Confessions of an Anorexic Athlete

TW: Sexual abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, detailed description of  anorexic and bulimic behavior, suicidal depression

A note to the reader: This is a personal and heart-wrenching, open account of the nitty-gritty of my eating disorder. I appreciate your readership and I think you'll be surprised by the tone. It would help your understanding greatly if you also listened to the music I've inserted, it communicates emotional messages.

   Hey there, stranger. I say that not because we definitely are (though we might be), but because this is going to be perhaps the best explanation of the dynamics of my life that have made me tick these past 12 years. This is far from a full explanation of me, this is the most succinct explanation of my reactive, anxious behavioral response to a number of triggers through my lifetime and the dysfunctions that follow. This is an explanation of how my anorexia works.

   I came out (and am coming out) publicly about my eating disorder and what I've found is that just about everyone has a way of assigning biases and intents and their limited understanding to it - certainly to my chagrin at times - but also, understandably. We operate on the information we have, and eating disorders (specifically anorexia) are the mental illnesses with the highest rate of morbidity and have a lot of fear and dread attached to their stigma. Twelve years or not, I want to get it out - maybe just for me - how my disorder works and why I have hope. And if it touches someone, then I accomplished something else, too. I don't feel shame about what I struggle with, on the contrary, I'd like you to take my hand and learn with me:

Sometimes the one you counted down and out is the one you can learn the most from.

   The thing about my faults is they're often the armor I wear to keep away the kind of people who kick me when I'm down. Unfortunately, it almost always works too well.

  Strange things happen when you live in my world. It began so well, so full of intuition and gentleness. Words needed not be exchanged between my Dad and I. We had grown so close in our safe world, and then he left by way of death. Not intentionally, but the impact of his absence was heavy. Many people have denied and questioned the idea that something about me triggers insecurity in many - but I stand by that assertion. Perhaps its the intensity of always being hustled into competition, no matter the arena. I remember criticism. I remember objectification. I remember degradation and devaluing. I remember denial. I remember invalidation. I don't just remember it, I internalized the voices that spoke it to me...

   Piece of shit...

   Gettin' a lil' Buddha belly there...

   It's always just walking on eggshells with you, get a thicker skin already...

   I don't care how it used to be, if your dad had grown up to see you as a teenager he would have abused you...

   I mean, yeah, I guess you have a pretty face and stuff, its just that your hair really helps you look pretty...

   Of course you're not as good as your brother, you're younger than him, one day you'll catch up...

   I get along with everyone but you, what does that tell you about yourself?

   Why do you have to make everything so difficult?

   You're not carrying your weight...

... and so the best I could do was lose it. The best I could do was lose the weight I couldn't carry. I could lighten the burden of those who had to carry me, for they never failed to remind me how difficult it was and how much they resented me for having to do it. So all of the anger and the hate that I became the trash can for ate me from the inside until there was no weight or strength or health left in me. Everything I tried was discouraged, demeaned and degraded.

   Then the garage happened. And it was so awful that my mind hid it away. I was a trash can already, it only made sense that a violent beating and rape would happen to me. It fit into the view of what I had become. And in my twelve-year-old little mind, I grasped for understanding. The inappropriate aspects of that acquaintance relationship would continue for two more years before I systematically I destroyed every social relationship in order to cut ties with that friend's older brother.

  And I hated the body to which my spirit was tied - it had betrayed me by puberty, by beauty. No one ever spoke of my intelligence or my kindness or my tenderness or intuition or my goodness. No one spoke to me like a human being. The transition from human being to disposal place of rage and confusion and sorrow had been rapid and violating.

  I began to punish the body for its sins - beauty, sexual attractiveness. And still the reminders came. They still come, every time someone tells me I'm sexy, every leer, every lewd proposition, every wandering gaze or wandering hand. It would not be attractive. It would be the ugliest thing I could make it - skeletal. I don't think I'm beautiful when I'm thin, that's just the point. I only know how to dispose of the rage that others bestow upon me with self-loathing. It would eat no more. It was never a conscious decision. None of it is ever a conscious decision. It was just easier to lay near death in a bed of ignorance than face the demons that took residence in this house my spirit was given. They would come to me at my bedside of depression, they would be angry again. Piece of SHIT! You MADE me say that!

  When the pain would come, sometimes I would feed it. Rapidly, to quiet it. shutup!shutup!shutUP!SHUTUP! With the worst things I could find - something to satisfy the anger, the hunger, the despair, but never the health. I hate this damn body. It can take this junk and it will die, maybe, and I will be free. It wouldn't die. It would reject it. It had forgotten how to eat. It still has, but it's learning again. But then, it would reject, it would come up in a rainbow when I needed to stay home from school, when I needed to avoid the people who might be able to see me. 

