn’t good for me, I didn’t tell anyone the extent of how bad things were. We parted ways towards the end of senior year because his other girlfriend, who he doted on, took on expensive dates, and took to the prom, was getting suspicious of me, the side chick, and A valued his relationship with her more than whatever we might’ve had going on.
Throughout this relationship, my eating disorder was at an all-time low. A would call me fat, and compare me to his other anorexic girlfriend, C, and constantly remind me how much thinner and sexier she was, and that she would willingly be sexual with him. He didn’t “have to” force her like he did with me. I was purging multiple times a day, and constantly self-harming. Anything to numb the pain of the dysfunction that had become my life.
After I graduated high school and went away to Eckerd College, A was far from my life, but close in my thoughts. I felt like I deserved all the horrible things he’d done to me. I felt like I must have looked disgusting at my weight because I wasn’t nearly as thin as the skeletal memories of C.
I was anxious about being in a relationship. I met a boy named Jake, who was shorter than I am and always had pot. I had a car and we shared the same taste in music, so it was a match made of convenience. We’d drive to fast food joints, get munchies supplies, and get stoned out of our minds. I soon discovered that being high helped me relax around Jake and other people, and stop thinking about the bad memories from high school.
But Jake wasn’t always around. He had his own issues, and wasn’t sure if he wanted a girlfriend, while I was fairly certain I was a lesbian, and was tired of dating boys with whom I didn’t really click. So, I turned to prescription sedatives. I didn’t know the first thing about drugs. I thought all drugs besides cocaine and IV drugs were like pot: that they weren’t dangerous, and that I could stop anytime I wanted.
Pretty soon, I was taking Xanax “just in case” I got anxious. Still, I was anxious all the time. Eventually, I ran out of Xanax, and I didn’t know how to refill my prescription. I’d had a bad experience on marijuana that resulted in another sexual assault, and had no interest in smoking it anymore, but I didn’t know how to cope without my pills. I threw up a lot, sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. I trembled with anxiety in class, and couldn’t force myself to eat. It was as if A had never left my side.
Finally, my physical body went back to normal, but I had a lot of healing to do on the inside. You all know the story of how I dropped out and went to treatment, and then switched schools. Let’s fast-forward.
At the end of 2016, I was dating Tim, the 40-year-old meth addict who was every parent’s worst nightmare. I was going to AA, but still struggling to stay sober. I’d get blackout drunk once or twice every few months. Tim’s friends tried to turn me onto cocaine, and Tim joked about turning me onto meth, but thank God, I wasn’t that easily swayed.
In December 2016, Tim raped me, and my life fell apart. I went back to drinking and back to treatment, this time for PTSD. I didn’t know how or if I’d ever heal, but I did.
I’ve heard a lot of people at newcomer’s AA meetings say, “If you had the life I do, you’d drink like I do too,” and I used to feel the same way. I used to want to scream at the men who told me to pray for Tim and A and my other abusers, “If you’d been violently raped and hit and choked like I had, you wouldn’t say that. You’d be angry, and you’d drink that anger away, so go #$*^! yourself!”
I never did pray for those men. I am still very, very angry at them for what they did to me and the happiness they stole from me. But at some point, I had to stop using my trauma as a crutch. When I was drinking and drugging over A, I hadn’t seen him in a year or two. He wasn’t buying me beer. He wasn’t forcing the pills down my throat or packing my bowls for me. Tim never handed me a razor and said, “Tear yourself up. You deserve it.” I did all of those things to myself.
I did not choose to have the traumatic formative experiences that led me to these men in my adolescent and adult life. I did not choose to be abused, hit, screamed at, demeaned, or raped. I did not choose to become an addict or an alcoholic. But I took the first steps towards my own undoing, and I have to own up to that. Long after these men were no longer part of my life, I was still writing them into my story, breathing them in with every cigarette, and inscribing them on my body with every cut of the razor.
