Trigger Warning: Mention of eating disorders, depression, and self-harm.
Here’s a fun fact: January is “Self-Love month.” I actually had no idea until I saw Demi Lovato post about it in the caption of a recent Insta pic featuring a close-up in the shower, completely bare-faced. The caption, which reads, “January is Self-Love month. What is one thing you love about yourself? Mine is my strength. Oh, and my freckles,” prompts others to share what they find beautiful about themselves by posting a photo with the hashtag #tellmeyouloveME. As a die-hard Lovatic and a huge advocate for women’s empowerment, I immediately smiled when I saw her post and decided to share it with my friends. But for some reason, I felt like a fraud. Here’s the thing: when it comes to self-love, I’m still trying to be my own advocate.
Freshman year of high-school I was on the cross-country team with girls who went from sweat-soaked Olympians on meet days, to glowing goddesses on Monday mornings who made our less-than-attractive school uniforms actually look good. Confidence beamed from their smiles as we were announced, yet again, the all-girls private school cross-country champions. A sense of confidence and pride also beamed from within but wasn’t visible through my metal-mouthed smile. I always came in last during our meets anyway, but I didn’t give that much thought: I was happy for my sisters. That same year, I had injured my Achilles heel and was unable to participate for the rest of the season, which crushed my athletic dreams. I had always felt good about my body when I was involved in a sport; it was instant gratification for me: seeing gradual results from running two-to-four miles and sprints four days a week – it was quicker than going to the gym and taking days to rest in between. That summer, my friend and I decided to try out for cheerleading. I had participated in cheer-camp the summer before my freshman year and I loved it! The workouts were different from those in cross-country, they were focused on core-strength, which is vital in cheer, especially if you’re a flyer. By the time my friend and I had tried out for cheerleading, my body had changed because I’d been inactive for so long. I became incredibly frustrated with myself when I couldn’t jump into my stunt partners’ hands on the first try like I did the year before. Flying was supposed to feel weightless, and I felt like the weight of the entire world. I ended up being cut after tryouts and tried my best to let it roll off my back. Besides, I was involved in Glee Club, and there was no way I was going to let anything affect my singing.
Sophomore year I began to self-harm. If I’m being honest, I don’t know exactly how it came about. I remember feeling unhappy with myself in a way that for once, wasn’t about my physical appearance. My stress levels were at an all-time high because I was struggling to comprehend geometry and chemistry, risking a failing grade. The thought of failing a class and being enrolled in summer school made me want to crawl out of my skin. By some miracle, and a lot of tutoring, I passed geometry and chemistry – not with the most stellar marks, but that weight was finally lifted off my shoulders! But even then, I still felt hollow inside for reasons I can’t explain. I knew a few of friends that self-harmed and I wondered if it actually made them feel relief from their inner struggles. The first time I self-harmed, it felt like a high unlike any other. I became addicted to the feeling of pain as a temporary fix when I felt sad or lonely. I continued to self-harm until the beginning of my junior year when someone at school notified my guidance counselor that they had seen me showing my cuts to a friend. Before I process anything, my mom was called in and I was sent to have a psychiatric evaluation done. I told the doctors that I didn’t want to die; suicide was never the goal or reason, but the cuts were superficial…a quick fix to numb the pain. They said I was okay to go home, but only if I began therapy once a week. I agreed, mostly because I felt like a bug under a microscope. My mom wouldn’t let me stay at the house alone on weekends and I had meetings every morning with the school guidance counselor, there were even guard dogs on me, watching my every move. The first month of withdrawal was literal hell. I cried myself to sleep every night and had increased urges to self-harm since I couldn’t do it anymore. My mind needed another way to release the pain I was feeling; that’s when my eating disorder stepped out of the shadows only to greet me like a long-lost friend. She reminded me of the first time I had felt this way. When I was eight years old I attended a summer camp with skinny white girls who didn’t have fat thighs like I did. I felt like an alien in my own skin and for the first time, waged war on the turf that is my body. I tried starving myself for a day but only lasted one meal because I liked food too much. My eating disorder reminded me how numbness could feel electrifying, so I complied, swapping out one bad behavior for another at the price of feeling alive.
