I didn’t even really believe it myself at first. You know, that I had an eating disorder. That I was anorexic. I’d never been the dancer, the gymnast, the athlete. I’d never been the desperate fashion-seeker; I’d never even heard of most of the popular actresses and models.
But that was only the beginning of the things that kept me outside the seemingly-exalted realm of stereotypical anorexics, of stereotypical anything.
Trigger warning: Descriptions of eating disordered behavior.
I was only 17, and I was away from home for the first time. No one was checking on me, and I didn’t look underweight—mostly because I wasn’t underweight. I didn’t even have a clue that anything was happening until some comments several weeks in. Even then, I ignored it, and the disorder really began to take hold. The details of the story are frustrating and triggering for us all, but I suffered, my mind was contorted and confused, my body was refusing to menstruate and the secret of my torment was hidden to every soul around. My smallest was small but not stereotypical. My biggest was not above my recommended high healthy point.
No one could see.
When I finally began to own up to the daily mental torture, the exhaustion, the headaches, the feverish coldness, the compulsions and obsessions and fears that plagued me, I was not believed. People to this day remind me that we all find flaws in our bodies. We all see things we don’t like. We all want to change something. Yet they don’t understand the pain and agony of living day in and day out with a mental disorder that tells you untruths all day long and throughout every night.
Anorexia developed, as it often does, into bulimia, and that brought with it new symptoms, new challenges, new fears and dark places to face. Weight returned; old clothes, with terror, began to fit again. And to those around, all seemed well, the girl was fine. The girl was not sick. The girl was healthy.
But she was not. And even the doctor, confronted with all the symptoms, acknowledging their presence, simply brushing them off with a smile and a prescription. No diagnosis. No referral. No action. And the girl continues to suffer. So the triggers continue, and the tortures continue, and until family and self choose to act, nothing is done. Because a lack of diagnosis hides the disorder.
I didn’t know how to ask for help at first, so I fought alone. I know many of us have. I know many of us have faced this dark place, trying to confront the dark places of our minds with only our own strength. This lonely place needs to be broken by education and compassion, somehow.
But what do we do in this lonely place, where no one acknowledges the validity of the illness? Far too often even we as sufferers find ourselves cornered into believing that perhaps we are not sick, that we’re just too self-centered, too proud. And this place of self-loathing continues the circle, but the circle must be broken…
To continue reading this story from our partner Proud2BMe, click here.
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