If your life sucks because of something that happened to you, but isn’t happening anymore, take a look at your surroundings, your actions, your day-to-day. What are you doing that’s holding you back? In what ways do you still need to heal? Where do you still hurt? Let the pain end, and have some compassion for yourself, but don’t allow your mind to be your own doormat. It took a lot of soul-searching for me to stop saying, “I’m like this because I was raped,” and to start saying, “I’m like this because I refuse to change.”
I’m not saying this cured my eating disorder, allowed me to never self-harm again, and that now every day is sunshine and unicorns. However, this attitude did allow me to start the healing process. When I admitted that “It’s not them,” a common AA saying, and realized the problem was me, my maladaptive coping skills, my drinking, my self-harm, my eating disorder, and my desire to cling to it, I was able to make the necessary changes.
There’s a part in the “How it Works” chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous that describes a director trying to arrange dancers who won’t cooperate. As the director tries harder and harder to bend others to his will, his life gets more and more out of control. Sometimes I just have to let people do their thing. This doesn’t mean that I should tolerate abuse, but if someone is mad at me, if I hate my classes or position at work, if my group partners in a group project aren’t doing their part, I can’t change that. The only thing I can control is my reaction to life. Life is going to keep coming at me–nothing can change that. But I can control how I handle life’s ups and downs.
It took me a long time to learn that my emotions are not facts. In actuality, my feelings are often wildly uninformed. After Tim raped me, I didn’t want to press charges because I felt protective of him. I had no reason to feel that way because he didn’t even protect me from his own desires and violence, but I felt that way nonetheless. I wish I had listened to my mom and done everything I could to ensure that he rotted in prison instead of still seeing him around campus and wanting to disappear into the sidewalk. I wish I hadn’t surrendered what little control I had left in that situation.
It used to be hard for me to swallow my pride and say that my feelings were wrong, or admit that I couldn’t make somebody do something, but these things come easily to me now. I am so grateful that I have a spiritual program to work that helps me deal with my day-to-day life. The Twelve Steps are about so much more than substance abuse recovery. They are a design for living that have allowed me to reclaim my life and love who I am today.
Victory Is Mine: The importance of a good dietitian in ED recovery
Last semester, I took a Human Nutrition course that had a big effect on me. It was taught by Professor Zach Cordell, a young, no-nonsense professor who wears his hair long and a bow tie every day. The class opened my eyes to a lot of the lies that the food industry tries to sell people. For instance: is there a difference between fruit snacks and gummy bears? No, not really. But parents give their kids fruit snacks a lot more often than gummy bears because fruit snacks are next to the granola bars and dried cherries in the grocery store, and gummy bears are on aisle four next to the M&M’s.
I was not in a good place with my eating disorder when I took the class. It was actually the second time I’d taken the class because I’d failed it previously due to some severe slacking and one of my signature mental breakdowns, so I knew a lot of the information, and I was familiar with Professor Cordell’s teaching style. However, for someone in eating disorder relapse, a class that heavily emphasizes weight management isn’t necessarily the best idea.
Now, before I go any further, let me tell you a little something about my feelings on dietitians. I hate them. They think they know everything about food; they think they know what I should eat better than I do, and they have the AUDACITY to tell me how and what I should eat. As someone with SERIOUS control issues, this has never sat well with me. When I was in IOP during my senior year of high school, the program required that I see one of their in-house dietitians. I cycled through pretty much all of them before I found myself in the program director’s office, being told that I needed to avoid caloric beverages (???), and finally, I proved myself so ornery that she made an exception for me and said I could continue the program without any dietary instruction.
Luckily for me, this all changed last semester. I was doing the work in therapy, but I needed more support with food and meal planning. I switched to a new therapist about six months ago, and while she has a much more compatible therapy style for me, and a better understanding of the trauma I’ve been through, she doesn’t take my eating disorder as seriously as my old therapist (who specializes in eating disorders) because she is less educated about them, and I don’t “look sick.” I was doing a lot of important healing from trauma with the new therapist, but I was also getting away with a lot of disordered eating.
