(no subject)
my speech for NEDA week.
All my life I have always hated math, despised it even. Yet for the past decade I have been consumed by numbers. How many calories are in this apple? What does my waist measure? How many pants sizes do I need to drop? How many hours can I go without eating? And most importantly, what is the perfect weight and will I finally like what I see in the mirror when I reach it?
My anorexia began when I was 12 years old yet the seeds were planted long before. The summer after 6th grade my whole life changed. My favorite person in the world, my paternal grandfather, passed away suddenly and then to complicate matters my mother left my father after years of living in discord. My world was turned upside down and my body mirrored this, as it decided without my permission, to suddenly grow hips and breasts. Yet I didn’t look like the models I saw in my seventeen magazines, I felt so awkward and ugly and sad. And so I bought into the big lie that so many women naively believe: if I was thinner I would be happy.
It began in phases. I started to be more conscious of my body, my clothes, the food I ate, the models and movie stars I thought I should look like. It became like a science experiment, a math equation: what does it take to become perfect? I tried eating only certain foods, different amounts, always comparing myself and what I ate to all the girls around me. I always came up short. My self-hatred grew until it was larger than the disgusting person I saw in the mirror, a monster constantly in the shadows never letting me out of its sight. I began to exercise as the spring turned summer. I remember running down my road, sweating and swearing at my fat thighs, all the while dreaming of this perfect thin body I would soon possess. And then one hot day that summer, I said to myself, “Why should I eat at all?” So I started skipping lunch, and then with time, breakfast and dinner as well. Anything consumed was to be eliminated by vomiting or with handfuls of laxatives I bought with stolen money out of my mother’s purse. The weight loss was immediate, almost shocking and just like that I was hooked.
By my 13th birthday I was officially diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. The doctors and therapists were all paraded in, one by one. My parents pleaded and threatened, I’m not sure they knew what to do with this deceptive shrinking creature who had replaced their daughter. But everything fell on deaf ears, I didn’t care what anyone said, I was finally becoming “perfect” and no one could take that away from me. My anorexia gave me a sense of power and control in a life that felt utterly chaotic. Everything I couldn’t say out loud, I could finally scream with jutting hipbones and bony limbs.
In today’s society, anorexics are often asked to prove their sickness with the severity of their weight loss. I refuse to do that here. In my head I know it all by heart, how much weight I lost that first summer, how much weight I gained that fall in an Inpatient hospital, the cycle continuing through another hospitalization at 15 and onward throughout the rest of high school and onto college. By none of that really tells you what it was like. Its all just numbers, mere statistical data, none of it can truly tell you what life is like in the grips of eating disorder.
The day shall be spent obsessing about food all the while avoiding it.
You should compare yourself repeatedly to everyone, measuring your wrists and waist over and over and over, making sure nothing has gotten bigger in the past hour.
Nights are to be spent lying to parents and friends, hiding your weight loss with baggy clothes and purging any food you guiltily eat.
And then you just lie awake, trying to fall sleep while clicking your knee bones together, trying to ignore the pleading cries of an empty stomach
Over time I realized that this wasn’t the life I wanted, the one I had planned for at the age of 6 and 7 when the world seemed bright and crisp and open to all possibilities. I found myself one day lying on a table with weathered white hospital sheets, watching my heart beat on a sonogram, and I felt such immeasurable sorrow and loss. How did this happen, when did I lose myself so completely in the search for perfection? No matter what number I thought would finally make me happy, it never did. Somehow I had mistakenly believed that when I became thin I would be happy yet here I was, thin and thinner, and I was miserable.
My recovery didn’t start at once. In fact sometimes I like to think it begins everyday when I wake up and have to face the fact that I still struggle with who I see in the mirror and what I hear in my head. I wish I could promise recovery is easy, that eating isn’t a chore, that weight gain is fun. Letting go of my anorexia was devastating, because it became my identity, my life. I have had to learn to speak up, to know NO ONE is perfect, and to accept feelings after years of starvation-induced numbness. It is a process that takes time. You will have to fight and cry and scream, you will slip, and you will have to start again. In time you learn to begin to beat the eating disorder at its own game. I don’t own a scale or weigh myself. I don’t diet. I cheerlead myself through shopping for pants, chanting I am not fat in my head. I have a support system I lean on when eating gets hard and it feels like it would just be easier to lose the weight again and be safe in my cocoon of starvation. But there is nothing I am prouder of than my recovery. After so many years of saying I would never ever let myself be this size, here I am all curves and flesh, and the world has not ended. In fact my life could not be more amazing because I actually have a life now, a life without obsession or compulsion. It’s kind of funny, ironic even, that when I finally realized that I didn’t have to starve myself anymore ….that’s when I finally saw how happy I could be.
