Bailey’s Story
It was 3 am and I was hunched over on the toilet in excruciating pain after taking a fist full of laxatives on an empty stomach. Meanwhile I am desperately stalking my ex on social media, scrolling through pictures of him with his new girlfriend on their Australian vacation even though we only broke up like two months ago. As I stand up and flush, and deal with the aftermath of my behavior, I am thinking to myself “This is not how I imagined 25 would be”.
That’s my worst Eating Disorder day. If you have read the Eight Keys by Carolyn Costin and did the assignments…then you have probably thought about the worst day of your ED too. Truth is, every bad day in a relapse is worse than the next.
It took me a long time to realize that, and on that worst day or rather, worst DAYS, I could truly not imagine a life without my ED or that a bad day in recovery wouldn’t lead me back down the rabbit hole. My eating disorder always screamed at me with a vengeance after break ups or more accurately, after any perceived rejection. This is a pattern that would repeat over and over until about 4 years ago.
The first time I had a negative thought about my body I was 6 years old. It was a dance recital and my best friend, Cydney, and I were dressed as Peter Pan for a performance of I Don’t Wanna Grow Up. An irony I think about a lot now that I have fully realized my ED also functioned to keep me from fulling growing up and taking on adult life. We were posing for pictures backstage and I overheard my mom say to her mom, “Cyd is such a peanut, just so tiny! And with that blond hair and blue eyes, you’re going to be in trouble when she’s in high school!”. I knew then that in comparison, I was bigger and therefore less desirable. Adults back then would describe me as “solid”. I learned to hate that word, in addition to other words like “flattering”. My pediatrician would bring out that horrific pink growth chart at every appointment and lecture my mom and I about the importance of diet and exercise.
Something important that doesn’t really fit anywhere else in my story is understanding a little about my family constellation. I am from a large extended Irish Catholic family. I like to say that my mother’s side of the family is the fairy Irish, they are all small, dainty and unreasonably attractive. My father’s side of the family is the potato farming Irish. You know, the brawny, athletic, built to survive a famine Irish. I favored my father’s side and my younger brother always favored my mom’s. So while I was desperate to be smaller, he was always on a mission to be bigger and tougher. I like to say that we were raised in the same house but by completely different parents. My parents truly hated each other for the majority of my childhood and did not agree on how to raise us so effectively, I was raised by my mother and my brother was raised by my father. There was a cycle of physical, emotional and verbal abuse in my family that made me see my father and my brother as the Enemy. As a result, my mother and I became extremely emmeshed. Similarly, my father and my brother became emmeshed as well. A pattern we still have not fully grown out of.
My brother started wrestling in 1st grade. I don’t know how much you all know about wrestling as a sport, but it is entirely centered around weight. My father kept a scale in the kitchen. I watched my brother weigh himself ritualistically every day. And I secretly started to do the same. I watched him restrict, purge and overexercise in an effort to control his weight which theoretically made him a better wrestler, all before he was even in middle school. I watched and took notes. In some ways, I rejected everything he and my father did. I actively hated sports and viewed sports and exercise as punishment for gaining or losing weight. I learned what foods were “safe” and which ones should be avoided if you were trying to maintain, lose or gain weight. Family dinner conversations often revolved around weight and people in larger bodies as a punch line in jokes. I feared becoming the subject of these conversations and I remember being terrified that when I wasn’t in the room people were talking about me the way my family talked about others.
Despite being entrenched in diet culture, I continued performing, I found a love for acting because there was relief in shedding my own skin and becoming someone else for a brief time. In 6th grade, when puberty hit me, and everyone else like a mac truck, my body image plummeted. I had my biggest role as the Queen of Hearts in a community production of Alice in Wonderland. After the show, my friends presented me with a bouquet of roses…just the stems (off with their heads!) and we posed for pictures. I saw the photos after and was truly disgusted by my body. I went on my first diet the next day using a lot of the same behaviors that my brother was praised for as an athlete, thus starting a long battle with my weight and self-hatred. It was my last time on stage. I wished to be invisible and developed a true fear of being seen. However, because I was “solid” and unhealthy behaviors were so normalized in my family…no one noticed.
When I was 16, my high school boyfriend dumped me after a year of dating and then came out as gay in front of the entire school during an anti-bullying assembly, which ironically led to me getting bullied for “turning him”. In one fell swoop I lost my first boyfriend, all my friends who chose his side, and a month later, my aunt died. It was a perfect storm of loss and emotional turmoil that had me in a dark hole of depression, worthlessness and desperation for affection and acceptance. I upped the ante on my dieting and lost weight rapidly. The bullying stopped and other boys started to pay more attention to me the thinner I got. I learned, as so many women do, that my desirability was directly related to my weight and the gaze of men. I spiraled into depression. The day before my 17th birthday I was suicidal. I spent the night in the ER and after talking with the social worker, and lying my ass off about the severity of my depression, I was sent home. I started medication and did okay for a while. For my senior year, I got to go to a magnet art school and for a year, I forgot to starve myself. I gained a little weight and while I still cared, and hated myself for it, I had other things to focus on that seemed to matter more. I like to call this time in my life an accidental/spontaneous recovery.