I asked Professor Cordell if he offered private nutritional counseling, and he said that while he does, he wouldn’t have been a good fit for me, and he passed me along to a wonderful woman named Trish Kellogg.
I was a little leery of Trish at first. She’s overly smiley, extremely positive, kindhearted as can be, and very pretty. Clearly there was a catch. I figured she probably ate puppies for breakfast.
Fortunately for me, puppies are not part of a meal plan, and are only for petting. Working with Trish has helped me so much, and I anticipate rocketing even further into recovery as I continue to work with her. At first, we worked out a basic eating plan that included three meals and one snack. Because I hate the exchange system (a common system of meal planning used among people with eating disorders that avoids measuring food and counting calories), Trish outlined the macronutrients I need to be eating and said I could plug them into any meal and snack I wanted, so long as I got all of them in by the end of the day and didn’t eat all protein at breakfast, all carbs at lunch, etc.
This plan was a little to vague for me, so Trish broke it down further. She said I needed to have a certain number of proteins, grains, fats, dairy, and fruits/vegetables at every meal and snack. Initially, it seemed like a lot of food. It was a struggle to fit it all in during the day, and I wasn’t hungry for most of it. Trish challenged me to push through it, to eat within an hour of waking up, and consistently reminded me that coffee is not a meal–no matter how much cream I put in it.
Once we got past the basics of meal planning, we started working on some of the more difficult aspects of my eating disorder. Trish challenged me to start eating “fear foods,” foods I’m irrationally afraid of eating, either because I’ve had bad experiences with them, or because I’m afraid they’ll cause extreme weight gain. One of these foods is peanut butter. The first time I was in treatment, I was fifteen years old. Since the center was for school-age children and teenagers, the dietitians there had us eat a lot of sandwiches and wraps for lunch–similar to what we would have brought with us to school to eat during the lunch period. One day, the entire room got peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. I didn’t know a whole lot about nutrition at the time; I was afraid of food, I wanted to be skinny, and that was that. But as I watched all of the other patients cry and have meltdowns over having to eat peanut butter on white bread, I felt a wave of panic wash over me, and I felt there was no way I was ever going to eat peanut butter again.
Looking back, I see now that a few people’s anxieties fueled a huge meltdown, but the irrational fear of peanut butter and other similar spreads (cream cheese, other nut butters, jelly, apple butter, regular butter, Nutella… don’t get me started on Nutella…) stayed with me. When I related this to Trish, she said something had to be done.
I didn’t think these fear foods were really such a big deal. It’s not like I was afraid of all bread, all meat, or all caloric beverages. I could live without ever eating a nut butter again. But Trish told me that no food should have power over me. It’s safe to eat all foods in moderation, and it’s okay to enjoy them. Pretty soon, I was eating peanut butter, Nutella, and even cream cheese on bagels and sandwiches.
Another huge victory I’ve had is with cooking. I moved out of my parents’ house in December, and have since been learning how to cook by trial and error, the advice of my coworker Barbie who is in charge of cooking the free samples at the grocery store where we work, and of course, my mom who has received many a phone call asking, “Mom, how do I defrost chicken in the microwave?” or “Mom, what do we do when the stove catches fire?” My mom is an excellent, self-taught cook, and if I can be half the cook she is, I’ll be in good shape.
Last night, my girlfriend Rebecca was over, so I cooked dinner for her, my roommate Colette, and myself. One of my favorite things to cook is Asian food, and I’ve been tweaking a recipe for traditional Japanese ramen noodle soup I found on Pinterest. The recipe calls for bok choy, which is not something I’d even recognize in the grocery store, so I substituted some leftover kale I’d cooked the night before in an attempt to bulk Colette and myself up in the vegetables department (an area in which we are both severely lacking), and substituted sweet chili sauce for soy sauce because the soy sauce was on vacation and nowhere to be found in our fridge which looks like an archaeological dig site (minus the actual dirt, of course. Hi, Mom!) It came out delicious, if I do say so myself.
