Tip: Writing about being 19 might make you feel 19, but you’re still 24.
I’ve been holding off on talking about my eating disorder for the past few years. I’m nearing 7 years in recovery. Why haven’t I passed the time writing essay after essay about how brave I am for overcoming the most deadly mental illness in the world? Especially considering how freely I will voice my opinion on other matters and how much admiration I hold for others fighting these same battles.
Primarily, it’s because I don’t really subscribe to the narrative that I’m powerful and inspiring for managing my mental health, nor do I think it gives me some magical insight that requires others to pay attention to me. Nothing I have to say about eating disorders is profound or unique; I am one of 30 million women who will struggle with an eating disorder in their life.
I also struggle to write about it because I used to read about it. A lot. If you weren’t around for Tumblr’s golden age, you might have missed out on the very insidious content of models contorted into humiliating poses with a Picsart grunge filter smashed on top. To the untrained eye, it’s just weird university students testing out a new hobby. To me, though, it meant everything. I worshipped these women as my idols; their bodies were works of art I was dedicating my life to replicating with shaky hands.
Even once I started therapy, I would scour recovery content, looking for any “trade secrets” these people accidentally let slip. You told me you did X to show how ridiculous you were acting back then, but now all I can think of is how I should try X to see if it works. Even if the content was a 10-minute video of a woman explaining exactly how her eating disorder ruined her life, all I heard was “blah blah THIS IS MY WEIGHT blah blah BIG/SMALL NUMBERS blah blah LOOK AT MY BODY.”
Video after video, post after post, book after book; if I just read the right inspirational quote, I would surely find the strength to battle my inner demons, right? I tricked myself into believing that I was doing something good by constantly, incessantly consuming media about eating disorders. I don’t write about eating disorders because I know all too well that even the most well-meaning message is going to be corrupted in the eyes of someone’s eating disorder.
There’s one more reason why I don’t write about eating disorders, and it’s a doozy. Some of the worst moments of my life happened because I had an eating disorder. Not all of them, but enough that I get uncomfortable addressing my past behaviours and the kinds of thoughts that arose as a result of my severe mental illness. I did and said some truly heinous things in the name of my eating disorder, and I feel a lot of shame about them. It feels awkward admitting that not only did I have an eating disorder, but I was kind of a shitty person because of my eating disorder.
For me, there’s a delicate balance between acknowledging my mistakes and self-flagellation; just like there’s a delicate balance between excusing shitty behaviour and forgiveness. When you have an eating disorder, your brain is literally starving itself back into a child-like state. What little energy you have gets diverted from those valuable skills of critical thinking and logic into the basic human functions. This leads to a lot of poor decisions and vulnerability, which affects everyone who is watching in horror as you drop a nuke on your life. As I’ve already said, I won’t be divulging the details of my eating disorder to anyone except a licensed therapist, but trust me that they happened.
Now for the twist: Yes, I don’t want to talk about my eating disorder, and yet I am writing this today. Eating disorders are inherently contradictory, and I guess so am I. At least I’m self-aware, right? My current position (with no promises I won’t change my mind tomorrow) is that even if I have my reservations, there is something serious happening that needs to be addressed.
Thanks to extensive therapy, I am trained to recognize the patterns that crop up right before my eating disorder makes its grand entrance. It concerns me that what was once inside my head is being mirrored in the world around me. There’s been an uptick in discourse surrounding eating disorders, at least for someone with their finger on the pulse (perhaps you never really move on?). It feels like a resurrection of a truly dark cultural movement that will inevitably steal the youth of millions of girls, if not their lives. What used to be called ‘coke-skinny’ is now being called ‘ozempic-skinny’, but it’s all the same cancer. We are watching celebrities shrink at alarming rates, our medical system is collapsing, and food costs are rising. Blink, and you miss it, but suddenly we are living in one of those self-sufficient terrariums with eating disorders breeding like mold. How are we supposed to take care of ourselves in these conditions?
Still, I do. I begrudgingly do the work every day to make sure I am never in the position to lose myself so completely to my mental illness again. I write myself love letters on post-it notes and stick them around my room when I’m feeling self-critical. I repeat the mantras gifted to me by wiser women about taking up the space I deserve and never accepting less than “enough”. I turn dinner time into celebrations of friendship and love. I act on my hunger: for opportunities, for knowledge, for nachos, for even better days.
I won’t pretend I’m perfect to sell the dream of “recovery”. I will promise that life gets a little easier on the exact day that choosing to get better isn’t even a choice anymore, it’s the only option.
The brutal, honest truth is that I don’t have any kind of solution right now. I’m treading water just like everyone else, amidst diet pills and the press junket for Wicked. Still, I feel better in my body than I ever have before because of those first steps I took 7 years ago. Maybe someday I’ll have something more profound or inspiring to say about my experience having an eating disorder. For right now, all I really care about is being a voice on the side of getting better.
If I haven’t made it explicit enough, eating disorders will ruin your life. You will not get relief by hurting yourself. When you brush fingertips against death, you will only want to grab it with both hands. You need to get better. You need to want to get better. You need to choose to get better. If you don’t choose it today, there will be fewer tomorrows.
Tip: Having an eating disorder won’t kill you. Until it does.
Simone Brown 