I’ll fast forward a bit, in college I experienced binging for the first time. I hated myself so I comforted myself with food. Then I hated myself for eating and comforted myself with more food. The more I comforted myself, the more I hated myself and the more I hated myself the more I sought comfort. I still regret my undergrad experience. I isolated and avoided everything and everyone. I didn’t date, I didn’t go to parties, if I didn’t like the way I looked in the morning I didn’t go to class. By my senior year I was my highest weight ever and skating by academically by the skin of my teeth. Then a miracle happened. I was approved for jaw surgery. Its probably important to mention that while all of this was happening, I also had a facial deformity. My chin was growing sideways. My mom and my friends assured me that it wasn’t noticeable unless you were looking for it but to me, it was the most glaring flaw that practically announced itself when I entered the room. So when a doctor agreed to surgically screw it all into the right place, I thought it was the CURE. If my face was fixed then my life would be fixed, I would finally be confident and deserving of love and attention.
I am sure you are all shocked to hear that it didn’t work. But for the sake of the story, lets keep going chronologically.
After the surgery, my jaw was wired shut for two weeks and I was on a liquid diet for 6 weeks. Now, I am sure some of you in the audience are thinking. “What a lucky bitch”. I can assure you that feeding myself with a syringe is not the miracle answer you are looking for. It was messy, painful, and honestly so grotesque to look at. And because I couldn’t feel my mouth for several weeks, I did have to look. I had to eat in front of a make up mirror to make sure that I didn’t miss my mouth. Not to mention, I couldn’t brush my teeth adequately for weeks either. So gross. But I did lose weight, and fast. Dangerously fast. And again, no one cared because everyone saw it as a wonderful side effect of having an excruciating surgery, the silver lining of having adult braces and having to use a baby toothbrush for months. But that evil little voice crept back into my head. I still hated myself, but since a new face didn’t “fix” me, I started believing that being “thin” would “fix” me. So pushed the envelope on how much weight I could lose and blame it on not being able to open my mouth all the way.
9 months post op (still wearing adult braces by the way) my cousin introduced me to her friend from school. Jarad. He was awkward but funny and he flirted with me. We started dating a couple weeks later. And for a while it was really good. I started working an ED residential in the Boston area as a mental health counselor. It felt so good to help people I related to. I felt really good about my life, I had a job and a boyfriend I loved. We both gained relationship weight, but it didn’t matter because we loved each other. Except, he didn’t. He started telling me that I needed to diet, I felt so much shame because I knew he was ashamed of being seen with me. He was ashamed that I wasn’t as athletic as his roommate’s girlfriend, and ashamed that my career as a mental health counselor was not making as much money as he wanted me to make. He told me I didn’t deserve a lot of things. We started monitoring calories and going to the gym more. Dieting was something we did together and it got me his approval. Even if I was starting to cry about eating “too much” again. It was slow and steady but my body did start changing again.
A year and a half later he dumped me, and I once again felt suicidal. In the ER that night, I again downplayed my depression but this time, when asked about my eating habits I couldn’t lie. Maybe in some way, I was proud of how little I was eating and thought the doctor would be impressed? I am still not really sure why I told the truth. But when I saw my therapist the next day, she confronted me about it and I was finally diagnosed with an eating disorder.
Now that it had a name, Anorexia, it seemed more real, my ED felt validated and almost empowered? At the same time, I thought I could still stop any time I wanted. I would just get my revenge, break up body, make my ex jealous and then move on with my life. But then he started dating someone else. So I restricted more and started purging. But it never felt like enough. I went to PHP for a minute but ended up leaving AMA because they told me to go to residential. I kept digging myself a deeper and deeper ED hole. At one point, I flew all the way out to CO for residential because if I was 2000 miles away from home it would be harder for me to leave right? I lasted 8 hours.
I was in complete denial. I was a scientific anomaly. I was going to be the first human to live without food. I quit my job because the residents started to notice. No one can sniff out an ED like someone with an ED. And I started a new job in a similar position but not working with the ED population, met my next boyfriend, Cole, who was kind and supportive. But medically, I started deteriorating. My doctor wanted me to wear a heart monitor. This was the last straw for my therapist, she gave me an ultimatum. Go to residential for at least a month or stop seeing her. I love my therapist. I have been seeing her for almost 8 years now and she is the perfect balance of empathy and therapeutic roasting. So, I went to residential. I was there for Christmas and New Years. I finished and went to PHP. I kept seeing my therapist and my dietician, but I didn’t fully commit to recovery. I was half-assing it. I didn’t follow my meal plan and I still weighed myself everyday, but I did the bare minimum to stay out of treatment. Cole and I broke up after 9 months and I decided it was because I had “let myself go” in my half-assed recovery. So, I committed to relapse. I got to my lowest weight and was given another ultimatum. I went back to residential. The night before my intake I took a lot of laxatives. In my first 24 hours, I ate a full meal and couldn’t handle the emotional overload that came with eating 100%. I told a counselor I would kill myself if I had to eat another meal. They sectioned me, but it was horrible, the cops came to the residential and cuffed me and threw me in the back of a paddy wagon. In the ER, people stared at the skeletal girl in handcuffs and whispered. I somehow convinced the doctor in the ER to send me back to Residential and when I got there I called my dad to pick me up. I called my dietician who pulled some strings and got me into a different PHP.