Rebecca, Colette, and I all have very different eating styles. I can only imagine what Colette is going through with her eating, and I don’t have much insight into it, so I won’t guess. I do know that she eats very little, and says she doesn’t like to eat. It’s hard to watch. I don’t want to see my best friend suffer in eating disorder hell–if that IS what’s going on, and I don’t know how to help beyond my Jewish grandmotherly role of “Eat, bubbelah, eat,” which I know from experience is NOT helpful. Rebecca, on the other hand, is an avid dessert eater. She eats what she’s hungry for, and with enthusiasm, which I really admire. It’s very inspiring to me to see someone who wholeheartedly loves food, loves too cook, and loves to eat. When I eat with her, I’m not as conscious of my internal ED voice, and I’m able to enjoy food more. By eating with both of them, I’m learning to focus on my own hunger/fullness cues and enjoying my own food rather than obsessing.
It was this newfound focus that allowed me to break three major eating disorder rules last night. Because the recipe doesn’t yield very much, I’d only taken a small portion to make sure there was enough for everyone. After we were done eating, I was still hungry, and I saw that there was some ramen left, so I decided to have seconds, something my eating disorder NEVER used to allow me to do. After that, Rebecca decided she wanted ice cream and a bagel (her two favorite foods), and I was okay eating the ice cream, even though dessert is typically against the rules.
Every week, Trish gives me a challenge, and this week’s challenge was to get food on my hands. I touch food all the time when I’m eating finger food or cooking, but I hate it. I have an irrational fear that I’m going to absorb calories through my hands, which I KNOW is not possible, but it still freaks me out. It makes me feel gross and messy; it’s overwhelming, and I just! Don’t! Like! It! But I’m not one to shy away from a challenge, so Rebecca and I split the bagel, and I spread Nutella on it with my finger. It was a little unnerving, and I felt stupid for being freaked out over something that seems so trivial to a non-eating disordered person, but I’m also learning not to judge my emotions, so I sat with the discomfort, licked the tasty Nutella off my finger, and moved on.
Just recently, I was speaking to another woman in recovery from an eating disorder about why it’s vital to see a dietitian. She was just beginning her recovery journey, and wanted to be her own dietitian. We were speaking in the context of a therapist-led support group, and the other women shared their resoundingly positive experiences of working with dietitians on their paths to recovery. The biggest reason to work with a dietitian is so that you’ll have someone with more experience and knowledge about food than you do. A dietitian knows exactly what your body needs and how to supply it. Trying to be your own dietitian is a tricky path, even if you don’t have an eating disorder. There is so much misinformation about food and nutrition out there, and EVERYONE is trying to sell you something. Dietitians are unbiased, and on your side–not your eating disorder’s.
I am so grateful to have crossed paths with Trish. I’ve made so much progress in conquering my eating disorder, and gotten a better understanding of the things I still need to work on. I’ve come incredibly far in just a few short months, and I’m learning to value my accomplishments, no matter how small they may seem to an outsider. Today I stand tall. Today I am proud of myself.
I Am the Master of My Fate
Things rarely go as planned for me. I’m in my third year of a two-year program at my college. I’m not even at the college I intended to go to. I’ve lost an astounding amount of friends in the past year, and Jon, my best friend from summer camp, lives an ocean away, and I haven’t seen him since high school, despite our haphazard efforts at arranging a reunion. Meanwhile, my body has ballooned instead of shrinking like I always wanted. I don’t grab a couple of drinks at Hamburger Mary’s with a couple of gal-pals like I always thought I would before I turned twenty-one.
These could all be construed as negatives, but it’s really just a matter of perception. Spending more time at Daytona State instead of a traditional college has given me more time to make sure my major is right for me. The main reason I am so far behind my peers in my education is because I was hospitalized almost every semester for mental health reasons. A community college like DSC gives me the flexibility to retake classes, withdraw late from courses I won’t be able to finish, and establish a rapport with my instructors so I can let them know what’s going on with me.
