Finding My Nourishment

By Erica Rae

Content Notice: This story contains references to Disordered Eating.

Erica had suffered in silence for too long. She knew it was time she sought out help. Getting treatment for her disordered eating revolutionized her life — she finally found power in loving herself for exactly who she is.

Before I drove home from my Tae Kwon Do class, I texted one of my best friends.

“I’m going to tell them tonight. I need to tell you so that I actually do it.”

I needed help and I knew it, but I had gone months feeling unable to reach out, feeling paralyzed at the thought of talking to someone about how much I was hurting. No one seemed to see the pain I was living with. No one realized that my switch to the same small lunch every day, the constant excuses not to go out to eat, and my inability to watch cooking shows meant that something was seriously wrong with me.

I was in the midst of an eating disorder and no one seemed to be able to see a thing. All they saw was someone who had gotten skinnier, someone they ‘wished they had a body like’, someone who- on the outside- somehow seemed relatively fine and put together. However, I was slowly being eaten away on the inside- in both the physical and emotional senses.

I got home that night, and told my parents that we needed to talk.

“I … I think I have an eating disorder, and I think I need help.”

They were shocked. Somehow, I had managed to keep it hidden from them. Because of this, they thought that where I was wasn’t ‘that bad’. They could help me gain the weight back I needed to, we could do it all ourselves, within our family. No one else really had to know.

However, as you, dear reader, might expect, that wasn’t the case. I was in too deep for just my parents to be my only support in my recovery. I love my parents dearly, and they were a huge part of my recovery, but neither of them are particularly great at talking about difficult emotions; they’d much rather pretend they didn’t exist.

I needed a professional; so the summer before my senior year of high school, I started outpatient family-based therapy for anorexia. It did what it needed to do in that moment, but, for me, would not have been a sustainable option long-term. Despite that, as I went through the half-hour individual sessions that my bi-weekly appointments included, I learned some major insights about myself.

Until I got into therapy, I rarely talked about what I was feeling. I rarely felt what I was feeling. I was a tight little ball of concealed anxiety and depression who would cry herself to sleep every day, only to wake up the next morning and pretend like everything was fine. I felt the need to be ‘strong’ for my friends, to be the motherly type friend. For some reason in my mind, that meant my emotional needs were a burden. On the flip side, I considered it my job to be there consistently for other’s emotional needs. Learning to reach out and talk to others about what I was feeling was all sorts of terrifying, but has since become something that I value in my relationships with others. Being the one to do all the emotional labor is exhausting, and wasn’t sustainable for me. I needed to find friends who I could vent to without judgement.

Additionally, my time working on myself led me to discover that I’m queer. While I was at war with loving myself, I came to the realization that if I find a partner, I don’t care about their gender. If someone is willing to love me, and I love them too, it doesn’t matter if they are a man or a woman or nonbinary or another gender identity. This realization has continued to be one of the most important self-discoveries I’ve had in my life, and who knows how much longer it would have taken me to realize that if I hadn’t been pushed to be open to my feelings. This has now become such a huge core aspect of my identity that I am so proud of, and has led me amazing friendships and relationships I wouldn’t have imagined just a few short years ago.

Finally, even though my first therapist and I did not connect deeply, our relationship and the work we did together planted a little seed in my mind. Those seeds germinated when I started seeing a different therapist when I went off to college, and then went away for a summer to do a service project. I was not taught about mental health growing up, I was never taught that “it’s okay to not be okay.” I never felt like I had a space in which I could express that. By coming to terms with what I was battling within myself, I realized that I want to be someone that others feel comfortable talking to. Doing so within a professional role will allow me the necessity of setting boundaries with others, helping me maintain my mental health as well. Working in a field related to mental health would also give me the ability and credibility to be someone others felt comfortable turning to.

This is not to say that everyone needs some trauma to be able to find themselves. This is not to say that you can’t have an extremely fulfilling life without going through a challenge like this. This is not to say that I would ever wish what I experienced on anyone. Every day is still a challenge for me not to fall back into habits that are still so seductively tempting, but every day that I push back against those voices, it gets a little easier.

However, for me, fighting through an eating disorder, and then battling the anxiety and depression that it masked, revolutionized my life in so many ways. I’ve become a friend that people can talk to, but also someone who knows her boundaries. I’ve found power in loving myself for who I am. And I’ve realized what I think I’m meant to do with my life. I am currently in a Master’s program for social work, and I will be able to make my advocacy a profession. I will be able to use my experience to help guide me in service to others, while also learning how to better how to care for myself.

I know that my struggles aren’t over, that sometimes they get close to surfacing again, but I’m not in the same position that I once was.

I’ve learned.

I’ve grown.

And I’m better because of it.