The thing about being sick is that to the untrained eye, it looks like healthy, especially if you’re already skinny, to begin with. The rest of my junior year was a black abyss in my mind, a comfortable home for my eating disorder. Lunch periods in the library were my new cross-country track. The adrenaline from starving myself hard-wired my brain and fingertips to do complete homework – a new way for me to reign supreme. If I did eat anything for lunch, it would be a salad with balsamic dressing, you know, a façade to keep up appearances. In the abyss that was my eating disorder, salads were more than just energy, they were dollars cashed into this bank that deposited diet pills and withdrew inches from my thighs. For me, the Dean’s List wasn’t just about grades, it was a score-board tacked to the front of my brain, a tally of how many calories I could cash in for straight A’s in exchange for sitting with my friends at lunch. And how good this bargained-for body looked doing it. Even though I water-loaded to keep myself from feeling hungry, my skin was still acne-ridden and my face, shallow. I could barely make it up a flight of stairs after gym class, let alone run to catch the bus in the morning. One time at lunch, my friend tried to force-feed me a quesadilla and I slapped it out of her hand, shaking with rage. When my therapist wanted to weigh me for the tenth time, I mouthed off and walked out, drunk on a false sense of control and pride. I was the puppet master and my friends and family were growing tired of my mood swings and outbursts that threatened to cut the strings.
The ivory wired girl in the mirror told me I looked good and praised me for doing such a wonderful job at losing weight. I could now ditch “the fat jeans” and finally, post mirror pictures of myself on Instagram that deemed me “sexy” based on the hip-bones that jutted out from the waistband of my skinny jeans. One night, I took a mirror selfie in a cropped t-shirt and sweatpants, posed just so that my hip-bones and flat stomach were the centerpieces of the fluorescent spotlight. I uploaded the picture to Instagram and began to feel “Insta-worthy” as my liked soared from 20 to 40, to 50. My murmuring heart began to pick up speed when my ex-boyfriend texted me that he had seen the picture and that he never thought I would upload something like that. Curiosity got the better of me and I asked him why – my eating disorder anticipating his response like a hungry child with sticky fingers clawing at the screen. His response read, “It’s just ‘cause you’re so good, you know? When we were together, you barely let me touch you. Always covered up.” My ego salivated at his words. That was the first time I’d known desire and how I knew this body was a way out of empty.
But, there’s only so much the mind can fabricate before the body starts to cave in on itself. Summer began to feel like a fourth winter as I was perpetually cold, even on 90 degree days. A friend pointed out that anorexic people often feel chronically cold because their bodies can’t produce or maintain heat – I gave her my signature look, daggers. I told her I couldn’t finish a pretzel dog at Pretzel Maker because I was “lactose intolerant.” Food consumed so much of my mind and time that I would fill up a measuring cup with cereal to make sure I wasn’t eating over 80 calories for breakfast. I would log my caloric intake in a food journal after every meal, and cry when I didn’t know how many calories were in certain foods. Months of running on adrenaline lead me to feel lethargic and as a result, I was failing almost all my classes my senior year. I would go to sleep as soon as I got home from school, and leave homework until the last minute – often rushing to complete ten-page research papers in the library five minutes before homeroom. I thought I had everyone fooled by using one specific bathroom to purge in after lunch…until I didn’t, when a freshman caught me and ratted me out to the principal. I still remember sitting in her office, begging her not to call my mom so I wouldn’t get taken out early and sent for another evaluation with my therapist. “It won’t happen again,” and “my therapist already knows,” rolled off my conveyor belt tongue, sprinkled with tears. I cursed myself in my head for not being more careful; for letting my guard down. Control was starting to slip through my fingers the tighter I tried to grasp it. I was known as “that girl with Bulimia” by people at school, the spectacle that cried in the bathroom stall during class time and almost fainted at Glee Club rehearsal (because I constantly felt dizzy and nauseous).
On January 14th, 2014, four days after I purged my birthday cake on my eighteenth birthday, I made the decision to give up control. I no longer wanted to continue to go through life feeling empty, and I didn’t want to hurt the people I loved. My best friend felt so helpless through all of my hurricanes, that she didn’t know if she could do this anymore. She would read me lists of the direct consequences of my disease, but my mind was too full of white noise to listen. I would ignore her and then cry to her when I saw my ribs sticking out in the mirror. My eating disorder told me that I didn’t need anyone else, but in the end, I wasn’t willing to give up almost twelve years of friendship. I knew I had to get out of the dark, even if I crawled out half-alive.