As for losing friends, well, I’ve drifted apart from the clubs I was once involved with at school, partly because of other commitments like work and synagogue (It seems like EVERY event is on a Friday night!), and partly because I’ve grown and changed a lot, and I just don’t vibe with some of the people who used to be my friends. It’s important for me to explore various types of friendships with a multitude of people so that I can determine what does and doesn’t work. Am I a little lonely at school? Yeah, sure. But this pushes me to get outside of my comfort zone, talk to the people in my classes, and it challenges me to be my authentic self, regardless of whether or not people like that.
Jon and I will always be best friends. He stood by me through anorexia hell, multiple rounds of treatment, and even the time I got unhealthily obsessed with a crush for a solid six months and drove him nuts asking questions about the mystery of the male mind. We email each other all the time, just to share anecdotes about our lives and our plans for the future. Jon is one of those special friends who will always be in my life. He’ll be in my wedding, either as the groom or as my maid of honor. He’ll look so pretty in a dress!
My body? Forget weighing 98 pounds. I’d rather be able to keep up with my kindergarteners, walk across campus, and eat some freaking fries when I want to!
And as far as not going out for drinks with friends on the weekends? That’s my choice. I can decide to start drinking whenever I want to. I don’t know what would happen if I did, and that’s why I choose not to drink.
I went back to school towards the end of March, and I’m taking a very easy class called Managing Your Success. The intention of the class is to teach students how to thrive in college, how to manage time and money, etc. It’s really basic stuff, but sometimes it’s good to get back to basics. My professor recently included the quote, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul,” in one of his slides. Curious, I Googled the quote, and found the poem “Invictus” by William Earnest Henley.
I realized I’d heard the poem before and scoffed at it, but my take on it was different this time. One of the key lessons I learned when I was in treatment at Magnolia Creek was that no one can “make” you feel anything; rather, your reactions are a choice.
I had trouble with this concept at first. I thought it was normal and natural to feel bad about being abused, for example. I thought that “bad” things happened to me, and I had a right to feel ashamed, dirty, depressed, and helpless. In short, I was being a victim. I wanted to feel that way. I thought my abuse “didn’t count” unless I tortured myself emotionally over it.
It’s not my job to decide if the things that happen to me are “good” or “bad.” I can perceive them however I want, but I am only human, thus I have a finite perception of the events and course of my life. Labeling things that happen to me is another example of the myriad ways I try to play God in my life. I’m pretty sure God has this whole “running the universe” thing covered. I don’t think He needs my help with that. I am probably not the literal “master of my fate.” I think that probably falls under God’s jurisdiction. However, I do believe that I have a choice when it comes to how I feel and what I do. No, it’s not my fault that I have anorexia. However, every time I engage in an eating disordered behavior, I’m making a conscious choice to act on that impulse, just as when I overcome a relapse or an ED thought, I’m taking charge of my own mind. If we are responsible for our successes in recovery, we are also responsible for our failures. I certainly don’t want to admit that it’s my fault when I weave an elaborate web of lies about why there are bloodstains on my sleeves and razors hidden in the bathroom. I don’t want to take responsibility when my breath smells like vomit after meals and I’m losing weight. However, I want all the credit when I pick up another milestone chip at AA, when I listen to my hunger cues and eat a snack even though it’s against anorexia’s rules, or when I end an unhealthy relationship.
After a traumatic event as recent as December, I resorted to purging to deal with my feelings of shame and depression. It was symbolic for me; kneeling in front of the toilet represented apologizing to God, the universe, or the person who hurt me for whatever I’d done to “deserve” what happened, while the act of vomiting represented “purging” the painful memories out of my mind. At first, I told myself I’d “just purge once.” Then it became purging once a day. Pretty soon, I was purging as often as I could and eating as little as possible in the meantime. I knew something was wrong when I found myself in the employee bathroom at work while I was supposed to be taking out the trash, heaving up whatever low-calorie morsels I’d had for dinner on my break. Mid-barf, I was being paged over the intercom because the front had gotten busy and my supervisor needed an extra cashier. I had no choice but to finish vomiting, clean myself up as quickly as I could, and drag my shaky, pale, embarrassed self to a register.
