Editor’s Note: The following is a first-person reported story on one girl’s struggle with her body and mind. It contains descriptive details that might be triggering for some readers who battle similar disorders. 

I don’t think I ever looked at myself and saw the malnourished person everyone else saw. Every time I looked in the mirror, I cried. My reflection always seemed to show an extra layer of fat covering every inch of my body.

I never expected to become an addict. My family doesn’t possess particularly addictive personalities, and neither do I, or so I believed.

My addiction was not to nicotine, alcohol or traditional vices, but an addiction to food. I spent nearly every moment of my waking hours calculating my eating habits and the exercise I felt I had to do in order to counteract supposed “poor” food choices.

My mind and body were teetering Jenga towers. Slowly, piece by piece, my damaging compulsions would pull away the stability that held my health and psyche together.

The first time I realized how ravenous this addiction was, I was in the hospital when a new girl was admitted. Looking at her for the first time, I felt as though I was punched in the chest. The wind was knocked out of me and tears welled up in my eyes.

The skeleton staring back at me had been through unimaginable pain. But she smiled at me with such warmth that she was the living embodiment of juxtaposition. Every joint on her body was visible; her skull was silhouetted underneath her skin, revealing her cheekbones, jawline and eye sockets. She couldn’t walk unless she was going from her wheelchair to the bathroom, because her body needed every calorie available. The mental and physical decomposition of this disease was then visible to me.

Even today, I feel as though I have a conjoined twin. A conjoined twin from hell that I am in a constant battle with, relentlessly attempting to sever myself from it while the twin sews itself back to me just as hastily, ensuring we are forever connected.

When I changed

What led me to this place? When did it start? What happened?

People always ask me that, but I don’t know how to answer them. I don’t know when my mind suddenly changed and I don’t know when I changed.

All I know is that I used the gym and working out as my escape from school. I would go at 5:15 a.m. for an hour, sometimes more, with one rest day a week. For most people, that is a healthy routine, but for me, it was my downfall.

I felt like I had to exercise. Missing a workout made me feel guilty and I would obsess over how to “make it up” later that day or the next time I went to the gym. There came a time where I would pace in my room for 30-40 minutes, walk my dogs for 50 minutes, do abdominal exercises almost every day and do squats or other leg workouts whenever and wherever I could. I still wasn’t seeing results and decided to change my diet.

I started cutting down my meals and using calorie counting apps religiously. Over the course of a few months, I started to look closer to my ideal body type: toned and thin, like the influencers that practically suffocate you every time you open Instagram.

Sometimes people would comment on how I looked and it only justified what I was doing. After all, if others say I look good, then why should I change my habits?

The problem was that I never stopped restricting myself. It just kept going and going, less every day until I was surviving off of fumes. It never felt like enough for me.

Counting calories

I don’t think I could ever convey how much of my time was—and still is, though less so as before—wasted on food and calories and calorie counting apps. My brain was in a constant state of questioning every hour of every day; “How many calories are in that? What will I eat later if I eat this? What are the ingredients in this? How many grams of protein and sugar are in that? Will people look at me as I eat? Am I eating too fast? Am I chewing too loud? Will anyone notice I’m in pain?”

Turns out, people did notice I was in pain, but no one knew what was hurting me.

This went on for a couple of months, but I never noticed a huge change in myself—physically, mentally or emotionally. The only time I ever noticed a problem was when others started commenting on how skinny I was, until I would go to events and refuse to eat anything there, until my dad told everyone in my family that he was going to hospitalize me. “It’s a control thing,” my aunt texted my dad. “She won’t stop.”

After seeing those words, I wasn’t the same. I couldn’t shake those texts out of my consciousness. Texts about hospitalizing me, texts about how deteriorated I had become.

Suddenly I looked down into my arms and realized that I held the fallen tower of wooden blocks—the blocks I strategically stacked and tried to balance for so long—not noticing that I was contributing to my downfall.

Who knows if those texts fueled a change in me, but I changed nonetheless.

The lowest points of my life

Those winter and spring months were the lowest points of my life. I stopped caring about school—very uncharacteristic of me—and I was consumed by the food I tried so hard to avoid. I weighed everything on a kitchen scale before I ate and created arbitrary rules about food in my head. After finding a meal that I “liked”, I would eat that consistently for days; there were weeks where I ate the same three meals every day.

While I don’t remember the date, I do remember my first doctor’s visit. Everything she said angered my stubborn habits. She told me I was severely emaciated, which I understood but refused to acknowledge as a problem. My stomach had shrunk due to undereating and my kidneys, in addition to my liver, were on the verge of failure. My skin turned yellow, parallel to symptoms of jaundice. I was cold, even in the Texas heat, since I didn’t have fat to keep me warm. My hair and nails were brittle because my body couldn’t produce enough nutrients to keep them alive.

