This past week, I finally enrolled myself in the personal training certification course I have been eyeing for the past six months. It was my first bold step onto the new life path I've had on my mind for nearly a year now. As a music school graduate, I always envisioned myself building a life around songwriting, but in the 8 years since I graduated, the road I've traveled has been winding, occasionally rocky, and always full of surprises. It wasn't until last year that I realized what I wanted to be doing: I want to help heal people's broken relationships with their bodies by way of physical fitness. As a woman approaching her 30th birthday, I have to say that it is terrifying to embark on such an unexpected journey so completely unrelated to my formal education. But I have so many reasons for why I want to do this, and they all originate with my own recovery story. I created this blog to track my journey into new, scary, and incredibly exciting territory, and to hopefully connect with other human beings who have had or still have similar struggles. Putting my story into writing and sharing it is one of the hardest things I have ever done, but also one of the most therapeutic.
Here goes.
When I was 20 years old, I decided to stop eating. It was a very conscious decision, planned and organized meticulously like everything else in my life, and I approached it with the same stubborn determination that has always been both one of my greatest strengths and one of my greatest weaknesses.
As a child growing up, I generally ate every bite of food on every plate placed in front of me without qualm or reservation. My parents ran a household based on healthy, and often homegrown, food and ingrained in me and my sister a lasting appreciation for wholesome and delicious sustenance. When I hit my teenage years, a time when many girls my age started to worry over their bodies, it never occurred to me to worry about my own. There were some days when I wished I was a little bit thinner, but it was easy for me to shrug those days off.
It wasn’t until my freshman year of college that I found myself craving thinness with an intensity that startled me. I had gained a bit of weight the summer before I started school and when I arrived at my dorm and met my slender roommates, I immediately felt sloppy, awkward and ashamed of my size. I wanted to lose weight. That first year of college I did lose weight by adopting cleaner eating habits and walking everywhere I needed to go. For a short time, this change brought me back to a semi-satisfied mental state.
Then, in my junior year, something changed. I was constantly stressed from balancing school with work (part time during the school year and full time every summer) and simultaneously battling with the confusion of figuring out who I was supposed to be as an adult. Suddenly the person I was just wasn’t enough anymore. I looked at myself and decided that the one tangible thing I could control was the one thing I had been struggling with since my freshman year: my size. I thought that maybe if I was skinny, I would stop worrying what people thought about me and be happy. I thought that maybe my partner’s already unconditional love would somehow grow if there was less of me to love. I thought that maybe, just maybe, I would finally feel comfortable in my own skin if that skin was hugging me a whole lot closer to the bone.
Food became my whole world because avoiding food required constant effort and energy. The hardest part was navigating my social life. My sister was in college in the same city and we were in the same year of school. I had thoroughly incorporated myself into her friend group and we had been exploring the college party life together for two exciting years. The challenge I faced was that if she invited me to a social gathering, I had to make excuses and stay in so I wouldn’t have to face questions about why I wasn’t eating or drinking. I was also in a relationship with a man who had always been appreciative of my body. Lying to him was easier because he only commuted into the city four days a week for work—it was simple to avoid making plans around food.
The weight loss was not gradual this time. I was a healthy weight when I began and within a few months my change in size was obvious. Because I’m on the shorter side of average, the initial change didn’t ring too many alarm bells for my friends, family, or partner. My clothes were considerably looser, but I cinched my belt another few notches and accepted baggy jeans as a style choice. Several months later, people started noticing. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t think I looked that much different and still thought I could stand to lose more weight, so I didn’t understand my sister’s concern when she told me I looked too thin. I invented excuses that I thought sounded convincing. To this day, I don’t know how I believed I could lie to the person who has been my best friend since birth and actually convince her I was alright when it was so very obvious I was not. She did not believe me.
I continued to lie to my partner, too, since I was sure he hadn’t noticed how my body had changed. Then one night we were out at dinner—he was eating and I was not, having given him one of my many excuses.
“I know what you’re doing,” he said. I feigned confusion. He didn’t press the point, but from that moment on I knew that he was watching me and that he knew I wasn’t okay.
I went home to Vermont for winter break. I will always remember the look on my mother’s face as soon as she saw me take off my heavy winter coat in the house.
“Your pants are hanging off you! How much weight have you lost?”
“Not that much,” I lied. “I’m okay, I promise!”
I don’t think she believed me either.