It’s not my fault that this is how my brain taught itself to deal with stress. It’s not my fault that I was the victim of a crime prior to this and it caused a great deal of stress in my life. However, it was my responsibility to be good to myself (and to fulfill a duty to my employer), to make healthy choices, and to my best to resist these self-destructive impulses. The ex-boyfriend who violated me was neither directly nor indirectly responsible for what I did that night. Yes, his actions were inappropriate and wrong, but so were the ways I chose to react to them. He wasn’t “making” me purge. I was doing it to myself.
These days, I have faith in a God that has granted me an “unconquerable soul.” I will never say I am grateful for the abuse I went through. Many people, even a few therapists have told me that I should be grateful to be a victim of childhood sexual abuse, dating violence, and rape because it’s made me so much stronger, and I will be able to use these experiences to help other people going through the same thing. While I am grateful for the outcomes of the traumatic events I’ve experienced, I am not grateful for the road I had to take to get here. However, I am the captain of my soul, and I choose not to dwell on what brought me to this place. Rather, I will look forward and see what the future holds.
The Island of Ana
At age fourteen, I was a mess of contradictions. I felt like no one cared about me despite the outpouring of love I received from my family and friends. I thought my parents hated me and sent me to treatment to torture me and make me fat, not because they were at a loss for how to help me and only wanted me to be happy and healthy. I thought my boyfriend only liked me for my body, which couldn’t possibly have been true because I was well on my way to emaciation, and he put more than enough thought into my wellbeing.
At the same time, I didn’t want anyone to care about me. I often confided in my journal and to my therapist that I wished people would simply give up on me and let me self-destruct. I wished my boyfriend wouldn’t beg me to eat. I wished my mom wouldn’t confiscate my razors. I wanted people to leave me alone and let me drown in self-loathing and unhealthy behaviors. I ignored the people who loved me, misinterpreting their concern as an attempt to control me, and I was repulsed by any act of care or kindness because I felt like I wasn’t worth it.
These days, I have a little more perspective than I did when I was first diagnosed with anorexia and depression. Sometimes, I still wish people would just leave me alone and let me self-harm or starve myself. But I’ve also learned that I can’t have it both ways. If I want to have meaningful relationships in my life, I can’t immerse myself in my mental illnesses.
If I did everything alone, or went everywhere with only Ana, things would be different. I could have purged that night at Hamburger Mary’s. But my friends were there, and Oxana followed me into the bathroom. She didn’t do it because she was mad at me or trying to control me; she did it because she was concerned. My little freak-out really scared and upset Christin. She knew exactly what I was doing when I headed towards the bathroom, and she said she felt “defeated,” when she saw me leave. That’s not how I want the people I care about to feel. I don’t get to have it both ways. I can’t care about my friends and girlfriend and not expect them to care about me in return. If the roles were reversed, and Christin were the one with the eating disorder, I would want to do everything I could to help her on her journey to recovery. It only makes sense that my friends want the same for me.
Anorexia is loneliness. It is not strength or hard work. It is a potentially fatal disease that I have to fight. My ultimate anorexic fantasy was as follows: I live alone in my own apartment. I don’t have a refrigerator because I don’t ever buy anything to put in it. My cupboards are bare and empty. I have a coffeepot that I use frequently, and I feed my dog more often than I feed myself. The fantasy never involved any friends, a girlfriend, or even a roommate. Letting anyone get close to me meant that they might care, and having someone care about me meant someone coming between Ana and me. I couldn’t have that. I see now how miserable and lonely that fantasy is. I would much rather have a full life, complete with friends, family, and Christin.
