College is both an exciting and nerve wracking experience. Because I am a transfer student, most of my friends that I have made so far at UCSD are living on their own and are on the quarter system for the first time. Luckily for me, I transferred from another UC and have not encountered this issue. However, I had to deal with a much bigger problem: getting through college while trying to recover from my eating disorder.
I have struggled with body image issues my entire life. I never liked the way I looked, but I enjoyed food too much to ever try to go on a diet. I would focus on things like doing my hair, makeup, and wearing cute clothes to distract myself with how I really felt about how I looked.
When COVID first hit, I decided to go on a diet. I finally had the time to focus on it and could reach my goal of looking the way I wanted. I had this image inside my head that I needed to be model thin because the guy I liked at the time compared me to other girls that looked like that. I started counting calories and within a couple of months, I had lost a significant amount of weight. I am not going to disclose the amount of calories that I was eating, but I do want to point out that it was barely enough, causing my weight loss to plateau. I kept trying for months to lose more weight by sticking to my calorie deficit, but the number on the scale would simply not change.
I finally hit my breaking point with this at the end of the winter quarter of my freshman year of college. I was already dealing with the loneliness of an exclusively online school year while living away from home. I was sick and tired of putting all this work in for months to eat significantly healthier and exercise daily, so I reached my breaking point. I reduced the amount of calories I was eating significantly and decreased my exercise.
Less than three weeks later, after going home for spring break, I had lost an unhealthy amount of weight and I was shocked. Almost every single person I saw that week made a positive comment about my weight loss and how I looked. I was told that I had a “perfect” body a countless amount of times and was determined to do anything to stay that way. Even though these comments were well intentioned, they only made my self-image worse.
I went back to school for the spring quarter and took twenty-five units while working sixteen hours a week just so I could distract myself from how I was feeling. I became obsessed with getting good grades to give myself a purpose other than having a bad relationship with food. I was severely burnt out by the end and when I came back to school in the fall, I simply did not know how to be a student anymore. This was when I realized that my negative relationship with food had become an eating disorder, and medical professionals tended to agree with me.
I ended up having to wait until the spring quarter to return to school because of how much my mental health had declined. I was too scared to leave my apartment because of how insecure I had become about my weight. I was going through extreme hunger and was gaining weight back rapidly. On the occasions that I would go out, I would only wear very baggy clothes, even if it was not appropriate for the weather. I would cancel a lot of plans with my friends because of how I was feeling and it created misunderstandings in my friendships. My absences were often seen as inconsiderate when in actuality I was struggling with my mental health. Additionally, I would rarely be comfortable taking photos of myself or posting anything on social media.
Unfortunately, since my goal was to transfer to UCSD, my dream school, I had to go back to school before I was ready to. I spent another quarter taking an unreasonable amount of units. With this, my obsession with getting good grades had returned and I relapsed into a much more restrictive eating disorder. I would go days without eating food followed by days of eating too much. I had become dependent on doing this and could rarely have days where I could eat like a properly functioning person. I would frequently miss class because of how guilty I would feel from eating or how sick I would get from not eating. Even when I did go to class, I would have a really hard time paying attention because my thoughts would obsessively revolve around my eating habits.
Recovery was a frightening task because I feared confronting the identity I had created as a result of my eating disorder. This created an unhealthy cycle of returning to my eating disorder behaviors as an escape from confronting deeper issues. As a result of my struggles with eating, I missed out on opportunities, friendships and academic successes that I otherwise would have experienced. The realization of how much I had lost to my eating disorder is what most inspired me to recover this past summer.
My first quarter here at UCSD has been full of ups and downs. There have been times where I have done things that have been out of my comfort zone, but there have also been times that I have gone back to my old behaviors. Recovery is not linear and I have learned to be gracious with myself. I have also learned how to manage my time without taking an overbearing amount of units to distract myself. I have been trying to accept the fact that not getting an A in a class will not ruin my life and that it mostly matters that I learn something and engage in my classes. I know that this journey is going to take a really long time and that it will not be perfect. I will stumble over and over, but I will continue moving forward and learning from my mistakes.
My hope is to show people that everyone has their struggles, even if it does not seem like it from the outside. I was told that I had my life together multiple times when I was at my absolute lowest point. Reaching out to get help and telling others that you are struggling is an enormously difficult task and probably one of the most difficult things I have ever done, but staying silent will only make things worse. For those of you who may share a similar story and set of challenges, I challenge you today to have the courage to take the first step towards recovery. Even if that step is small.