Rachel G.
Photography by Aneesa Wermers
Please note: Before choosing to read this letter, I must acknowledge that I address a topic that can be incredibly sensitive and difficult for some to read or hear about: eating disorders, as well as anxiety and depression. If you feel uncomfortable with this kind of content, I completely understand, and encourage you to find other empowering letters to motivate your own personal journey.
If you’re reading this, know that I’ve been there. I’ve had the thoughts, the obsessions.
That sickening, addictive cycle of self-deprecation that leaves you with absolutely no self-esteem to speak of, yet in some twisted way makes you feel better about, maybe feel more able to justify, the inability to be the model human being. Which, if you think about it, is completely ridiculous. What are we? Barbies? Mannequins? As much as the media would like to tell you that’s what you should want, what you should be, I’m here to say, in blunt terms: bullshit.
In my very last semester of college, I took Abnormal Psychology. Now, by that point, I was convinced I knew all there was to know about eating disorders. I mean, I had one for almost a decade. I’d lived it. I’d felt my world crumble bit by bit as those ugly voices consumed me; consumed my body until there was nothing left but a walking skeleton lacking a sense of soul. I’d nicked away pound after pound until all that was left was bone; until all that was left was eyes unable to look away from the destruction I’d caused. At some point, body dysmorphia cannot filter all that is lost to untreated mental illness.
To my surprise, a singular textbook pronounced that I still had more to learn about myself. As I read through its chapter on eating disorders, I came to the etiology section. I cannot put into words the strange feeling of enlightenment from so much technical language that spelled my life in only a page or two of information: how eating disorders tend to come from personalities of perfectionism; tend to come from a need for control; for a way to cause distress that displaces our thoughts from the other fragilities in our lives.
What all that eloquent, matter-of-fact text was saying to me was, “Starving yourself is a twisted cry for acknowledgment of a completely malnourished life.”
I thought of that period in my life when the anorexia started. Friends that considered me annoying. Family that liked holding grudges. Genetic predispositions to mental illness. Parents with a tumultuous relationship that made me feel like my home was just a pool of toxicity, and I was drowning. It was all adding up, making me question what was wrong with me, what could be changed to make it all better; and I looked down one day (quite literally), and saw it:
My body. My body was different; and that I could change.
Here’s some irony: that choice to change my body only expounded on what was already wrong; only externalized those internal conflicts that turned me to fractured porcelain. The difference between my life before and my life starved was this: now people could see it. Which was precisely what I’d wanted to avoid. I had put myself even further from my goal of belonging.
Which made the road to recovery even longer.
Gaining weight back was a living nightmare. All my worst fears were realized. I won’t go into detail, but look up “refeeding syndrome”, and you’ll get it. Just know that days before the beginning of my sophomore year of college, after a summer-long isolation where I was too afraid to let anyone see what was happening to me, I was lying on my bathroom floor staring at the ceiling and feeling like there was no way to go forward or back; that lying there forever, frozen, was the only viable option.
I’m happy to report that I did get off that floor.
The life I was gifted after is the reason I can write this letter and be okay with admitting my lowest moments. I have to emphasize that physically recovering from an eating disorder is one thing. Mentally recovering is another, and here’s why: eating disorders are part of a fork in the road where one decides what to do about something that is already wrong. Admitting that, and digging into the why of it all, may require a round-trip train down memory lane. All the pain we carry is like a set of needles that poke and prod you to do this, say that; feel this, not that. I came to anorexia already suffering from anxiety, depression, and a toxic home life. As I put the anorexia behind me, those other issues remained for me to pull apart, examine, understand; and purge. I was starving for answers, and finding those answers requires a willingness to not run away from the heart of the problem, no matter how painful.
I’m happy to report now that I’m far from the model human being- and I absolutely love it. I do whatever the hell I want (within reason of course), which feels liberating after years of damaging voices that insisted I would never be good enough or amount to anything. I can’t tell you I don’t still get anxious or depressed. I can’t tell you those voices aren’t still trying to whisper evil nothings in my ear. Here’s the thing: everyone doubts themselves. Life never goes the way you plan, so whatever it throws at you, what it does to you, comes down to how you handle it; a change in attitude. And that’s incredibly difficult to learn and master.
Here’s my final message, because I could ramble all day about mental health (it’s why I’m in pharmacy school now and already throwing myself into anything mental health related): Recovery is long. Recovery is painful. Recovery sucks.
But to recover is to heal; to heal is to move on; to move on is to finally be free to live.
All the best fellow humans,
Rachel G., Boston College ‘21
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