Food is not just necessary. It is fun, pleasurable, and it can bring people together. Today, I have a nasty cold, and when I told Christin that I’m sick, she offered to make me some soup. She loves to cook, but I told her not to bother with all that because I didn’t feel like I was worth the trouble. I was self-conscious at the thought of my girlfriend seeing me in sweatpants and a t-shirt, and I had been too tired to even take a shower. I fell asleep, and the next thing I knew, she was at the door with a container of homemade soup. If I was still my fourteen-year-old self, I would have been terrified that someone cared about me that much, but today I was just happy to see my lovely, gourmet-cooking girlfriend. I ate the soup without a second thought, and it was delicious. Ana was nowhere in sight; she wasn’t whispering in my ear that I needed to purge as soon as Christin left, or that I wasn’t allowed to eat dinner if I ate the soup. Sick people should have soup. It’s a fact of life. When someone I care about cooks for me, I want to be able to enjoy it wholeheartedly, and not obsess over calories and the like. That’s exactly what I did today. I can only hope it means Ana’s grip on me is loosening.
Ana Is NOT Invited
Ana is getting more than a little clingy. Last weekend, I went to the fair with Christin and Kerry, our friend from GSA. I love fairs and carnivals. I brought my camera and got some shots I’m really proud of.
I rode a ride that went upside down, which was something I’d always been too scared to do in the past, and I got Christin a caramel apple even though she told me not to, and it put the biggest, most adorable smile on her face.
Still, I wasn’t as happy as I wanted to be. Eventually, we got hungry and decided to eat something. I was really, really hungry, but I didn’t want to eat. Let me rephrase that. I wanted to eat. I wanted to enjoy fried food on a stick, something I’ve always loved (I mean, who doesn’t?) and not think about calories when I could have been laughing at the powdered sugar all over Kerry and the water he spilled on his crotch when his friend leapt up from the table to buy fried butter on a stick. (No, I’m not making that up.)
But instead, even with Christin’s hoodie wrapped around me, Ana was whispering in my ear that it would be better if I didn’t eat anything, and if I did, I’d better slip away from my friends and purge. “You can just pretend that the rides made you sick,” she said. Ana isn’t exactly the brightest. She tells me lies, like that my friends will like me better if I don’t eat, that I’ll like myself more if I’m half my size.
Ana also showed up uninvited at the GSA movie night/pajama party at my house last Friday. There was pizza and a plethora of desserts, but she kept dragging me away from Christin to remind me that I “couldn’t” eat anything. “I’m having fun with my friends,” I told her. “Who cares if I eat a slice of pizza? That’s half the fun.” Still, she wouldn’t leave me alone.
I’m sick of Ana crashing my parties. On Friday, the GSA is going to Applebee’s to sing karaoke, and even though the event is four days away, I’m already worried about what I’m going to eat. Nevermind the fact that I’m learning a new song and I’m going to rock it at karaoke, the fact that a bunch of my good friends (including Christin) will be there, and the fact that Applebee’s has this amazing chocolate cake I love. Ana has already tried to convince me that I can’t have the cake. At the fair and the pajama party, I let her win, but she’s actually given me an advantage this time. Since I started worrying so far in advance, I’ve had time to check out the Applebee’s menu and devise a plan of attack. I already know what I’m going to order, and it’s something I want, not what Ana wants me to eat. I WILL get that chocolate cake, and I’ll share it with my friends. Time in college and time spent with the GSA is about making memories and strengthening friendships, not isolating myself in eating disorder hell.
I’m posting this article to keep myself accountable. I’m making a promise to myself that I’m going to order the pasta dish and cake I want, not diet water and air, or whatever it is Ana will try to get me to eat. I have escaped Ana’s clutches in the past, and I will do it again and again and again.
The Love Triangle
Ever since I read Life Without Ed, I’ve thought of my eating disorder as a relationship with a really unpleasant bitch named Ana. She’s terrible. She’s always putting me down, calling me fat, and trying to control me. She hates my friends, but tags along to every lunch outing to make sure I don’t actually have fun. Every time I say I’ve had enough and that we’re done, she cries and says she’ll change, that this time it will be different, that she loves me. And I fall for it every single time.
