Warrior

The thing about eating disorders is that you don’t immediately realize all the pain you’re putting yourself through. Because first, you’re gonna feel euphoric. You’re gonna starve yourself, purge your meals, lose 30lbs and look in the mirror and feel a flutter of happiness that you’re on the right track. You’ll begin to see that sliver of space between your legs grow and fall in love with the new concave look your stomach has taken on. You’ll fall asleep with fingers gently dancing over your rib, hip, and collar bones, tracing them, willing them to become more defined, more contrasted. It feels like that hole in your life has been filled. It can take weeks, months, or years to realize the thinness of your hair, the brittleness of your nails, the way your skin festers and reddens from even the smallest scrapes. The way you feel sick all the time, how your body can’t fight infections. The soreness. The aching. The sensitivity of your teeth. You always have a cold, a fever, something hindering you. It can take even longer to accept that the bad things outweigh the sick progress you’re making. You cry in the bathroom before events that will have food. You begin to feel a icy sickness overtake you when people comment anything about your weight and appearance. You can’t look at magazine covers of flawless models without wanting to cut away every last bit of fat on your body. Restaurant commercials make your stomach ache. Yes, it can take an indefinite amount of time for the metaphorical weight of the disorder to begin to burden you. And by then, you’re too deeply in this toxic relationship with your self hatred to step away. Because you’ve heated your water slowly with your burning need to feel whole, and now that it’s boiling you’re trapped beneath the surface. Maybe then you decide to try recovery, if you’re fortunate enough to be able to break yourself away from that bond. You try to eat more. Then the weight gain happens. It’s like an apocalypse of the mind and body. Crying, purging, and the likes. Eventually you might be able to eat a normal 1,500 calorie meal but you hate yourself after. Maybe you’re able to go for weeks, months, years of doing this, and maybe you’re back to your normal old self eventually. But your mind doesn’t bounce back. Your mind still screams at you when you want seconds. Your mind still picks the things that you know have the fewest calories, fat, and sugar. You still feel twangs of shame when you walk down the streets and see all the skinny girls. You start wondering if they’re starving. You watch for signs of eating disorders in every skinny girl you see. Is her hair thinning? Is she ordering nothing but iced water at a restaurant? Does she flick herself with a rubber band after each small, slow bite? You look for any sign that she’s trying hard like you did, that she isn’t naturally that way. It still consumes you. Maybe somewhere along the rocky road of recovery you decide to be “fit” and you tell people that you’re not starving, just healthily restricting, and no you don’t exercise too much, it’s normal to want to be the best you can be physically. But you know in the back of your mind that as your portions are getting smaller and workouts more vigorous, there’s only one possible outcome to your path of “recovery”: You’ll reach your goal or die trying. The thing about eating disorders is that by the time you realize the pain you’re putting yourself through, you’ve already changed yourself for life.

how to tell if I'm sad again

Unfortunately I’m the type of person that you can screw over 1 million times and I would still be there for you if you needed me.