You have permission to find yourself beautiful

I cannot pinpoint the moment it happened, it was sort of like a slide. I started slowly and gained momentum until it was almost too late. I think that is how most addictions begin. You do one thing, like the way it feels, do it again and before you know it that small thing consumes every thought, every action, and is your life.

I remember sitting in my fourth grade math class and noticed my arm was jiggling. I spent about the next 20 minutes looking at every other girls’ arm in my class to see if theirs were jiggling too. That was the first time my weight distracted me from normal life. I went through middle school and high school always concerned about my weight, but never considered myself anorexic. I ate but I didn’t like the way I felt after I finished eating. It was not until the end of my senior year of high school that I began to slowly fall down the slide that is anorexia nervosa.

I had just gone through my first big ‘break-up’ and I found myself struggling to find joy in everyday life. I was so depressed I couldn’t even get myself to eat dinner and as a result of a limited appetite, I began to lose weight. For the first time in a few months I found something to get excited about…going down a pant size! Before I knew it, I could not go a minute without thinking about my weight. I would not chew gum because I knew it had calories; I would skin my grapes because I figured that would save calories; and I ran EVERY TIME food went into my mouth. I ate an apple, I ran five miles. Two months later I had shed 30 lbs, went from a size 6 to a size 2, and was told my heart was in danger.

For the last two months of summer I went to therapy every week, had a personal nutritionist, and I was not allowed to exercise. By the end of summer I had gained 15 lbs and was considered “healthy enough” to go to college—to make a long story short.

Things started off great at TCU! I was making friends, rarely thought about my weight and always reviewed the notes my therapist sent me. I was right on track to recovery. It was not until Halloween 2010, that the slide I had begun to crawl back up took a turn for the worse and I was sliding back down. I can’t remember the exact moment I fell back into the disease, but before I knew it I was throwing up in my room, working out after every meal, feeling sick every time I looked into a mirror, and eating a diet that consisted of lettuce, apples and water. By Thanksgiving break I was at 95 lbs and had lost 20 lbs in one month. I remember the tears in my mom’s eyes as she picked me up from the airport and noticed the weight loss. Her daughter was at it again.

Looking back I think the hardest part of the disease was seeing how much it affected my family. My parents are the best parents anyone could ask for. Therapist after therapist would question me about them as if they were trying to place the blame on my mom and dad for being “too controlling” or “too critical”. That was most definitely not the case. Believe it or not, you can have an eating disorder and have a great family and home life. I had an unhealthy relationship with control and with food. Plain and simple.

I spent the next year and half overcoming both anorexia and bulimia, and it will be 2 years this June that I have been “sober” from both addictions! It is not like life is all smooth sailing now. I will ALWAYS struggle with food. I will ALWAYS feel the need to work out after I eat. I will ALWAYS have an unhealthy relationship with food. It is being strong enough to remind yourself that there is more to life than being rail thin that stops you from acting upon those demons.

I think the best thing anyone ever told me was “you have permission to eat”. Oddly enough, having someone say that to your face in the middle of such dark times does something to you. I know everyone is different, but I hope anyone who reads this knows there is more to beauty than being skinny. You are created the way you are for a specific reason and trying to change that will only kill you. You have permission to eat. You have permission to find yourself beautiful.

The Illness is Not Me, and it is Not You Either

I’ve never really liked the rain, it makes me feel cold and sick. What is always worse is when you get stuck in the pouring rain, the thunder is loud, and you are without an umbrella. That’s how my brain feels, everything is loud, cold, raining, and there’s nothing that I can do about it. At least that’s what I thought.

I’ve always known that I wasn’t happy. I grew up with an addict and alcoholic of a father, who was verbally and physically abusive. He would threaten to hurt if we ever got in the way of anything he depended on. Yet, we were demanded to look like the perfect family because we lived in a town of only 300 and everyone would know if there was a crack in the portrait.

When my mother left him, that’s when things really started to go downhill. My biological father turned what used to be the vegetable and fruit drawers to his beer drawers, there was liquor in his coffee mugs in the morning, and the kids at school would tell me about how he was getting in bar fights over the weekend. I was only ten.

When I was sexually assaulted for the first time at 13, it was on a school bus full of kids and nobody helped me. Rather instead, I heard the laughs and I saw their smiles. These laughs still haunt me to this day. It took me over a year to tell someone and over three years to finally tell my mother.

I didn’t tell anyone how I was feeling, I was stuck in this dark rainstorm wanting to die, only holding on because I didn’t want to hurt my mom. I wouldn’t hug others, my personal relationships suffered, and I was a hollow body.

I was sexually assaulted again in high school, I still hear his telling me not to ever say anything but that I liked it. I was a “good girl”. My first year of college my boyfriend of only a couple weeks raped me, again called the good girl.

I became a shell again, my grades plummeted and I struggled with all of my personal relationships. My relationship with my mother deteriorated. My old insomnia came back, as did my anorexia, panic attacks, and another suicide attempt.

It wasn’t until I was taken off of my old medication that my first real feeling of recovery came to me, a combination of merely just clouding up my thoughts in the midst of the storm. I was switched to a different anti-depressant and sleep aid while going cold turkey from what I had been on.

The medication switch when it finally hit me was not the only thing that saved me. The new medication served as an umbrella for me to hold in a way. The love and support that I could finally feel once covered from a freezing rain of PTSD memories I couldn’t control warmed me from the cold I felt inside.  The words of encouragement gave me the strength to keep walking.

Sexual assault, rape, depression, panic disorder, PTSD, and mental health illness can happen to anyone. It effects Frogs around you and you may not know it because it’s not something on the outside, it’s on the in. Those who are struggling lose many friends to the fact that others just don’t understand or don’t want to be friends with someone with these kinds of issues.

But if you take anything away from what I have written, it’s that you are not alone and you are not defective. I have spent too many days in my young life thinking that there is something wrong with me. I have an illness, but the illness is not me and it’s not you either. The Counseling Center has inside and outside resources for help. Here’s to recovery, love and support, and go Frogs.