TRUE LIFE
Learning to choose me
Sarah’s world was consumed by her eating disorder for more than a decade. It’s wasn’t an overnight transformation, but with time, patience, and understanding, she learned to embrace her natural body as it is Writing | Sarah Young
I
was terrified, standing on the scales, praying that the number would show a drop in weight. I’d just woken from a nightmare where I’d gained two stone overnight. When I opened my eyes, my hands had been running over my protruding hip bones, even in sleep, just to check that they were still prominent. I kept feeling like there was a shadowy presence, just out of the corner of my eye, watching me. It felt like death. I felt like maybe I was ready for him. It was early 2012 and I was nearly 21. I’d been living with an eating disorder for almost a decade. The reason for its development can’t be pinpointed to one
single event, but rather a combination of many factors coming together to make the perfect storm. This period was the worst I’d ever been. My brittle, dry hair fell out in clumps in the shower. I was experiencing memory loss. I was dizzy a lot, the world seemed grey, and my senses were dulled as if my brain was smothered in cotton wool. I had insomnia, and when I slept I had nightmares. I was entirely, unequivocally, weary of being sick and miserable. I was weary of being in a living hell. I was weary with the despair, the darkness, the anger, and the devastation. I was weary of the calories circling around my head all day and night. I was
tired of counting down the minutes until I was ‘allowed’ to eat, of the starving and compulsive exercising, and eventually, the purging. I was exhausted by the intense fear I felt at going anywhere near food, and the utter desolation of my mind and body that meant I lived in a starving shell that couldn’t function, and a mind controlled by a single focus: to lose weight. A severe mental illness caused by a combination of genetics and my environment was my way of handling the world and myself, but finally, after eight years, I decided that this could not go on. At first, I viewed death as the only escape from the torment, but as moments of clarity started to push their way to the forefront of
my mind, the possibility of recovery developed from rejected thoughts to cautious actions. However, I was faced with a world that seemed to not want me to recover. Not fully, anyway. It was as if everything in the world was screaming: “Recover, but not too much. Gain weight, but not too much. Eat more, but not too much.” I felt like the world was asking me to tone down my disordered thoughts and behaviours… but not too much. I watched others call themselves “recovered” from eating disorders, while closely restricting their intake, and controlling their exercise. For me, that felt like still being sick. It felt like being better, but not well. >>> March 2020 • happiful.com • 39
