I Thought I Had Cured My Eating Disorders Years Ago

But I wasn't healed until the people who disordered me were out of my life.

little me on the far left in the first of many bikinis + my kickass aunt and rockstar cousins

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I was put on a diet when I was three years old. That’s how old I am up there in that picture. And that day at the lake is the day that my aunt overheard me playing in the sand with my cousin.

Me : I’m going on a diet! Wanna come with me?

Cousin : Sure!

I don’t remember a moment of my childhood and teenagehood and young adulthood when food and body didn’t consume my every thought. I breathed food and body. I absorbed food and body. It’s a wonder I did so well in school with subjects that were not food and body.

I might have looked like I was listening to you when you were talking to me, but really I was silently soliloquizing about food and body.

How much can I not eat and still stand?
How much can I eat when no one is looking?
How much fat is in a banana?
How long can I survive on only black coffee?
How many miles do I need to run to make my body forget it ate dinner?
How can I survive solely on Snackwell’s and WOW chips and Fat Free Cool Whip and Caffeine Free Diet Dr Pepper?

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I became a mother in my mid twenties and was cured of a lot of my demons because of it. Going through the process of creating a safe and healthy home for a growing life inside of you sparks a new understanding of what your body is capable of. And then you use all of your strength to push that life from your insides in order to create a safe and healthy home for it outside of you. The journey of housing and birthing a child really makes you reevaluate your relationship with your body.

My body became more than just something I could control. My body became super and it became magical. I found some respect for my body I never knew I had after I had my first child. I was thankful for it.

I thought I was cured.

But the voices that raised me were still there. At family dinners or holidays, everything became toxic again. The comments, the antiquated and dangerous language used around food and bodies hovered around every gathering. Comments on how good my butt looked in those jeans, or how ‘skinny’ I was today, or how many times I went back for seconds, or how little I ate from my first plate.

Nothing could commence without the foundation of us first declaring who was over or under weight this week, and what foods we were not eating because of it, or how we were eating everything with abandon because of the week we had.

Life was lived through the filter of either permission to eat all the things, or reasons to not.

Food controlled everything, whether it was being eaten or not. My body was never mine under their roof. It was glorified or it was weaponized. I was either a good daughter for being thinner that week, or a nasty one for being over the weight they were comfortable with. And if I got too lean, that was almost as reprehensible as being thicker.

I could not be leaner than her and I could not be stronger than him.

Fights were sustained for weeks if I said I was uncomfortable with their talking about my body or the amount of food I ate at the dinner table. I either stood up for myself and was yelled at, or I took it like a silent soldier. Every word like a knife slicing through my humanity and cutting me into whatever size and shape they deemed acceptable.

My relationship with my body—and the food I either put in it, kept from it, or banished by force— was a leash on a collar of a mangey, old dog. It was heavy and tired and sad and lonely.

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After I had my second child, my relationship with food and body shifted and I felt cured again. I wasn’t purging anymore, therefore I was cured. I controlled and scrutinized every morsel of food that entered my mouth and spent hours at the gym every day. I was healthy because I ate as little as possible and kept it in, had muscles, and was a size I never knew was possible for me. I was healthy because of all the vegetables I ate and broth I sipped.

Healthy for me still meant small.

I was weighing myself a dozen times a day and the numbers haunted me. If I was a pound over from the hour before, I hated myself. If I was under, I was obsessed with figuring out what got me there and how to keep it down.

I was smaller than I had ever been and was still miserable and unsatisfied.

I didn’t realize I had just shifted from one disorder to another.

Obsessing over food and body in any way is a disorder.

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When the pandemic hit in 2020, I had already began to loosen my control and had gained a good bit of healthy weight. I had just quit a toxic job and felt free for the first time in awhile.

Then one day my birth family left me and took my eating disorder with them.

It makes sense. They created it. They controlled it. It was their beast they continued to feed every day without my consent. So when they chose to walk away from me, the sickness I thought was mine was tethered to them.

Not to me.

My food and body obsessions were never about me. My size and the many, many times it changed was never about me. The control I felt I needed to have over all of it was never once about me. And I would never have been able to figure that out if they didn’t leave.

And I will never forget the moment when I realized I was actually and completely healed.

They had been gone for about 2 weeks without a trace or word and I felt lighter. I walked differently. Stood differently. Spoke differently. I was physically heavier, but I was lighter than I had ever been.

I had no idea that the key to healing myself was ridding my life of the blood that got me here. It felt like living for the first time.

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I don’t recognize that lost, little girl anymore; the one who consumed food — or the idea of it — more than she did her life and love. And yet she used to live inside of me. I am she and she is me, but we do not have anything in common anymore. We have the same memories and the same birthmark on our bellies and scars on our faces. Cut us open and we both bleed the same blood. And the blood of the people who took me to such dark places.

But she is not who I am today.

That young girl who hated her skin and shape and didn’t trust herself or the food that was meant to nourish her, made me who I am. Of course she did. She came before me, and I grew from her beginning. But I am wiser, older, smarter.

I am finally healthy.

This mighty and thriving body I am now—this twisted and tangled mind, and this heart made of broken glass from shattered yesterdays—are all built from that girl’s sorrow. I came from something sad and broken and scary, and spun it into spider silk.

I am stronger than steel but I remain soft. That kind of gentle strength can only come from a place of pain.

They don’t give that out for free.

Everything that she went through—every tear-soaked pillow that dried to cradle her head as she drifted to sleep, every hateful word she thought and spoke to herself in the mirror, and every hateful word that entered her ears from the mouths of the people who gave her life—all made me who I am today.

And though I don’t have any of her thoughts and feelings anymore, I give her love as much as I can.

That’s the beautiful thing about pain and trauma and getting to keep living on the other side of it. You get to nurture the parts of you that didn’t get nurtured before. You get to hold the hand of your little self and love her.

And you get to heal her.