Don't Eat

In my earliest memory, I am three.

I’m standing in my parents’ room in our old house with the soft white carpet and the dangly knobs on the dresser that jingle rhythmically whenever anyone walks through.

My dad is there, and he’s holding me. I have this view of it now, like I’m watching our embrace from above, perhaps from the corner as the afternoon light streams through the large window across from the bed, bathing us in warmth. Human memory is funny; I feel like there’s something to the fact that we remember some of the most important parts of our lives like they’re movie scenes. I think even our subconscious doesn’t want us to forget them, as the brain inevitably does and always will, no matter how much time passes.

In this memory, my dad is telling me how much he loves me. He’s telling me that no matter what, no matter how old I get, where I go, or what I do—I’ll always be his little girl.

I think of this little girl a lot, with her shock of light brown curls and her plump cheeks. She’s quiet and gentle. She has a lot of thoughts but keeps most of them to herself. She’s tiny, too. So, so small.

I wonder when I decided that I hate her. Was it at age ten, the first time I stood in the mirror pinching my fat and forcing myself to do jumping jacks, long before my body would transition from that of a child? Was it at age twelve, when my panic attacks started and I needed something to hate? Or long before any of that, in some undefined moment?

I’ve always enjoyed food. Perhaps too much, at least when it comes to sweets. I’d pick all the chocolate chips out of my trail mix, sneak ice cream after bedtime, and my siblings and I would devour handfuls of our Halloween candy in one sitting despite our parents’ ‘one piece’ rule. I’ve always enjoyed food, and somewhere along the way it became something so embarrassing. To this day, I am wary of how much other people see me eat; how much I express my desire for food even when I’m hungry.

I was lucky that my anxiety manifested itself in my ability to eat. I promise my starving started out as an unwanted symptom of my disorder. I mean, I started starving myself at twelve.

How the fuck could I have known what I was doing?

Eventually, and not before long, I realized the ways my body was changing. I’m not sure exactly when it occurred, but I went from that cold panic surrounding the knowledge that I needed to start eating before I had to be hospitalized, to that quiet resolve that if I didn’t start eating... well, that would be fine too.

One time my mom asked me why I wasn’t eating—we were on the way to the water park, and I didn't pack myself a lunch. I told her I didn’t like my body. That body, small and gangly and trying its hardest to grow.

My mom never brought up that comment again. I told her years later about my unhealthy eating at that time, hinted at it in that embarrassed way we talk about ourselves when we hate what we are but still think we might be important. She was so surprised. I think if I brought it up again she'd be surprised again because she wouldn't remember, because she never noticed in the first place, and is that bad? How do you forget about that comment from a twelve year old?

Either way, I could cry now at the intensity with which I wish that that little girl had someone to talk to. She didn’t know what was going on, what an eating disorder even was. I didn’t even hear the words till a couple years later, visiting a church with a family friend.

The woman asked the prayer leader to pray for my eating disorder. I remember thinking, “Oh. Is that what I have? Is that what’s wrong with me?”

I was having big thoughts—I did that all the time—and they were so misguided.

Or were they?

I barely ate throughout high school. My freshman and sophomore years, I spent an hour at the gym every day. My mom would drop me off after school, and she still, to this day, mentions her admiration for the discipline I exhibited by going so regularly. I was tiny and thought I was huge. I continuously felt for my ribs when I was sitting, liking the way they poked out. I knew how much to eat in front of the family to avoid any serious suspicion. I obsessively wrote workout routines on post-it notes. I tracked what little food I ate each day in my journal. The “Do something to reach your goal every day!” that’s still scrawled on my mirror in dry erase is referring to the restrictive eating and obsessive exercising I was putting my body through. I envied other bodies, as long as they were smaller than mine. I absentmindedly covered notecards with the most important reminder I could think to tell myself, the mantra I lived by: DON’T EAT. Every time I took a bite of something “unhealthy,” I obsessed over it for the next several days. I couldn’t go to bed unless I did my entire regimen of home workouts, I took progress pictures and could barely go out and exist in my body if I started to look any bigger, and I locked myself in my self-made prison with the key clutched in my own trembling hands.

