We Are Not Our Eating Disorders

Sometimes I wonder if I was born with this, the way women are born with all the eggs we’ll ever have. Was I born with the whole of my obsession with my body, a dopamine addiction, a compulsion to control? I feel defective—like spoiled goods.

I know that there are times in my life when I’ve been able to control the eating disorder behaviors. They have ebbed and flowed. But the disease? I am not sure that ever goes away.

I have spent my entire adult life battling eating disorders. And I have learned, at 56 years old, I am far from alone.

As I’ve shared in previous posts, I don’t mean to let the patriarchy off the hook. The toxins that girls and women absorb from the suffocating nature of societal expectations caused my mother and grandmother to obsess over their bodies and the ways they lived inside them: the noses they felt grew too large, the bodies too round, and their stature too short. It became a part of my life from an early age.

At 10 years old, when I announced I wanted to be an actress, my mother told me she’d let me if I lost 10 pounds first (“The television puts 10 pounds on you!”). I was “allowed” to participate in Weight Watchers with her after that. We ate out of plastic pouches of food: powdered peanut butter, silty shakes, and microwaved frozen dinners in the evenings while my brother and stepfather ate steak, chicken cutlets, potatoes, and pizza.

I lost five pounds off my already very small frame and never ended up acting.

Instead, I found a hunger in me I never knew existed. This wasn’t the hunger a child was supposed to experience. This was a deeply distressing hunger. A guilty hunger. An angry hunger. I was learning that my body was the enemy, a prisoner that dared to act out, my mind its jailer beating it into submission.

It was a story that was written early on and one I’ve continued to battle every day since then.

When I started writing about my eating disorder a couple of years ago, I immediately recalled that memory. But I pressed on, feeling the deep need to remind myself of what I loved to do at 10 years old and what I loved about myself “before”:

My strong legs,

my love for reading and writing,

The way I embraced my friendships with my whole essence,

the musicals I meticulously directed in my basement, starring my brother and neighbor kids, singing at the top of my lungs with abandon,

My passion for making and listening to music, spending hours working out songs on the keyboard in the upstairs bedroom of my suburban home,

my bright smile accentuating the dimples on my cheeks,

the menagerie of animals I cared for,

and how I gravitated to babies, the way they softened my body as I held them, accepting the entirety of me.

My healing now, at 56 years old, relies upon remembering that I am not my eating disorder. It relies on listening to my body, feeling the discomfort or tightness or expansiveness or joy or release that different experiences and activities bring me, and leaning into the fullness of who I am.

I struggle every day to listen and to move toward what feels good and right in my body. There are days when it feels like it will never get easier. I have memories upon memories of the ways my body has loved me fiercely, even when I have struggled to love it. When it feels like, as I started this post, I am battling the me I was born as, I remind myself that my eating disorders are not my personality. This is not “who I am.”

It is this combination that has given me many moments, days, months, and years of what it looks like to create peace within and between my mind and my body, through the battles with my body and my mental health.

There are battles, still. There are compulsive behaviors and distress, and fuck-it-all times when I obsess over my body and my eating. But isn’t that the thing? We are messy in our healing. And learning to accept that we are not all or nothing, but all and nothing and everything in between, is part of that recovery.

Those of us who have battled eating disorders throughout our lives, into adulthood, may have an even harder time understanding that we are not our eating disorders and our eating disorders are not us. We’ve lived with this for so long, we imagine they are us and we are them. But I am so much more than that, and you are too.