All my life I have always hated math, despised it even. Yet for the past decade I have been consumed by numbers. How many calories are in this apple? What does my waist measure? How many pants sizes do I need to drop? How many hours can I go without eating? And most importantly, what is the perfect weight and will I finally like what I see in the mirror when I reach it?
My anorexia began when I was 12 years old yet the seeds were planted long before. The summer after 6th grade my whole life changed. My favorite person in the world, my paternal grandfather, passed away suddenly and then to complicate matters my mother left my father after years of living in discord. My world was turned upside down and my body mirrored this, as it decided without my permission, to suddenly grow hips and breasts. Yet I didn’t look like the models I saw in my seventeen magazines, I felt so awkward and ugly and sad. And so I bought into the big lie that so many women naively believe: if I was thinner I would be happy.
It began in phases. I started to be more conscious of my body, my clothes, the food I ate, the models and movie stars I thought I should look like. It became like a science experiment, a math equation: what does it take to become perfect? I tried eating only certain foods, different amounts, always comparing myself and what I ate to all the girls around me. I always came up short. My self-hatred grew until it was larger than the disgusting person I saw in the mirror, a monster constantly in the shadows never letting me out of its sight. I began to exercise as the spring turned summer. I remember running down my road, sweating and swearing at my fat thighs, all the while dreaming of this perfect thin body I would soon possess. And then one hot day that summer, I said to myself, “Why should I eat at all?” So I started skipping lunch, and then with time, breakfast and dinner as well. Anything consumed was to be eliminated by vomiting or with handfuls of laxatives I bought with stolen money out of my mother’s purse. The weight loss was immediate, almost shocking and just like that I was hooked.
By my 13th birthday I was officially diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. The doctors and therapists were all paraded in, one by one. My parents pleaded and threatened, I’m not sure they knew what to do with this deceptive shrinking creature who had replaced their daughter. But everything fell on deaf ears, I didn’t care what anyone said, I was finally becoming “perfect” and no one could take that away from me. My anorexia gave me a sense of power and control in a life that felt utterly chaotic. Everything I couldn’t say out loud, I could finally scream with jutting hipbones and bony limbs.
In today’s society, anorexics are often asked to prove their sickness with the severity of their weight loss. I refuse to do that here. In my head I know it all by heart, how much weight I lost that first summer, how much weight I gained that fall in an Inpatient hospital, the cycle continuing through another hospitalization at 15 and onward throughout the rest of high school and onto college. By none of that really tells you what it was like. Its all just numbers, mere statistical data, none of it can truly tell you what life is like in the grips of eating disorder.
The day shall be spent obsessing about food all the while avoiding it.
You should compare yourself repeatedly to everyone, measuring your wrists and waist over and over and over, making sure nothing has gotten bigger in the past hour.
Nights are to be spent lying to parents and friends, hiding your weight loss with baggy clothes and purging any food you guiltily eat.
And then you just lie awake, trying to fall sleep while clicking your knee bones together, trying to ignore the pleading cries of an empty stomach
Over time I realized that this wasn’t the life I wanted, the one I had planned for at the age of 6 and 7 when the world seemed bright and crisp and open to all possibilities. I found myself one day lying on a table with weathered white hospital sheets, watching my heart beat on a sonogram, and I felt such immeasurable sorrow and loss. How did this happen, when did I lose myself so completely in the search for perfection? No matter what number I thought would finally make me happy, it never did. Somehow I had mistakenly believed that when I became thin I would be happy yet here I was, thin and thinner, and I was miserable.
My recovery didn’t start at once. In fact sometimes I like to think it begins everyday when I wake up and have to face the fact that I still struggle with who I see in the mirror and what I hear in my head. I wish I could promise recovery is easy, that eating isn’t a chore, that weight gain is fun. Letting go of my anorexia was devastating, because it became my identity, my life. I have had to learn to speak up, to know NO ONE is perfect, and to accept feelings after years of starvation-induced numbness. It is a process that takes time. You will have to fight and cry and scream, you will slip, and you will have to start again. In time you learn to begin to beat the eating disorder at its own game. I don’t own a scale or weigh myself. I don’t diet. I cheerlead myself through shopping for pants, chanting I am not fat in my head. I have a support system I lean on when eating gets hard and it feels like it would just be easier to lose the weight again and be safe in my cocoon of starvation. But there is nothing I am prouder of than my recovery. After so many years of saying I would never ever let myself be this size, here I am all curves and flesh, and the world has not ended. In fact my life could not be more amazing because I actually have a life now, a life without obsession or compulsion. It’s kind of funny, ironic even, that when I finally realized that I didn’t have to starve myself anymore ….that’s when I finally saw how happy I could be.