Admitting You Have a Problem

"If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself." -George Orwell 

I hit my rock bottom on February 14^th, 2018.

It had been a rough morning getting my kids out the door for preschool, complete with coats, backpacks, and a stack of pink and white-iced sugar cookies for the Valentine’s Day party their class was holding. My girls themselves were decked out in similarly themed outfits, and as usual had spent the early hours of the day protesting even the simplest directions. As we scrambled madly to the car, I buckled them in quickly before climbing behind the wheel, simultaneously scanning my phone for a podcast to occupy them during the twenty minute drive across town− a journey which had doubled in distance since we’d moved from our apartment to my boyfriend’s house a week earlier. No matter how well prepared I tried to be, on preschool days, I always felt chronically late.

And I hate being late− it seems inconsiderate, irresponsible, and in contrast with everything my obsessive, type-A personality stands for. Like many other things, lateness tightens my stomach up in knots, and as I raced through town that morning, one thought made the anxiety even worse: we’d forgotten to make Valentines for their classmates. It had been in the preschool newsletter, I knew, and the word “optional” had been included, but it had been written as optional rather than optional, which meant every parent would undoubtedly participate. Every parent except me. I’d show up late, the youngest mother there, the girls and their uncombed hair in tow, and in my mind’s eye I saw all the other parents and teachers staring at me, disappointed but unsurprised by my failure. 

At least, this is how I imagined it going. In reality no one batted an eye when I said I didn’t have Valentines, and the drop-off went the same way it did every Wednesday. But between the school day micro-stressors, and my long to-do list for the afternoon which included packing up the messy remains of my apartment and tackling a mountain of homework, I felt spread thin. Dangerously thin, like my nerve endings had been flattened with the stretching.

By the time I reached my apartment sans children, I realized that in my anxiety I’d unconsciously burned through the two bags of heart-shaped chocolate that one of my best friends had given me the night before. Like most mornings, I’d had nothing but a cup of black tea for breakfast, and that day the variations of dark, milk, and cookies n’cream chocolate served as my first, most important meal; needless to say, sitting in the driver’s seat, surrounded by torn tinfoil, I felt both ashamed and physically ill. Stumbling out of the car, I barely managed to make it inside to the bathroom before my body forcibly ejected the sweets back up my esophagus, leaving nothing behind but a taste of sour metal and inadequacy on my tongue.

Exhausted, I collapsed on a mattress that had yet to be moved, horrified suddenly at what I was doing to myself. What I’d been doing to myself for almost two years, ever since the moment I realized my marriage wasn’t going to work out.

At first it started with simply avoiding food; food is love, food is nurturing, food is self-care, and in my grief and guilt, I subconsciously decided that I didn’t deserve it. In the beginning I would go days without eating more than a couple pieces of toast or fruit, my stomach so full of emotional pain that I couldn’t imagine putting anything else into it. When I’d dropped twelve pounds in a few weeks− a large number on my 5’4 frame− I realized that my sadness felt eased by the control I was exerting over my body, as though in the whirlwind of divorce, the growing disorder gave me something to hold onto. I’d regularly run my hands over the bones in my knuckles, wrists, shoulders, and hips, feeling stabilized by their jutting firmness. I remember one moment thinking that if I kept starving myself I could just disappear, slip through a keyhole and escape from everything; the idea felt incredibly enticing and attainable.

Maybe this sounds like emotional eating, or a natural response to stress. And that’s how I justified it at first. After all, I’ve always been an emotional eater, prone to fits of over or under-eating depending on my mood, and doctors have long touted the physical benefits of intermittent fasting. But this was different. This was more punishing, more self-destructive; in the midst of it I understood why some people felt drawn to cutting, the way distractive pain can relieve something much worse. And eventually, the simple deprivation wasn’t enough. I found I alternated between periods of fasting, and aggressive binges when my anxiety was at its highest; I’d tear through junk food, telling myself it was okay because I hadn’t eaten all day, and because I wasn’t obese. So what did it matter if I enjoyed a few treats? The numb, mindless consumption served to numb the pain.

But, unsurprisingly, the relief was temporary; gradually a binge would leave me feeling overwhelmed with guilt and shame at both my lack of self-control, and my own repulsiveness. I had no understanding at that time that my actions were an attempt at self-care, however misguided. I was so absorbed with feeling disgusting, that I didn’t see the way the fullness of my stomach substituted for the hug I really needed. Afterwards, I’d find myself unable to sleep or think or function normally at all until I extracted the venom I’d poisoned myself with, and so I’d complete the episode by throwing it all up before resolving that this was the last time. I assured myself that I could stop whenever I wanted to, and that even if I didn’t, this was better than drugs or alcohol, wasn’t it? It’s not like I needed an intervention− I wasn’t weighing myself obsessively, or throwing up secretly all over the house like other people I’d read about. I ranked myself based on publicized stories about eating disorders, and decided that since mine wasn’t as dramatic, it wasn’t as destructive. My self-delusions were powerful, and they convinced me nothing was wrong; I didn’t recognize the way that food was my substance of choice, and I was irrefutably abusing myself with it.