During that same trip, my partner surprised me with the gift of a full back tattoo, which he had planned for my favorite tattoo artist to complete in just two days. I still don’t know how I made it through that tattoo with blood sugar that low. I sat under the needle for two days in a row, a total of 12 painful hours combined. The tattoo was worth it, but it brought to light the fact that I was obviously in physical danger: the day after it was done, my partner was putting tattoo ointment on my back and out of nowhere I felt I was going to faint. I staggered to my feet, ran to the bathroom, and hung over the toilet bowl feeling like my stomach was crawling out my throat while the room faded in and out around me.
I lost more weight. I continued to make excuses, and I used them so much that they actually started to seem believable. My sister knew better. She knew the struggle, knew all the signs and the excuses, but she couldn’t save me because I simply did not want to be saved. I was convinced that I was finally starting to look the way I had always wanted to look: diminished.
It was right around this time that I ended up shaving my head. My sister and I had both grown up with waist-length hair and I had never had truly short hair, so I decided it was time for a properly short cut. I also decided it would be a cinch to do it myself. So one night I propped a hand mirror up to face my bathroom mirror and started to cut the hair at the back of my head. Three bald patches later, I was on my way to my sister’s house with a hat pulled down to my eyes and panic roiling in my stomach. She met me at the door with a pair of buzzers and ten minutes later I was shorn down to baby duck fuzz.
I only mention this because it became exponentially harder to look like a healthy human being once the shaved head was added to my emaciated body. I looked gaunt and ill. I remember stepping on the scale in my bathroom for the first time since I’d started and the number bowled me over. I was elated, but also a little worried. For the first time, I wondered if what I was doing was damaging and, if it was, how I would possibly continue to live my life in any way that would make me happy.
It was shortly after this that two of my best friends came into the city to visit. We had been planning the weekend for months and I was beyond excited. We had a blast and the ladies left the next day; everything seemed normal.
Not long after, however, I got a three-way call from my two friends and my sister. I could hear the trepidation in their voices as they started talking to me, as they started telling me how worried they were about me, how I was so obviously not alright, and how for the sake of their love and our friendship, I needed to acknowledge what I was doing to myself. I gave them my excuses. They called bullshit. They made me stay on the phone until I promised them that I was going to stop hurting myself and start getting better. It was one of the hardest promises I have ever had to make.
It is difficult to put into words how that mindset swallowed me up, took me over, became so normal that doing anything else was out of the question. It is nearly impossible to convey how hard it is to battle the terror that came from thinking about what would happen if I gave up that mindset; the fear that I would return to a body that made me believe I was unattractive, undesirable, unworthy.
My sister became my emotional rock, with my two friends alongside her, and my partner gave me the gift of physical fitness: he taught me exercises that would begin to rebuild my wasted muscles and allow me to feel stronger within myself. I took steps towards repairing my broken relationship with food so I could learn to love it again.
And slowly, very slowly, I began to recover.
It took a long time. I graduated college, spent a summer at home, and moved across the country with my sister in the fall. I look at pictures from that road trip and see that I was still so skinny, so unnecessarily small. It was a full two years before I hit a healthy weight again. I didn’t celebrate, I didn’t mark it on my calendar; I honestly wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I’d spent so long aching for skinny, I didn’t know how to be happy with healthy.
It’s been almost 9 years now and every year has been a struggle, but the struggle has gotten progressively easier. As the years continue, it is important for me to remember that version of myself who was so completely unhappy in her own skin that she tried to shrink herself out of it - I owe it to her to persevere in my fight for self-acceptance. I’ve given up on waiting for that little voice in my head to go away, the one that belittles me for not being smaller, not being prettier, not being perfect. It will always be there. But I have found a way to make it bearable. The gift of physical fitness has become my truest ally against relapse: when I work out it is proof positive of the amazing things my body can do, the strength and the stamina and the reliability that I wouldn’t have if I wasn’t nourishing my body and giving it the respect it deserves.
Every day I make myself look in the mirror and name one thing that makes me happy to be me. I am happy to be strong. I am happy to be healthy. I am happy to be inhabiting a resilient body that has so readily bounced back from deprivation, even when my mind has been slower to heal.
That is why I am starting this journey, 9 years later but only just now ready for it. I want to heal, and I want to help others discover how strong and worthy and resilient they have the power to be.
AB
8.20.17