5-11-2013 It's Back

My junior year of high school was spent at a private Christian school. I truly tried to fit in at this school because I thought I had a better chance at fitting in with kids who had been raised similarly as I had. I did have one or two acquaintances but not any substantial friendships. The earlier parts of the year I was still dead set on anorexia. I simply did not know anything different. One small incident had a profound effect on my eating disorder early on in the year though. One day for lunch I had packed a Greek yogurt that I had bought the day before. I remembered that I had forgotten to refrigerate this particular yogurt for about 4 hours after buying it. I merely left it on the counter by accident. The next day at lunch when I was eating the yogurt, it did cross my mind but I did not think anything of it.

The next day was “picture day”. I woke up did my normal routine. Ate my hearty breakfast of egg whites with bell peppers (but hey at least I was eating right). Around 9am that morning I just started feeling down right sick to my stomach. This was unusual for me because I rarely got sick, despite having a pathetic immune system. I kept ignoring it and hoping that it would just pass. It certainly did not. By the time chemistry class came around at 11:30am I felt so stupidly sick. I sat in the back row of the large laboratory table, not listening to a word the teacher was saying. I had it planned; if I was going to get sick I would run out of the classroom to the bathroom right outside.

Being nauseous is just the worst feeling for me. I actually had a fear of it from a young age. As I was sitting in my chemistry class I got that god awful rush of saliva one gets right before the epitome happens. I knew then I had to get the hell out of there. Too late, I stood up and only had time to make it to the trash can in the corner of the chemistry class. Yep, that’s correct the weird skinny kid tossed her cookies in chemistry class in front of everyone. Some of the guys snickered and laughed and the girls turned their heads. Marissa the fabulous walked out of the room in tears. It was so embarrassing and it was all thanks to that damned spoiled yogurt from the day before.

The reason I bring up this story is because it changed my mindset substantially. From that point on I told myself I wanted to eat really healthy so I would never get sick again. For the first time in 5 years I was giving myself permission to eat, but I was going to eat so I would not get sick. I was going to be a super human instead of a shriveled child. For a couple months I actually started taking lots of vitamins and supplements, I went to the farmers market and bought all sorts of exotic vegetables. I found a health food store located about 40 minutes from my house. This store was the kind of place that had natural cures, palm readings, and all sorts of outlandish things. I decided I was going to try to be somewhat of a hippy. It was most definitely a phase. I was not a very good hippy…I wore all sorts of my deceased Nana’s jewelry. Not exactly hippy like, I just missed my Nana though. I went in grocery stores almost every day and spent almost all my money within a year. I still worked at the retirement home, but I had prioritized my new life so I only worked on Saturday and Sunday mornings at the retirement home. On Saturdays after my shift it was off to my weekly therapy appointment. I was so adventurous. My therapist at the time truly thought I was doing fantastic. No 17 year old who spends all their money on vegetables and fat free ricotta cheese is alright.

I had gained weight though. I was looking “normal”, by the end of the school year.  My fascination with food had temporarily distracted me from my fasciation of being emaciated. It was true, the worst years of my Anorexia until present was behind me.  My Anorexia was far from over though. The beast had just thrown an obstacle at me. I have heard from several eating disorder professionals that some anorexics/bulimics will go through periods sometimes years where their disorder is almost nonexistent. Then, like cancer of the mind it comes back at full force, reclaiming the innocent soul. 

I graduated 11^th grade at Greenbrier Christian Academy in 2010. I looked back at the year with some good memories, but also with some regrets. Going to College was a prospect now and I had to think real. I decided mostly on my own to go back to Grassfield High School (the public school) to finish my senior year of high school. I thought if I went back to Grassfield there would be more opportunities for me to take more challenging classes me senior year. Summer 2010 came and I had to get my senior year pictures. I got the pictures before starting school in the fall. On the day of my “photo shoot” I was relatively confident. I wore several special pieces of my Nana’s jewelry in her memory. Numerous photos were taken of me outside with nature, and one was taken with a drape on. I felt somewhat uncomfortable with my body image that day, but what was coming nearly knocked the air out of me. Towards the end of this summer was “the heaviest I had ever been”, and I had done it on my own. The depressing, criminalizing thoughts of anorexia were gaining strength again. When I was called in to view my pictures everything took a turn for the worst that day. When I saw myself in those pictures I was nothing short of petrified. I was so close to not allowing my picture in the year book, but that would not look good at all. On that day I told myself I would lose weight. Screw eating “healthy” and screw not getting illnesses. I was the definition of fat and I was going to lose weight.

It did not come on abruptly though. The day I saw myself in those pictures, Ana’s evil screech just started whispering like a little chime in my ear. Don’t eat that; think how much weight you could lose, you can’t go back to that school this fat lose it all fatty, you will feel powerful once again. It started out a whisper but at the admission of my next eating disorder treatment, Ana’s voice was like a stampede. Something else happened this year which may or may not have affected my eating disorder. My dad who is in the Navy told us to all sit down he had something to tell us. This was very unusual, and I was already thinking bad things. My mom already had a look of horror on her face. At first I thought some good news was going to come. My dad said he was going to Afghanistan for 13 months. Bang. What? No. For the longest time I was very distant from my dad because he was always the hardest one about my eating disorder and he reacted with anger sometimes. However, during these months in which my eating disorder had gotten “better”, certain family dynamics started to function a little better, including things between me and my dad. At the time I didn’t see him as the guy who didn’t understand me, but my dad who was going to a terrorist zone. I was upset. Everyone was very upset. He left in November of 2010, and things started to get that eerie feeling they had years before when my dad used to be deployed on a ship. Except this time it wasn’t for 6 months, it was for 1 year plus a month. I was angry, sad, worried, and confused, and how better to handle things than to revert to the comforts of my childhood illness.

“We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.”

― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia