Content advisory: Description of eating disorder and mentions of anxiety and depression.
It took me a decade to process my eating disorder. I was twenty-two before I could finally examine the actions of my twelve-year-old self. My eyes stung as I read through articles from psychology websites about how eating disorders could affect psychological development. Suddenly, it seemed that I’d found the source of my struggles with depression and anxiety.
I tended to talk about this time in my life with detachment. It didn’t make sense to speak with emotion about something that had come and gone quite smoothly. When the time came, I approached my mom in tears and told her I was tired of living this way. Once I’d made up my mind, I couldn’t turn back, even though I tried. In the months that followed, I hit some bumps in the road. I struggled to pull my jeans up and eventually had to get a different size. During costume fittings, I couldn’t pull some of the tutus up and over my hips. In the mirror at dance class, I tracked the growing amount of flesh on my legs, waist, and cheeks. But I internalized all of this. No one would ever again know what I was thinking based on how my body looked. For all anyone knew, I had healed.
Except I knew. As I aged, I knew that I still answered to that younger self because I thought she’d perfected a sense of self-control, though I also knew how misguided that thought was. I hadn’t healed, despite the changes my body went through.
When I turned twenty-two, the hunger returned. The onset of anxiety drove away my appetite and left me with a familiar feeling of hollowness. I let myself fall back into old habits, if only to test whether they could bring me the old comfort I associated with them. I didn’t love the hunger – I loved the sense of control I had over myself, when it seemed like everything else slipped through my grasping fingers. Still, I couldn’t sustain this behavior for long. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to believe in the myth of my past self, whom I’d made into some kind of authority, when really all I’d been was a little girl who didn’t know how to love herself.
I grieved. I grieved for this person who believed that hurting herself would somehow make her more lovable, and I grieved my current self, to be betrayed by someone who could have no idea how her actions would impact the self in years to come.
Although, to be frank, I had some idea. When I was thirteen, I went for a medical appointment. As I sat up on the exam table, the doctor told me I might not be able to have kids if I continued eating and exercising the way I did. Of course, that concern meant little to me then. At that age, I had no interest in having kids. I don’t know if I would have been able to comprehend the eventual effects on my mental health either. I’ve read somewhere that making good decisions in the present means practicing empathy for our future selves, but I couldn’t bear the burden of caring for the future when I didn’t know how to care for my present.
I wish instead that someone had sat me down and told me about the urgency of loving myself, now. That while I might not be able to identify with the idea of responsibility towards future selves or future children, but I had a responsibility, and an invitation, right now to love the skin on my body and the bits of flesh that remained even after I tried to starve them away. That I had a right to love the intricacies of my mind. Contrary to the common conception about eating disorders, my dieting didn’t begin with self-hatred but with a belief that being smaller would make people love me more. I wish someone had told me I could make the choice to be that someone who could love me. The thing is, I think people did tell me, but the words didn’t sink in.
I wonder why these thoughts waited a decade to emerge. Of all my personal struggles, I thought I had a handle on this one. I learned how to compact it to a simple sentence, whether I relayed it to a friend or a therapist. I’d judged it as a bygone event, tidied and clean in the past.
In her book Journey Through Trauma, psychologist Gretchen L. Schmelzer shares about a young boy who acted as a source of stability for his mom as she brings herself and her children out of a destructive environment. Once safe, the young boy breaks down, surprising his mom with the emotions he’d hidden for so long. Instead of coding this behavior as abnormal, Schmelzer identifies it as a natural surrender of defenses once the environment no longer calls for them. In the absence of danger, the boy could finally allow himself to be vulnerable.
What I’ve learned about mental health and healing leads me to believe that complex emotions do not submit to detached reasoning and willpower. They are the stuff of instinct, and they emerge in places of safety. Maybe that’s why, at twenty-two, I could finally process them. Tempted by those same feelings of self-hatred, I’d begun building a tolerance for both the physical and mental imperfections I could now accept as my own. My internal environment had shifted, making room for vulnerability. Years ago, I’d learned to look in the mirror without flinching. Now, I learned to employ that ability in a metaphorical sense. My growing capacity for love meant I could finally offer empathy to all versions of myself: past, present, and future.
I find it interesting that I can’t choose when and where to process grief. Nor can I assign a chapter’s end. Grief, by nature, is circular and sporadic. It may disappear, but it will return as long as it exists as a threshold between myself and resolution. It waits until I’m ready, though I may not think I’m ready, to present itself: less an unwelcome guest and more a piece of myself ready to return home. I did not embrace the overwhelming tide of confusion, sorrow, and regret. But I’m thankful that it met me at a time when I could acknowledge the impact and wade in without fear of drowning. In a way, I am thankful for the emotions because they signaled a change in my mentality. For a young girl who believed she couldn’t take up space, those feelings meant I’d finally begun to make room.
Elisabeth Ivey writes literary non-fiction and young adult fiction. She has contributed to The Odyssey and Messiah College’s The Swinging Bridge, and she has presented research on representation in youth literature at the PA NAME and IMAGINE Social Good conferences.