Soon after this first somber visit, I was placed into the hospital as an “inpatient”—which meant that I lived there and was granted two hours of visitation with my mom per day—on May 3, 2018. I couldn’t have razors, pens, pencils, markers, paperclips, scissors, a watch, clothing hangers, gum, caffeine or my phone. Nor could I stand or walk unless necessary, sit without my back touching the chair or use the bathroom without someone watching me after meals. When I showered, the door had to be open and a nurse would come and verify that there wasn’t any contraband within my bathroom. I wasn’t allowed outside for two weeks because it was considered a hazard to my health, and once I was permitted to go outside I was restricted to a small radius surrounding the hospital so I wouldn’t try to “sneak in exercise,” even though me and plenty of the other patients would do exercises while in the bathroom.

Since I lived at the hospital, my blood pressure and heart rate were measured before I went to sleep and when I woke up, and my blood was drawn weekly. There were security cameras watching our every move, with nurses monitoring the video at all hours of the day. Walking from my bathroom to my hospital bed, there were at least three sets of eyes on me. I was never alone, even while sleeping.

I was provided a computer to do school work for three hours a day, but I couldn’t work on school outside of those hours and I wasn’t allowed to email my teachers or mom (though I did anyway). We had a strict schedule, where multiple group activities were planned, consisting of art, music, games or yoga. While I missed my home terribly, having access to the largest movie arsenal was a sizeable perk to being hospitalized, not to mention the therapy dog, a golden retriever named Flora, who often pulled me from the drowning depths of misery with her radiant velvet coat and placid disposition.

Albeit, being forced to eat three meals and six snacks a day, even if I was nauseated to the point of pain or given food that made me involuntarily gag, definitely outweighed Flora. It didn’t help my damaged body image to gain 15 pounds and eat constantly, so I often cried at meal times and had to sit by myself.

I was blamed for these emotions, but it wasn’t really me who was controlling me back then. I felt like I was living someone else’s life.

During these designated meal times, I wasn’t allowed to wear jackets and my sleeves had to be rolled up so I wouldn’t hide food. I was also administered one packet of salt and pepper, but nothing more, just in case I tried to make my food inedible. Water was regulated severely so that I wouldn’t “fill up” on it, so I was often dehydrated. Participation in “games” was required so that I would distract myself, but they gave the same effect of putting a bandaid on a If we refused to follow these policies, we were segregated to a table alone and had to face the wall for the rest of the meal period, and if we didn’t finish everything, we had to sit in a room by ourselves and not communicate with others or have any form of entertainment.

Inpatient treatment went on from May to June. Then my new “day patient” status lasted until July 27, 2018, when my mom pulled me out of the program. Being a day patient allowed me to go home, see my mom and dogs, use my phone, watch TV and sleep in my own bed, only to return to the hospital the next day.

Though the English language holds an abundance of words for every situation possible, it doesn’t hold the ability to convey how hard this time was for me. I was miserable and wallowed in self-pity every day. I hated how I didn’t have any freedoms besides what I wore every day. I hated how I spent my nights alone in a bed that wasn’t mine.

A life worth living

As for the when, the why and the how I got to the lowest point in my life? How did I get better? When did I realize I had a life worth living?

I wish I could say that I had answers, that everything is better now. That I’m healed and healthy and happy. But that would be a lie; I am none of those things. I am a work in progress, and probably always will be.

Even today, my thoughts are mostly about food and exercise, because I’m still recovering.

Recovering from being consumed by a black hole of anxiety and overthinking about where and when and what I’m going to eat. It takes me at least 20 minutes to decide what to eat at a restaurant, and it takes me even longer to pick a restaurant to go to in the first place. I end up eating the same foods over and over and over again because I’m scared to try something new, not like it and then “waste” calories on it. Sometimes I have anxiety attacks in the middle of restaurants, or even at school, because I fall into a pit of despair about what to eat, what I’ve already eaten and other catastrophic quandaries.

No one will ever go through the emotional, mental and physical trauma I went through and suddenly come out of a therapy session refreshed and “normal” again. It will take years for me to recover and be in a healthy mindset.

But that doesn’t deter me from pushing back against the (almost) constant whispers that try to pull me back down into the dark and lonely place I used to be. I fight every day to stay where I am, underweight still and forever stunted from growth but still better than having death breathing down my shoulder.

Slowly, one by one, I am stacking the blocks back on top of each other, only this time they will be more stable than before.