When I did inevitably start getting bigger my junior year of high school, I delicately walked the line between pretending that bigger reality didn’t exist, and hating myself more than ever before. Like I said, I enjoyed food, and I was exhausted of restricting myself. It had bled into every area of my life; in order to starve myself, I had to constantly have food on my mind, and there has never been anything so exhausting.

For the next two years my body fluctuated as I fed it, and I stepped away from the gym. I didn’t know how to separate the gym from my destructive eating habits. I continued to starve myself for weeks leading up to important events and beach trips, but I binged a lot more. I enjoyed food—while I was eating it. Those same disgusted thoughts were there the second I was done eating, but I got better at ignoring them. Like a pendulum, I swung to the other end. Away from anorexia and towards binging.

College brought a plethora of new experiences.

For one, I reached my lowest weight in my adult life. My anxiety made a reappearance my freshman year, but once it died down, the compulsion to feed the sick desire to see more of my bones and exist in less space arose. So I did. And friends noticed. And my sophomore year of college, after I’d gained some weight back, I truly opened up for the first time about my struggles with food. Those friends will forever be dear to me if only for the way they handled—and continue to handle—me when it comes to food.

Ever since then, I have fluctuated. Still, I fluctuate. With my mindset, my physical appearance, my dedication to all those old harmful habits. I’m healthy, I think. People call me thin; I've always been smaller. But I still don’t like myself. I don’t think I hate myself, but that shame and embarrassment about my body is worse than hate.

It’s not debilitating. It's not violent. I can live with it and enjoy my life. But it's unsettling and that's worse. Because it's always there, and it’s never gone away. I’m embarrassed to be seen, to exist in the space I occupy.

Some days, a lot of days, are fine. But there’s still that feeling.

And I'm scared of change, of taking ten steps back when I’ve only taken five forward, of regret, of erasing the hard work I’ve done to get to the point I’m at now. I’ve only recently started to accept myself, after all.

And I feel like that acceptance isn’t love, it’s tolerance. At worst, it’s denial. It’s the fucking exhaustion of not being able to live like an imposter in your own skin for any longer.

All my life, I’ve been existing in this odd space of denial. Of doing harmful things to myself despite knowing they were harmful. When I entered middle school and started doing research on diets and losing weight, I quickly found that not eating was actually the worst thing you could possibly do. It slows your metabolism. Your body goes into starvation mode. It tries to self-preserve. You get fatter. I knew this, I believed this, and I hurt myself anyway. It’s the need for quick gratification, isn’t it? the impatience and the inability to love my body and give it the chance to change in a healthy way. If only I had spent all those years giving my body what it needed, who knows where I’d be now.

It's a thought I don’t entertain often.

A note of reassurance for me is that even at the height of my obsession with my body, I never wanted this to be my reality forever. I remember reading a blog post written by a woman named Laurie. I don’t remember exactly when, but I was under thirteen when I found it. “I am anorexic,” she started, going on to detail her extensive history with her eating disorder that started in her childhood. Laurie was submitting to the fact that she would always be anorexic, that it was part of her DNA, that the word itself wasn’t even indicative of a disorder anymore but simply a state of mind. Laurie was in her thirties, and I remember thinking of myself in my thirties still doing all the stuff I was currently doing. It was unthinkable. Disgusting. Pathetic, the way people clung to their mental illnesses. I didn’t know how, but I knew I would be better by my thirties. I couldn’t be Laurie.

I’m twenty-three now, so I have seven years. And I'm probably at the best spot I've ever been in. Not to where little me would have wanted to be. I’ve mistreated that little girl, validated all her negative opinions of herself and cheered her on when she was harming her body, been the one and only voice in her ear telling her DON’T EAT YOU’RE UGLY DON’T EAT. But even then, she was still looking out for me, looking towards the woman she knew she wanted to be.

I really don’t want to let her down. And I hope that’s enough.