If only I was more like him.
If I was at one hundred percent perfect, able to forget my inhibitions, totally free of baggage.
Right now…
I’ve been in recovery for more than a year. I’m not sick anymore. But I’m not as free as I want to be.
I still hear that voice in the back of my head. The one that says you aren’t good enough the way you are. You’re too much. You need to prove your worth by becoming smaller.
When I started high school, I was normal enough. Sure, I felt compelled to organize everything. To get straight As. To never, ever upset my parents, lest I trigger another one of their fights.
Sure, I sometimes thought about my body, what I ate, if it was too much. What teenage girl doesn’t?
I’m not sure how it started, really. My therapist thinks it was a reaction to my parents’ fighting. To Mom’s habit of self-medicating with anti-anxiety meds. Dad dropping an ultimatum—rehab or I’m taking the kids.
Mom calling him on it.
He said things would be calmer after their divorce, but they weren’t. Everyone was further away. Both my parents were working more hours to cover the legal fees. Oliver was apprenticing. He was as desperate to get away from the chaos as I was.
He succeeded.
I didn’t. I was alone. And the entire world was out of control.
I needed to take it back. To make one tiny part of the universe make sense.
I’m not sure how I got the idea. Eating disorders came up every so often in YA. And even in some of the your body is changing, how to deal books Dad bought me.
I knew how they worked, intellectually. But I didn’t really know. I had no fucking idea.
At first, I starting skipping dessert. The candy Mom sent. Ice cream after one of Luna’s swim meets. Cake at a party.
It was the only thing I could control. And it felt good. Comforting in a weird way.
Like I was proving my worth by denying myself pleasure.
For a while, that was enough. It was enough to lose a few pounds. Buy jeans one size smaller.
Then it wasn’t.
I started skipping more.
Anything with added sugar.
Drinks with calories.
Bread.
Dinner.
Breakfast.
I wanted to be smaller, to be more worthy, to be enough. To prove I was stronger than my physical needs.
The more I had, the more I needed.
The more I denied myself, the harder I broke. I’d black out. Come to in my car, halfway through a quart of ice cream, desperate to fix my mistake.
That was always the worst. The panic that came with messing up. It was like I was crawling out of my skin. Like I needed to be anywhere else except my body.
Like anything would be better than sitting with that.
I always hated purging. But, at the time, it felt better than the alternative.
Even now—
I don’t know.
I knew it wasn’t healthy. But I needed that control. I would have done anything to hold onto it.
I thought I was good at hiding my behavior. I thought no one knew. I guess, for a while, that was true.
Eventually Dad and Oliver saw it. They were terrified. I knew they were terrified. I hate that they were terrified.
But I still needed my control. It was the only thing holding me together.
I didn’t want to go to therapy, but I didn’t have a choice. I was a minor.
After one session, the shrink recommended inpatient treatment. A week later, I was in a psychiatric facility, eating three meals a day, plus dessert, doing daily group therapy, individual therapy, art therapy.
It was so much about eating. About making sure I had enough.
I resisted for a long time. But eventually I saw it. That my head was a mess. That I didn’t have to hate myself twenty-four hours a day.
Once I was coherent enough to start writing, I did better.
Then I was healthy enough to dance—starving yourself weakens your muscles, including the ones in your heart—and I…
It’s hard to explain recovery. It’s not like I had one moment of epiphany. I had a million moments. And a million moments of no, that’s not it that followed.
It was a million steps forward and half a million steps backward.
Once I gained enough weight, and stayed stable enough on my anti-depressants, I was discharged. Sentenced to a fate of careful meal planning and therapy once a week, every week, for the rest of my life.
I follow my post-treatment plan now. The same thing for breakfast. Lunch and dinner every day. A small treat for dessert. Not enough to trigger panic.
I don’t count calories in my head. Or stare at my stomach wondering why it’s so soft. Or write odes to self-loathing.
But I don’t live either.
I’m still trapped. Trapped by the fear that I’ll slip.
Trapped by routine.
I scan the bright blue sky. Look to Holden—the wicked smile, the danger is sweet tattoo, the easy posture. My best friend. My brother.