JACKUMONKEY

"Because in my mind, I was causing it. I genuinely thought I was deciding to punish my body by starving it on the absolute bare minimum. That I was making a conscious choice to exercise to the point of passing out and feeling some warped sense of victory when I could keep going, even then. That I had absolute control over the decision to make myself sick when I did allow myself to eat (even if it was just an apple) because of the debilitating fear of putting on weight, and because my stomach was so accustomed to being empty. That was genuinely how I felt. That this was something I could stop, if I tried hard enough. I don’t remember what actually triggered me into accepting I had a problem. There were so many rock-bottom moments that it’s hard to remember the one that actually meant there was no way back. But once I’d admitted it, I read a million books and researched every bit of information I could get my hands on about eating disorders. And then I saw what I had thought was just in my warped little head was an actual THING. My thoughts had somehow been taken out of my head and put down on paper by someone else. It wasn’t just me. I had an illness. A weight lifted. This wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t in control of it. The opposite was true. It was in control of me."