Displaying items by tag: healing

Anorexia, like many mental illnesses, prays on your weaknesses, your vulnerabilities. It hits you where it hurts. For those struggling with anorexia, that place is in food and the thought of gaining weight. To the anorexic, gaining weight is far worse than death. As a matter of fact, the anorexic would choose death over gaining weight if she had the choice.

At the height of my anorexia, when someone asked me what my worse fear was, I almost always said, “I’m afraid of getting fat.” But even in my state of complete denial over how my body looked, I knew this sounded ludicrous.

Gaining weight is repulsive for the anorexic. It means weakness, torture, agony, pain, worthlessness, guilt and shame, defeat, punishment, surrender, giving up, and succumbing to her worst fear.

One night, I had an anxiety attack. I was in my apartment, with just my cat, Jinx. I had just indulged in one too many glasses of wine and a depressing amount of ice cream, trying to stuff down my sadness and quell my racing mind. I thought of reaching out to someone, a friend or my sister, but it was too late. I was inconsolable. I wailed and cried, and I couldn’t breathe through my nose. My shallow breaths caused me to panic even more. I heaved and wailed with my arms wrapped around my shaking shoulders, and tears stained the floor and soaked two dozen tissues. I couldn’t save myself from drowning in my own tears.

I kept chanting over and over, “Please come back to me, please come back. I promise to love you better. I promise I’ll love you right. Please just come back to me.” At that moment, there was nothing else in the world I wanted more than my husband to be in my arms.

After a few minutes of this, I had a sudden and uncontrollable urge to look at his picture. I hadn’t wanted to go back there since the day he asked for the divorce. It was too painful to see what we used to be. But for some reason, I wanted to see him on this night. I rummaged through my closet until I found what I was looking for: a mound of pictures of us in a Walmart photo envelope His was the first face I saw when I opened the pack. They were mostly on our wedding day, and again, I crumpled into tears, clutching the pictures close to my heart, promising I would love him better if he would come back to me.

I was lying on the floor, curled in a ball, crying another ocean. It was the third time that day I found myself in that position. Constant memories attacked me like BB pellets I couldn’t escape. The tears threatened to drown me.

The memories were of my former life, the one when I was married, had a house, a dog, a loving and caring husband. In those moments of uncontrollable sobs, I missed him terribly.

I thought about reaching out to my sister or my counselor, anyone to get the inundation of feelings out of me. I considered screaming and punching something, but since I work from home and my apartment is fairly small, I thought better of that. Then I thought of the one thing that I have always had throughout my life when I’m going through something that crushes me: writing.

For the better part of two decades, I struggled with body misperception and eating disorders. I looked in the mirror and saw only a fat girl staring back. The death of my mother when I was six had a profound effect on my life and the decisions and directions I took from there on. I learned to play the victim, the poor little girl whose mommy died. I got attention from other members of my family when I cried, threw a tantrum, or lost weight. 

My feelings were more than just physical. They were emotional and mental. I felt fat, a weight in my belly and in my mind, and so therefore, I thought I was fat.