World Mental Health Day

I wish I could say it is effortless to put down into words what the last half-decade of my experience with mental health has been. Mental health is a topic left on the top shelf of many households — always present, collecting dust… out of sight yet visible. I want to put a disclaimer: I’m not sharing my story to participate in some trend, gain unwanted visibility, pity or attention, but in hopes of destigmatizing the subject entirely & allowing my reality to be an open door for another who may be struggling with the same issues I will be addressing.

For the past 5 years, my body has been abused time and time again by own demons. 50% or more of my brain power has been dedicated to maintaining and feeding my relationship with eating disorders. Orthorexia, anorexia, and bulimia have all been players in a dangerous game of equating your self worth with your body and overall appearance. Flashes of people telling you “you look great!” after weeks of calorie restriction and intakes of diet soda that would make any physicians skin crawl. Eating disorders are left out of our society’s conversation all together. Sure, they are addressed in short by those in the public eye that have been afflicted by them. Perhaps they have been inflated with a sense of glamour by the fitness community. They are a small whisper in our day to day conversations when in fact, they are an unmanageable roar in the afflicted’s brain. I joke with myself that I haven’t been single for over 5 years, why? I’ve been in a great telling romance with my eating disorders. The story is an uncomfortable one, but isn’t that why we’ve left so many similar narratives go unheard?

When you experience change in your life, it’s not as easy as drawing a line across a sheet of paper. I can’t just say on this side of the line, I was a normal functioning human being, and on the other side of the line, I was a literal skeleton of my former self sprinkled with depression and anxieties unknown to the rest of the world. 
I blame myself most of the time, for not being strong enough to pick myself up and out of the dark times that highlight the depths of my disordered thinking. Why was moving to college and feeling so utterly alone so triggering for me? Everyone else seemed to struggle and adjusted, whereas I just drowned. As alluded to, my disorder began my first year of college. I saw so many bodies unlike my own, I was suffocated by attitudes of being healthy and eating right and exercising. These were new attitudes. I would sit at my desk sipping on a Pepsi as the girls on my floor flutter kicked on their yoga mats as if every movement elevated them into supremacy, and dented my confidence. Of course, this is the downward slope of bad self-talk. I did not feel worthy. I did not love myself. I was insecure. And I needed some way to fix all that. Instead of a more inwards approach, I longed to fix my outside. I thought with a better body things would just come easier because that how it seemed to work for other girls. (Also, the constant ringing of my first college boyfriend-quickly-ex-boyfriend calling me fat didn’t really help.) The simple dieters formula, eat healthy and exercise lead right into the gapping mouth of orthorexia. Quickly, eating healthy became a list of acceptable foods and unacceptable foods. Then those I could fit into my dwindling calorie count and those I feared. I mean truly feared, I have many horror stories that my family members can attest to of being so frightened by the idea of going out to eat, unable to weigh out every piece of food on a scale and calculate its nutritional information that I would throw everyones good intentions under a bus and stay home, alone, in bed munching on a 100 calorie bag of popcorn to aid my grumbling stomach. I managed to not even see the changes in my body the way others did. At 21, I was under 90 lbs. You could see every muscle in my limbs contract with each movement. People would tell me I looked sick, and I wore it with confidence. I liked hearing that, and my eating disorder loved it. It was actually on the day of my 21st birthday party, I had my first encounter with bulimia. After nearly 2 years of restricting myself to 1,000 calories, 900 calories, 800, 700, 600… my body decided to turn its back on me. Recovery seemed to forced its way into the horizon. I would reactively eat back all those calories I spent every day so fixated upon avoiding. I gave up the control of managing how many calories were ingested by. In the mean time, I have had people approach me about how to be healthy the entirety of my disorder, asking for advice on losing weight and being active. I forgot to mention, my addiction to running and cardio by any means was almost as insatiable as the hunger that would soon come to fuel my bulimia. I got scared around 110 lbs, and decided that this was recovery enough. It’s crazy to think now, that then… I truly believed this was fat. Being 5'7 and 110 lbs to me was disgusting and appalling. If I could just give myself an award for being the most body dismorphic I had ever been in my whole life, Sonia ages 20–22 would be there fighting between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place. Restriction came back into play, the reactive eating subsided from a daily occurence to once a week. I would restrict to literally nothing. The “recovery weight” fell off. Filling up on sparkling waters and diet sodas, zero calories, for about 2 months. I would cave one day a week during this time period — allowing myself to accumulate a high volume of food, binge, and purge. Hello Bulimia, welcome to the party, this is anorexia, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety, and depression… glad you could all be here with me. You may be wondering how did I, and how do others like me, manage to keep up all this disordered behavior? Doesn’t life get in the way? When something like a mental illness plagues your brain, the most intelligent part of your body, it latches onto that incomprehensible depth of imagination and invention to create a feasible way for you to not only continue your illness, but endure your daily activities in the utmost normality of any other human. I don’t even remember much from the ages of 20–22 because so much of my brain was enveloped in anorexia and numbered stints of bulimia. People still remind me of stories from that time and I look at them as if I’m having an outer body experience. That’s nearly 3 years of a blurry battle, fought alone and mostly in silence, when I spoke nothing but misunderstanding spilled out of my mouth. I was angry at myself, yet unable to pull myself out of this abusive relationship. It’s hard to let go of what has become comfortable, no matter how much it hurts you. And who is there for you when you are knee deep in the waters of your own self destruction? The people who loved you the most, they leave. You push them away as they come to you with healing words and concern, because your eating disorder tells you to. They can’t see you hurt yourself so they press the mute button, and even though they cannot turn themselves off, there is silence. 
I have lost friends, ruined familial relationships, broken romantic relationships, neglected those who meant the best — all to my mental illness.

