Eating Disorder Talk

Any book on eating disorders is a must read. I am a person who is the queen of going into my small, little hole of “protection.” This is my world of denial. The more I talk about my food thoughts and read about it, the better off I am. Though my health has been great, I am well aware that my food addict is doing push ups in the parking lot. So, with a happy heart, I am eager to share a portion of this new book about a human’s personal experience with this disease:

“When I first got sick with anorexia, at the age of eleven, no
one talked about eating disorders—tome or anyone else. I
had been molested by a neighborhood man at the age of six,which
created an innate distrust of my surroundings, not to mention a
sensitivity to the senseless nature of personal physical and emotional
violation that would stay with me from that point forward.
By age thirteen, peer cruelty and family turmoil had left their
additional marks, and yet I spent the first seven years of my battle
with anorexia harboring absolutely no suspicions that my problems
were caused by anything other than “just me, being me.”
My family appeared to feel similarly.We simply didn’t know any
better, and neither did anyone around us. I continued to decline,
year after year, and everyone close to me fell away, as mystified as
I was by my slow descent, and unable and uninvited to venture
into the intimate, secret places where only the eating disorder
and I could go.

When I turned eighteen, I left my family and moved to another
state to attend university. I was already a nationally recognized up and-
coming young jazz and bluegrass musician, and I had been
accepted to a prestigious music program.Unfortunately,my “best
friend,” the eating disorder, had no useful advice for me to help
me cope with the stresses and strains of a whole new life, let alone
the demands that my college’s music department directors placed
on me. Before too long my physical and mental health caved in.
Not even three months into my freshman year,my parents arrived
to pack up my things.
I dropped out of school and flew home. Not knowing where
else to turn, I found myself crawling even deeper inside my eating
disorder for comfort. I couldn’t face my family,my few remaining
friends, or the cold, hard facts of such an abrupt end to such a
promising music career, let alone the heavy weight of guilt I felt
for somehow letting it happen. Like an athlete, over time my patterns
of over practicing and persistent, consistent weight loss had
steadily weakened my body, including the ligaments and tendons
I had relied on to maintain my ten-hour-per-day practice regimen.
The doctors told my parents they had never seen such a severe performance
injury in one so young—that my injuries resembled
those of a thirty-year-career musician. They told me I had better
proceed to Plan B, but I had no Plan B. I had no sense of “me”
without music.All I had left of the person I had previously referred
to as “me” were hard casts on both hands and forearms . . . indefinitely.
I couldn’t even lift a milk carton or turn a doorknob, let
alone engage in the sole form of expression that had offered me a
safe way to “speak” the words and emotions that now remained
bottled up inside, hour after hour, day after day. I was in constant,
ever-deepening pain, both inside and out.Worst of all, I remained
in ignorance of the name of my tormentor. I still labored under the
assumption that the total collapse of my life was “just me, being
me.” I wrote myself off, and miserably, unbearably, inconceivably
settled down to die.
Meanwhile, my mother searched around and found a physical
therapist for me to try and at least salvage my musical dreams.
Mom drove me to her office once a week, sometimes twice if things
got really bad.My new therapist’s name was Annie. I liked her well
enough, although I never said much during our initial sessions
together, other than politely asking for the occasional clarification
of her instructions for the physical therapy exercises she assigned.
Privately I thought that she seemed like a strong, happy, confident
woman—someone I felt quite sure I could never find anything in
common with.
One day, a few months after we started working together, I
arrived at her office not just quiet and reserved, but mute and
silent. She sat me down, very gently, and said, “Today we will not
do physical therapy. Today, we will just talk.” She explained that
she knew I needed someone to talk to, that she could see I was
hurting. Furthermore, she told me she believed that if I didn’t talk
to someone soon, I might actually explode from the strain of
holding it all in, whatever it was, that was pushing so desperately
against my seams to get out. I opened my mouth, intending to
quickly thank her for her concern, and to assure her that all was
well and there was no need to worry. I opened my mouth . . . and
it all came flooding out.
The depth of relief I felt was incalculable, mind-blowing, and
instantaneous. After seven long years of battling my disease in
lonely silence, after I had long since given up hope of help ever
arriving, Annie noticed my pain. Even more miraculous, she
seemed to understand what that unnameable pain inside me felt
like from personal experience. She also appeared to possess the
ability to do what I could not—separate the particular issue that
was causing such a struggle from the human being underneath
who was struggling. She saw me . . . trapped inside, held down by
the weight of my disease, but still alive and willing to fight and
wanting to survive. She heard me . . . my nearly inaudible actual
voice, crying out for recognition beneath the eating disorder
voice’s vicious lies. She cared about me . . . in a way I had never
even considered caring about myself.
She wasn’t at all intimidated by my pain or my disease or my
shame, or even my inability to put any of it into comprehensible
words at first, because in her own way she had walked through
those same places in her life and had emerged whole and healthy
and strong. She also—amazingly, unbelievably—seemed to believe
in me, even when it felt impossible to believe in myself, and even
while I faltered and fell so many times that her continued presence
and support seemed less like compassion and more like insanity.
It was only later that I learned that the reason she was able to do
this for me was because someone else had first believed in her and
stood by her when she needed that person most.
Annie was my first mentor. She was my first anything—the first
person I had ever met who proved to me that an ordinary person
like me could be a hero in her own life. She taught me this by
showing me, through her own example, that everybody has “something”—
something that we each struggle with, something that life
hands us, individually, which forces us to wake up and choose life
every day, in every way, in every thought,word, and action, because
choosing anything less than life means we will not survive, and
what a waste of a perfectly wonderful, irreplaceable, unrepeatable
life that would be!
Annie also taught me that this “something”—my something—
meant not that I was weak, but that I was human. It meant that I
was not to be forcibly, willingly even, separated from the herd of
humanity all aroundme by the perceived unusual weakness within
me, but rather that this very challenge I was facing was what
included me and made me very much like the surrounding herd.
Annie shared with me something I would never have realized on
my own—that, in struggling through my particular “something,”
I was simply participating with each person around me in the normal
and necessary rites of passage life offers us. In other words, I
was having my own individual experience of the collective “human
condition.” Most importantly, I learned from Annie that it was
only when we all come together to share in both the burdens and
blessings that life offers to us that we each activate our inner power
to fully live.”

I am excited about this new book already! I haven’t read the whole book yet, but I already know it will be life changing and inspiring. GET THE BOOK AND HELP YOURSELF IN YOUR RECOVERY!