By N. A. N., guest blogger
I was 13. I got into the car and was met by my eye avoidant, undemonstrative mother and two silent sisters, both of whom had long since moved away from home. I intuitively knew why I was there. I’d laid stiff while it happened beside me years prior. From that day on it was no longer a secret within a family, but made explicit that it was never to be spoken of again, to anyone. I went back to school as an altered version of myself—voiceless and alone—and threw up for the first time.
This was the start of food becoming my go to, my “best” (and only) friend. It gave me comfort and a degree of escape from the hell in my head. Only I couldn’t have guessed that day in the school bathroom that what I had done would gridlock me for decades. I was just trying to survive. Trauma and neglect would be the gateway to the mental illness that would hold me captive for almost 3 decades.
Throughout my decades of bulimia, my ability to develop authentic friendships and healthy intimate relationships was greatly compromised, despite having people all around me who wanted to get to know me. I felt peripheral everywhere, all the while keeping up a daily regimen of people-pleasing. Ironically, I desperately wanted to feel loved, to be heard and understood.
How could no one see tht I was actually dying for these connections? How did I manage such Oscar-winning performances year after year playing a resilient and positive woman who excelled at everything she did? I felt like a fraud.
Bulimia wasn’t making me more disciplined; it wasn’t giving me more control or the perfect body or life. Instead, I was emotionally drained and exhausted all…the…time. As ER trips increased and I lost my last natural tooth, I started to live in fear that I would die in my sleep and eventually, part of me hoped that I would. I hated food, but my mind kept me in a daily incarceration of planning it, finding it and filling the empty spaces with it.
Plans for recovery started a million times on a million Mondays, with varying degrees of success. I knew all the treatment options, all the lingo, yet decades of days were spent in “service” of bulimia, and of others, never myself. My eating disorder would often tell me it was just “too late”; “I broke too young”; “I couldn’t be fixed.”
But then one day, without ceremony, I stopped…
Was the recovery journey comfortable? No! For over a year, I was physically uncomfortable leaving food in my stomach. I felt panicked a lot of the time. Could I learn satiety or intuitive eating if I’d never experienced it? What would I do with the abundance of time I suddenly had?
To stay in recovery, I had to figure all of this out.
The development of personal spirituality, self-respect and creativity that it took to engage with my recovery—and the world around me—would eventually change my life.
Today, I haven’t purged in years. Though sometimes I grieve for my 13-year-old self: her years of missed relationships; missed memories that should have been with people instead of food; not having children; nor a healthy body made to laugh, move, love herself and love others.
However, now into my second life chapter, I am so grateful to my voice for leading me to freedom, to my body for finding a way to stay, and to my mind for finding a way to make it all meaningful.
Time, on its own, doesn’t necessarily heal…but people do! And the time to heal will always be now, and it will always be worth it.