A few months after my 22nd birthday, this really started to surface in my mind. What had I lost in addition to the weight? I had lost people, experiences, happiness, love, and a future. Maybe this time, I would recover. With these realizations, I just… ate. There is something hard to address in recovery for those who struggle with eating disorders, the weight. It will go up. You have forced yourself to be below a certain set point of overall regularity for your body’s health. It is not what the person who last spoke to you or looked at you tells you it is, it’s determined by something out of your control. Control. I see this as something many mental illnesses boil down to, the loss of it, the management of it, the intensity of it that billows out into every choice you make. When I think about the true underlying cause of this eating disorder experience of mine, control is there, waving its arm at me. Maybe, when I stepped into that new environment, around those new people, confused and lost, anxieties built into me and signaled my entire nervous system that I had indeed lost control. Instead of managing my emotions and gripping reality by the horns, I chose to get my relief from managing what I put into my body, how I expended its energy, and so on. This spans into bulimia, what I put in and what I can force out.

In my 22nd and 23rd years, bulimia has replaced what anorexia previously was. I battled with failed attempts to recover. I would exit restriction, eat, gain as one would expect, and hate my appearance. And I mean hate in every sense of the word. I would cover my mirror, keep my room as dimly lit as a possible to avoid looking at what healthy really looked like because I desired to look sick again. I showered in the dark, running the soap bar along these new, foreign limbs that felt out of place, too soft that what I had previously known. The weight went up, everyone around me seemed happy I was eating. I finally got my period after almost 3 years of an inactive reproductive system. This is where my bulimic episodes became more frequent. I felt as though I couldn’t keep feeling this way about my body. Instead of aiding my mind, I decided to eat for those who loved me and purge for the part of me that did not. Bulimia is one of the most abrasive forms of self-harm you can partake in. Forcing a foreign item down your esophagus only to coat it with stomach acid and adjacent salivary glands, lymph nodes inflamed from the constant abuse. Taking breaks between each forced purge to massage my swollen neck, tender, and sprinkled with pain. I wish I could say that this is the part of the story where things get better, some magical fix-it band-aid is applied to my frontal lobe and judgements made from that moment onwards are considerate and wise. Mental illness doesn’t always work this way, and eating disorders do not. I still struggle with the management of my eating disorder. Some days are great, some days are terrible. I fight for balance every day, and despite a strong attitude, I do have periods of time where I succumb to negative self talk and alienate myself from the world. I realize that recovery and healing does not come over night, and it does not come from comparison or restricting or self harm either. 
There’s something mysterious and discouraging about mental unhealthiness. How can we fix something we cannot outwardly see as damaged and hindering? If you are cut, the blood bleeds whether you want to address it or not. When something deep inside your brain takes ownership of you, your identity, acting without your agency, without your best interest — who are we to blame and what are we to do? These are the hard truths to be swallowed by every individual who shuns the idea of mental health being spoken into word.

I do not have the answers for those who are looking for them, but I believe discussion is where they may lie.

Not by heavily concealing our truths, our demons, our mental health dirty laundry.

And this is mine. This is my story. And I hope by making myself open and vulnerable and honest, I can help someone… because I have never felt more alone than during the times I fell deeply into my mental illnesses. There are many times I can reflect on, that any piece of writing like this would at least ease the pain that perhaps I was the only person fighting such a battle.

I would like to offer myself entirely to anyone else who is struggling with eating disorders, body dysmorphia, low self esteem, depression, anxiety.

You are not weak. You are not unworthy of healing and happiness.

You are not alone.

Sonia