Meanwhile, I’m dating a wonderful girl named Christin. She makes me incredibly happy, and I love spending time with her. She accepts me for who I am and lifts me up. She thinks I’m beautiful the way I am, and I’m slowly learning to believe her. She supports me through the ups and downs that accompany my mental illnesses, and she wants me to be happy and healthy.
If I had to choose between Ana and Christin, it would be a no-brainer. Do I want to be with the girl who thinks nothing I do is ever good enough, the girl who will never like me unless I change everything about myself? Or do I want to be with the girl who likes me just the way I am, who appreciates the things that make me who I am, who sees good things even in the parts of myself that I don’t like? The answer is obvious.
Still, for some reason, I end up clinging to Ana as if I can have meaningful, fulfilling relationships with her and Christin. The reality is that I cannot. Last night I went to the local drag venue/burger joint with Christin and some other friends. It was my idea to go, and I was looking forward to it until I started thinking about what I was going to eat while I was out. Ana wasn’t invited, but she heard that we were going out, got jealous, and I reluctantly agreed to let her come. She told me that she’d love me more if I didn’t eat dinner, that it would make me prettier and more desirable. I ended up ordering something really small, much to Ana’s dismay, and I ate about half of it.
Immediately after I ate, I fled to the bathroom in the middle of the show to contemplate
purging. I ignored the fact that I was in one of my favorite places, surrounded by good friends; the fact that a place like Hamburger Mary’s celebrates acceptance and loving who you are, and Ana was screaming at me to do the exact opposite of that.
Before I could do anything detrimental, one of my friends came to check on me, and I returned to our table.
It doesn’t make sense to cling to “people” like Ana. She’s cold, cruel, hateful, and mean. I don’t want people like her in my life. I’m breaking up with her once and for all. This is the end.
Labels
In all honesty, I haven’t been prioritizing recovery lately. I’ve let anorexia creep back into my life, and it’s making me miserable. Today, I went out to lunch with my girlfriend and some friends from the GSA. I would have liked to have been able to spend the afternoon catching up with everyone and planning our next excursion to the local drag venue. Instead, I obsessed over calories, compared my plate to everyone else’s and hid in the bathroom debating whether or not to purge.
This is not the life I want to live. I am more than an eating disorder, more than a jeans size, more than a number on the scale. Things are going so well for me right now. I’ve made a ton of friends at school. I’ve assumed a leadership position in the GSA, and I’ve been running meetings recently while our president is otherwise engaged. I have a beautiful, lovely girlfriend who makes me incredibly happy. I’m teaching myself new skills in Photoshop so that I can do more with my photos. I have a new idea for a novel, and I’ve even been writing poetry again. So why have I slipped back into self-destructive behaviors?
Letting people get close to me is hard. When I was a freshman in high school and dating my first boyfriend, I didn’t know how to use my voice, so I used behaviors instead. I would self-harm on areas of my body I didn’t want him to touch. I would purge when I needed him to pay attention to me. I would talk about how much I hated myself to get him to tell me how great he thought I was. My relationship with him set the framework for all of my future romantic relationships, and I am trying to unlearn some of those old patterns. Back when I was fourteen, it was easier to put up a wall of mental illness and self-destructive behaviors and let people get close to that than to let someone get close to the real me.
But the real me is more than a list of labels and diagnoses. I’m more than an anorexic, more than a person with psychosis, more than a lesbian, more than a trauma statistic, more than one single word or idea. I am a daughter, a sister, a best friend, a girlfriend, a writer, a photographer, an artist, a GSA leader, a teller of bad puns, a clumsy dancer, a bow-tie-wearer, a good listener, a learner, a questioner, a Jew, a granddaughter. I am the person my friends can count on when they’re desperate. I am the “mom friend.” I am constantly learning and growing. Why would I ever want to slap a label as confining and static as “anorexic” on myself when I contain universes more than an eating disorder?
I’m not sure who the person under the layers of self-hate and self-destruction is, but I’m going to find her, care for her, and love her. She’s worth it.
Semisolid Sanity 