DANCING GAVE ME ALL THREE EATING DISORDERS

In seventh grade, I joined a pre-professional ballet company. We practiced Mondays through Thursdays from four to eight pm every week, and sometimes on Saturdays when we had shows coming up. Every day, from four to eight pm, I stared in the mirror watching my body until I graduated high school.

My ballet teacher would make comments like "how beautiful you can see her ribs" or “suck in your stomach” to 14 year-old girls. That last one was a comment I heard too often, so he would make me go home after a full day of practice and do “stomach exercises” like planks, crunches, and sit-ups to fix my stomach that stuck out too much. I would sit in school and practice sucking in my stomach all day. Once, there was a photo posted of my best friend and I eating a pizza together at a sleepover. Our ballet teacher didn’t speak to us for the whole week because one of the ballet moms had shown him the photo, and he was disgusted that we were putting something so greasy into our bodies. For years, I grew up thinking I was nothing more than what my body looked like. Of course I stopped eating after that.

I took a break from dancing my freshman year of college, but got back into it sophomore year when I joined the college dance team.

Being in a revealing uniform isn’t exactly a safe environment for someone who has an unchecked eating disorder. It just took on a new form. I would go to Texas Roadhouse or Outback and eat a giant ribeye. I would make a whole point of eating it so that people wouldn’t notice when I skipped all three meals the next day.

After I graduated and stopped dancing, I started eating regularly. But that didn’t mean I was automatically healed. I hated myself. I saw every pound I put on in the mirror. I tried gua sha-ing my new face shape away. I ran and cycled and did 12-3-30 all in hopes of returning to the same body, thinking I was healed because I was eating now.

I eventually came around to my new body, not really because I wanted to, but I accepted that this was how it looked when it was properly fed. I threw out my full-length mirror, never to be seen again. I stopped engaging in conversation around “eating better” or losing weight.

Slowly, I started to love this body that had endured years of starvation and abuse, that this body could survive after all the wreckage. That this body was beautiful because it was healthy.