It took me nearly a year and countless incidents to finally let the word bulimia enter my active train of thought; it took me months longer to admit to others what I was struggling with. Though I knew problematic relationships with food and eating disorders ran in my family, I’d always assumed I was immune; I felt strong, and knowledgeable, and believed that my self-esteem was just too damn healthy to ever degrade to that level. As well, I had never strived to be a size zero, or spent any time on pro-anorexia/bulimia websites or forums, or even measured the circumference of my waist and hips except for my prom and wedding dresses. I loved baking, and exercise, and my pant size had been the same since I was sixteen (with the exception of that post-grad, “freshman 15” time where I blew up like a balloon after an injury and spent six months eating everything I could get my hands on). Hell, I wasn’t even able to throw up a hangover; how on earth did I end up struggling to keep food down? But eating disorders, as I’ve learned, do not discriminate.

And the more I battled mine, the more I began to hate my body for consistently failing me. Instead of viewing it as a vehicle for success, and being grateful for the health that so many aren’t as fortunate to have, I resented and loathed every part of it: the softness of my inner thighs, the muscles in my calves, the little rise below my belly button that’s still numb from my C-section and refuses to flatten completely. I began to associate thinness with happiness, and felt sure that if I could diminish the problems of my body, every aspect of my life would follow.

But all it gave me was misery, and excessive fatigue; it took enormous work to hide the disorder and pretend to be normal around food, something I felt compelled to do even around those who knew what I was fighting. I loathed the idea of being labelled or pitied, and even after admitting my problem, I still felt that being bulimic was contrary to the image I’d always presented, to the comfortable social identity I’d formed.

However, on Valentine’s Day, something snapped.

In our little apartment, surrounded by unpacked stuffies and toys, I thought about the parts of my daughters which I loved so much− the curves around the outside of their knees, their sturdy stomachs, the healthy swell of their cheeks− and the way I hated the same things in myself. I thought about how I’d feel if they treated themselves with such disregard. I imagined how my own parents must have felt the first time they saw me, the hopes they must have had for my little body and how they spent decades nourishing and strengthening it. I sensed the way my physicality was both a gift and an inheritance, and similarly the way I was destroying it. I knew I couldn’t take my strength or health for granted anymore, and I couldn’t set such a terrible example for my girls, who, if I didn’t stop, might ultimately learn to show themselves the same cruel neglect. This time, I knew, I really was done.

…Of course, it’s not that simple. I’ve learned since then that relapse is a part of recovery, and I’ve accepted it. But in the days that have passed I haven’t purged, and I’ve somehow mentally extracted myself from the grip of that misunderstood monster who pretended to be my friend. Shortly after Valentine’s, I started eating breakfast again to restore my hunger cues and let my body know it isn’t starving. The joy of exercise− once stolen by my disorder− has returned on the wings of the snacks I’d been preventing myself from having. And my easy irritability in the mornings, which I now recognize as the by-product of stress from being relentlessly at war with my body, has disappeared. In truth, I’m more consistently happy and optimistic than I’ve been in years. The other evening, while looking at a vintage Hollywood photo of the curvy and very perfectly imperfect Sophia Loren, it occurred to me that I’d reached a place where I’d rather be fat and happy than thin and miserable. And that was pretty profound.

I’m also beginning to accept that I might never truly be free from my illness, however it manifests. It lifted its hooded head during one of the worst times of my life, and I’m still young; it would be naïve to imagine it won’t try to take power again. But I’m not alone in this struggle; countless others from every age, gender, sexual orientation, race, culture and creed have found themselves up against the same consuming obsession. Like any drug, it’s an attempt at self-medication, a coping mechanism for obstructing relentless pain and anxiety, and in the end this response is not one of weakness but one of an enormous determination to carry a burden alone. And no one is immune; if someone had told me ten years ago that I’d be battling bulimia in my twenties, I would have laughed obnoxiously before explaining exactly why that wasn’t possible, why I could never be that person.

But today, I am. And while I’m not necessarily at peace with it, I am beginning to take control again and let go of the shame and fear; like any monster, fear is what it feeds on, and I will resist the urge to offer up my body as a buffet. Though I believe it's almost impossible not to have some issues with food these days, given the amount of  disordered behaviour masked as "healthy eating" we're exposed to regularly through social media, and the "non-diet" diets so many ascribe to, I also think it's important to recognize when its becoming a problem. When the disorder's voice is louder than your own, and when it uses that tool to pull you down, rather than lift you up.

Ultimately, the biggest thing I've had to remind myself of these past few months is that the first step towards recovery is admitting you have a problem, and that erasing my body will not erase my past. My mistakes will not diminish with my pant size; my worth is not determined by either.