*Warning: If you are currently struggling with an eating disorder, content may be triggering.
Alarm goes off: a moment of beautiful, peaceful, unawareness. Then it hits. You stand up and pray you make it to the bathroom before you completely black out. You use the bathroom and try not to notice how dark your urine is. And then its time to get undressed in front of the mirror and pinch every inch of skin obsessively. Now the moment you've been waiting for since yesterday morning. You step on the scale. Not one scale, not two scales, but three scales, to triple check your weight. This number will make or break your day. You hold your breath and hope on, furiously scribbling the number in your notebook of weights that dates 5 years back. You step off and head to the closet, looking for your baggiest clothes that will hide your body. No, these make me look lumpy, you think. So you change, 8 times. Then you head to the kitchen and opening the fridge, staring longingly at the sparse amount of food, knowing that you have to wait until after a certain time to eat because your head has made so many rules. So you pour a black coffee and add a splash of cream. "This will make my dietitian proud!" You think to yourself. And then as you are putting the creamer away, the nutrition facts stare you in the face. It's not that you don't already know the calorie content of the entire grocery store, but the number seems more daunting than usual today. So you pour the coffee down the sink and reach for a sugar free energy drink. You go out and run errands, which includes picking up more diet pills and another pair of fuzzy socks because you can't seem to stay warm anymore. Your phone is buzzing. Friends asking to go out to lunch. Your head starts swimming. You hadn't planned on eating lunch, but you can't keep blowing people off. You sit in your car and you cry because you are hungry and tired and you miss your friends, but your head will not allow you to break the rules. So you go home and sit on your couch until the magic hour when you are allowed to eat. You strategically pick out the lowest calorie item and take 20 minutes to plate it and touch it and smell it and look at it. You take a picture of it to send to your dietitian. You log it in your MyFitnessPal account. You do everything but actually eat it. An hour of sitting at the table staring at a rice cake passes. You take a bite and walk away. Your mind and your body are exhausted at this point, so you throw on 2 pairs of pants and 2 sweatshirts and crawl into bed, hoping to fall asleep before your mind starts racing. An hour later you wake up with horrible cramping in your stomach. Hunger. "I know how to fix this!" you say, as you lace up your running shoes and head into the 99 degree summer heat. "2 miles? That's not enough? 3 miles? That's an odd number. 4? Okay!" But you do not have the energy to run, so you power walk for 4 miles until the thoughts and feelings all disappear. You come home and you shower. Only showers are no. Longer enjoyable because any time that you have to acknowledge that you have a body is painful. So you jump in and out, wrap up, and call it a day. You climb in to bed and weep, knowing that there is no end in sight. This is who you are now. And this is who you will always be.
This was a day in the life. This was my story for years and years. And I am not "recovered" by any means, but I also know that this? This is not who I am. Eating disorders are a living hell that I would not wish on my worst enemy. They suck the life from every part of you and leave you feeling like a shell of the person you once were. But guess what? That person is still in there? And they just need a speck of hope, someone to listen to their story, someone to say "I'm sorry" or "Me too". I am learning that healing can look like a lot of different things. Sometimes all you can do is make it through the day, and that's okay. All I know is, "no giving up allowed."