For three months I half-assed my way through PHP and did the bare minimum. I watched several others leave and they seemed to have found a full recovery. On my last day, I sobbed in the arms of a milieu counselor and admitted that I had been faking it. But I went back to work and kept half-assing it because that was the best I could do. I ended up quitting that job because I watched a teenager purge multiple times a day while the clinical team did nothing, and it was so painful to watch a child fall through the cracks in the system the same way felt like I had at the same age. I felt like I could see her future.
On New Year’s Eve 2019 my best friend got engaged. I was happy for her, but it was the loneliest I had ever felt. I redownloaded the dating apps and started swiping, when I found Peter. A week later we were on a date. Little did he know that I was fresh out of eating disorder treatment, jobless, and truly at rock bottom. He invited me out for drinks and then surprised me by making it dinner reservations instead. My ED was SCREAMING we had only planned on drinks how could I manage to eat in front of him?! But he was so kind and funny, so I told my ED to shut up. I started a new job a week later and fell in love with it. I really wanted things to work out, I wanted to finish grad school, I wanted a successful relationship and I wanted to stay at a job I liked for more than a year. I finally wanted all of these things more than I wanted to be thin and it was terrifying. I didn’t know who I was without my ED and without it, I was going to be forced to actually live my life, which was something I hadn’t planned on needing to do. Without my ED, I would have to grow up and start doing really hard things without my main coping skill. But at the same time, I didn’t want to keep repeating the cycle of relapses and treatment. So I started prioritizing the things I cared about and started talking back to my ED voice. “I have to eat lunch because I need to be able to focus on work”, “I have to eat dinner because food is a way to connect with my boyfriend”, “Its okay if I eat this cookie because I am celebrating my friend’s birthday”.
Suddenly, I was feeling better, mentally and physically. I was living my values and I felt like my life had meaning beyond what my body looked like. I was able to go back to grad school and after 4 years of on and off treatment, I finally graduated with my Masters of Social Work. I definitely had, and still have days where that voice ruins my day and makes me feel terrible about my body. But those days don’t turn into relapses.
Now, Peter and I are married, I am a social worker at a prestigious children’s hospital doing such fulfilling work, and I don’t know what I weigh because being thin didn’t get me all of these things. In fact, I only got all of the good things in my life because I gave up the pursuit of being thin enough. I go to the gym because it feels good to move my body and my fitness goals don’t have anything to do with how much weight I can lose. I eat what I want, when I want it and most of the time, I don’t think twice about it. I still have some days where my ED voice is loud, but I am able to turn the volume down. I don’t like the word “recovered” but I finally stopped half-assing my recovery. I have considered myself in a full recovery for 3 years now. In the wise words of Ron Swanson, “Don’t half-ass two things when you can whole ass one thing”. I finally feel like I am “Whole-assing” my life and that is truly so satisfying in a way my ED never was.
The other day, I was working a weekend shift checking in with kids who were boarding on medical floors, waiting for inpatient mental health beds. I met a 17 year old who reminded me a lot of myself. I purposely don’t work with the ED population, while I am passionate about advocacy and education, I don’t think I am in a place where I can treat eating disorders long term. But this girl made me question that. She talked about feeling hopeless, and the years of invalidation when she wasn’t “thin enough” for an eating disorder diagnosis. She talked about how her plan was to white-knuckle it through treatment until she was a legal adult. She talked about how recovery didn’t seem worth it. And I flashed back to a time when I had said the exact same things. I wish I had had someone to tell me that recovery wasn’t something that immediately happened after treatment and that for a while, it doesn’t feel worth it. That it takes days and days of repetition and practice to master the art of ignoring the voice in your head. That it is hard work and eventually it does get easier and easier.
If there is one thing to take away from my experience, its that only “kind of” doing recovery may get you out of treatment but its no way to live a life. You can’t fully be who you want to be AND have your eating disorder. Trying to do both is exhausting and disappointing. So to everyone in that place, I see you and I feel you. It’s so cheesy, but trusting the process and fully leaning into your values does work. It takes time, and it’s so hard. But it works. I hope my story gives you hope and some reassurance.
