Content Warning: This post discusses eating disorders and body image.
I was lying in my dorm bed, trying to fall asleep, when a vivid recollection of my high-school self popped into my head. I don’t remember what triggered the memories, but within seconds, hot tears were streaming down my face. The saltiness didn’t taste like sadness on my tongue; it tasted like healing, like I was finally recognizing my own strength.
I don’t talk about my issues with disordered eating to anyone. Even when I was at my worst, I could count the people who knew even a fraction of what I was going through on one hand. I don’t think anyone really knows how bad it was. If you know me personally and stumbled upon this, please don’t ask.
I'm hesitant to write this blog. I feel this urge to verbalize my experience, to let all this out somewhere, but I've experienced how competitive eating disorders are. The last thing I want is to bring harm. If these topics hit close to home, please don't read.
My insecurities with my body began to take form as early as preschool, but it was the pandemic that sent me spiraling. After being reduced to nothing but my own thoughts with the internet as my view outside, I began to detest every aspect of my appearance.
It was bad. The type of bad where you spend hours scrolling through social media before sobbing on the bathroom floor over a bowl of ice cream. Where you toss your lunches into the trash when your friends aren’t looking and act like you forgot it at home again. Where you stop brushing your teeth because of the calories in the toothpaste and watch your tongue turn sickeningly yellow. In hindsight, I don’t know how I glamourized that type of pain.
In my eyes, if I was skinny enough, I would be pretty enough, and then I wouldn't be lonely or sad or angry at myself. With that mindset, my health got worse and worse for years. It reached the point where I should have been inpatient but begged and sobbed not to because, in an ironic twist, guess what was on my mind? The meals probably weren’t halal. A strangely rational thought from a girl terrified of all food, religiously permitted or not.
Healing has been a very, very slow process, one that involved me eating meals incredibly carefully in front of my mother, turning away from my peers so they wouldn’t see the shame of me actually consuming a sandwich instead of smushing it into tiny pieces into a napkin, garnering all my strength to walk into my university’s health office and make a contingency plan. I had a therapist who didn’t help at all — I gave up on her after I voiced my complicated anxieties about recovery paired with my desire to fast for Ramadan (she didn’t even know what Ramadan was. I don’t miss her).
Actually, it was Ramadan when I felt myself getting better for the first time. I began to eat with intention and viewed every bite as the blessing it was. That month, and those following it, were constant, conscious efforts to feel better.
It’s been four years since that all began, and I’ve been finding myself thinking about the journey more and more. I used to block it out of my mind entirely, but little things have been making me more conscious about it all. Like, last week, I changed into sweats when I realized my jeans didn’t fit me — a realization that had previously sent me into a spiral for days (no thanks to that therapist again. ‘Be more positive’ is not very constructive, queen!). And a few days ago, I ate at a restaurant and didn’t let the calories beside the meal stop me from ordering the pasta I wanted. Sitting there with my friends would have quite literally been my worst nightmare two years ago. Today, I looked in the mirror and realized with complete clarity that I’ve been gaining weight. For a minute, all that pain and fear rushed back into my head. I had to stop myself from guiltily sneaking downstairs to pull out the scale and confirm what I observed in the mirror. But, to my genuine shock, I found myself thinking — who cares?
I don’t get as many compliments as I did when I was at my lowest, but I also don’t get as many concerned glances or hushed questions about whether I’m feeling okay. My hair doesn’t fall out as much. My body doesn’t ache. I look healthy, and I’ve been realizing that for the first time in years, I feel healthy. Instead of petty pride or jealousy toward my teenage self, there’s a strange mix of grief and empathy. None of my suffering was ever needed. It didn’t help me grow as a person, or become beautiful and desirable. It just made me miserable.
One in five women experiences an eating disorder by age 40. Of those, 95% experience them than 25. According to a Harvard study, a person dies every 52 minutes as a direct consequence of disordered eating. I knew all those statistics when I was a teenager; I looked them up. In my sick mind, it felt like I was winning some twisted competition against a healthier version of myself — and against those who couldn’t endure the trauma.
I don’t feel that vindication in the opposite direction. Recovery doesn’t feel like good triumphing over bad, but more so like a warm embrace around the aches. It feels like forgiveness. I'm not hungry anymore, and not in the painful way. I know I’m not completely healed — that’s going to be a much longer process — but I can soften in my satiation, and it makes me feel so much stronger than starving myself ever did.
This was a really, really hard post to write. I’ve taken multiple breaks because as much as I’ve needed to get it out, that isn’t an easy thing to do.
If you read this blog and any part of it resonated with you, even if we're complete strangers, please know that I am fully, entirely here. I know what it feels like to hurt and I’m learning what it feels like to heal, and I urge you to get the support you need. And if you're also on the path to satiation, please know that I am so, so proud of every day you’ve endured.
I have so much more to say. I wish I could provide a more nuanced take on this, some way for me to verbalize all the pain and growth constructively without the fear of spiraling back into it, but today, I’m only as far as these words. Still, this is more than I’ve been able to speak on this topic in years. I’m relieved to let this much out.
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