My eating disorder relented when I was officially diagnosed with “EDNOS,” or “Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.” EDNOS is an eating disorder where the behaviors don’t strictly meet the criteria of either anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa (I describe it as being a mix of both). It would make me throw a temper tantrum every time I saw my nutritionist, wailing so loud that sometimes I would cancel my appointments to soothe her. It would make me sulk in the corner when I ate lunch or dinner with friends. But eventually, we went out for dessert and I actually let myself enjoy my food. I became involved with eating disorder recovery groups such as Project HEAL, which is an organization founded by two incredible young women, Liana Rosenman and Kristina Saffron, who met at a residential treatment facility when they were thirteen. Together, “in the spring of 2008, both at the age of 15, they founded Project HEAL to raise money for others suffering from eating disorders who want to recover but are unable to afford treatment.” (The Project HEAL) I participated in their “Recovery Is…” campaign on graduation day. Dressed in my cap and gown, I proudly held up a sign that read, “Recovery is…starting a new chapter in my life.” And from there on out, I surrounded myself with positive people and vowed to enjoy life to the fullest, embracing each day as it came. In the summer of 2014, I attended orientation at Pace University; the day after, my best friend and I went to a Demi Lovato concert and ended up meeting her! This was one of the best days of my life, hands down. I began to realize how beautiful life could be when I actually started living it, instead of pantomiming.
I used to believe that being thin equaled success; that skipping meals for three days straight was successful; that tugging at every inch of a funhouse mirror was successful, and that loving to hate my body made me a success story. Now, I’m 22, almost four years into recovery and when asked if I consider myself “recovered,” my answer is no. My eating disorder’s voice isn’t so loud today. I’ve learned to drown out its taunts with music it hates such as: “Scars to Your Beautiful” by Alessia Cara, “Praying” by Kesha, “Love Myself” by Hailee Steinfeld, “Skyscraper” by Demi Lovato, and “Dangerous Woman” by Ariana Grande, amongst other self-love anthems. Today, it loves to worm its way into my head when I go shopping for jeans and the 00s don’t fit, and it tries to whisper to me that I’m the problem, not the jeans crafted with tricks. But I’ve learned to reverse that thinking, and do not aim my anger inward. Why don’t companies make jeans for all body types, even skinny girls with big butts? Now, I take more “outfit-of-the-day” selfies then I used to, praising myself for being happy, gaining my J- Lo booty back, and finally telling my body that I love her. Of course, I have days where I’m not so confident and want to turn every mirror around and hide under my covers for the next five years. I’m still trying to understand that those days are slips, not slides.
It’s difficult not to be hard on yourself when society constantly tells women and men that they have to look a certain way in order to achieve “perfection,” whatever that is. Luckily, more people are speaking up about body-shaming and self-loathing by launching movements via social media such as the Body Positive Movement, which encourages people to remain in a positive space when it comes to their bodies, despite the critics. Though I am all for body positivity, the realist in me finds it hard to maintain a positive attitude 24/7. It’s amazing and necessary to love yourself but, it’s a difficult thing to do because as humans, we all have bad days and good days, some more or less than others. Sammi Farber, a friend, and fellow recovery warrior, created the #IWILLGAIN campaign on Instagram as a way to encourage everyone, not just those in recovery from an ED, to think about gaining (in 2018) as not just what is on the outside, but as adding happiness to your life…what makes the soul feel good.
This campaign is very much in line with her beliefs about focusing on body acceptance rather than body positivity: “I feel it’s important to focus more on body acceptance rather than positivity because even if the world was body positive, it still gives the body too much energy. By focusing on body acceptance, we are lessening the power around the body and we have more room to focus on the soul it’s actually carrying.” Adding to Sammi’s point, I believe that in the case of eating disorders and other self-harming behaviors, it all comes down to what one is feeling inside and the soul’s health; the physical body is simply a vessel for releasing internal pain so we don’t sit with it and let it fester.
A therapist I once had said, “The first step to really loving yourself is learning to make peace with your body. It’s tough to love a battlefield.” I keep this quote taped to my mirror so I can remind myself of how far I’ve come and how far I still have to go. Learning to love myself is like the fear before the fall, but I’ve never been so grateful to crash into myself.
Recovery Resources:
NEDA: 1-800-231-2237, https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org
Project HEAL: http://theprojectheal.org/
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255, https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/