  Transparency was my enemy. If they could see my dysfunction, they could see what was wrong with me. They would see that I was, indeed, a piece of shit. They would see I was a trash can, and they would dump their rage and frustration, too. Later, that fear would come true in the worst way. But as it was, my depression and my pain kept me separate and strange. And every time the pain would peak - physical or emotional had blended together so effectively - I would wish for death. 

  Somewhere inside of me, compassion became my saving grace. Compassion for those who hurt me. I loved them so deeply, so fully... I knew their pain more than anyone in world would likely ever understand. They needed me, even if just as a trash can.

  And so I was so good at being a trash can, but an invisible one. I found a lot of people, a lot of people with a lot of trash. And most people didn't dispose rage into me like the others did, or maybe just a little. They were young - still young, still naive, still kind... but taking care of them saved me.

  Another saving grace appeared. A team. A sport. It later also became an elaborate form of bodily-mutilation. I chose physical violence to hurt the body that didn't have the ability to stand up to emotional violence and sexual violation. But I had a family. I would never lose the memory of what it felt to be on a team, to have their strength to support me and to try to use my strength for them. And so I became something I always wanted to be - an athlete.

  Still, thinking of myself as a trash can put me in a dangerously vulnerable situation. There were those who used it against me. One came along, and he changed my life forever. I entertained him because he believed me when I said, "I'm abused." He validated my hurts. And then he began to create them.

  Its not a life of mine, it seems, until I'm yelled at in the gym of a hotel on my boyfriend's family vacation after he assaulted me in a stairwell and I took a shower to cry to myself. He yelled after I told him I couldn't continue, that it happened to me before. He yelled that he knew that experience and that I was giving up on him. I had begun to believe I was not a trash can.

  Its not a life of mine until I had been violated two days later, when I hadn't had the motivation to feed my body enough to give it the energy to climb the stairs itself (even if it had been able to digest at that point in life), the evening a fever struck and I wanted to lay down and have him put his arm around me for comfort. I cried. I told him I was vulnerable and that I felt it was my fault. He yelled again.

  Why did I continue on? So many have judged that I was in the situation I was in. To them, I can only say that: I am not ashamed. 

  I am not ashamed that I was taught to be a trashcan and that my sweet compassion was manipulated and abused for years until I was the empty husk of a person, floating separately from this hellish place as often as I could imagine myself away from this body. No one who has judged my actions knows what it is to be a trash can. And I am not ashamed of myself. I have done my best with the cards I was dealt.

Truthfully, I will always love him. Not because he was good to me or I want to be with him or really even that I want to love him - but simply because he, of all people, needs it. I saw tenderness that no one else really experienced. I saw tears, and tenderness and love. I will always love him because his pain was the first that allowed me to nurture even the darkest parts, the first that allowed me to express my gift as fully as I could at the time.

  I love him because the time that I spent with him made me realize a dream, the dream, I had only had disgust for before - being a parent. Not with him, for him. He made me realize I actually wanted to be a mother.

   I am also not ashamed of my work to help even the most abusive of people in my world. I hold no ire. I am guileless. I am full of compassion, and yes, wisdom. I've worked very hard to be where I am and anyone who challenges me likely wouldn't have made it as far as I have. There are certainly cases where my energy was better spent elsewhere and people whom I was not meant to help. But the beauty is that I'm living in a miracle where I get to help some of them. Nothing about my circumstances nor my abusers allows anyone to steal my compassion from me. Retaining and practicing compassion is my gift, and I will not allow it to be taken from me.

 When he was gone, I couldn't let go at first. I lived my dysfunctions. I had fits of rage and disordered emotional connections. In the past two years, I've lived through the storm of a lifetime - sometimes hurricanes of self-loathing and dysfunction, finding people like all those that came before - but intermittently the gentle lull of my own temperament rose to speak to me.

  I worked with people with special needs. They spoke to me, especially the ones who couldn't vocalize. They spoke to my heart and healed it.

  I still didn't realize I wasn't eating. The bulimic tendencies had mostly subsided, followed by paranoias and food obsessions.

  My costume, my mask of apparent happiness was too good. No one was really concerned. When people brought up my thinness, I was forcibly reminded of the night I had stood in the cold, dressed as Rufio, while he berated me about lying to him about not eating. Anorexic. A dirty word. It was a word of my own shame and lies.

  The shining moments of my own successes lasted a little longer, sometimes I would feel peaceful for full minutes.

  I didn't always sleep with my fist tucked between my legs. Slowly, ever-so-slowly, some of the tension released.

  I returned to the place where the original messages had been given to me. It was slow moving, I had avoided and separated from the place and its people. It was difficult. I returned to the elaborate, unconscious ruse of trying to get help - the help I knew on some level was not the help I needed.

  I started noticing more often that the world I live in doesn't have the be like the world I had always known. One day, my frustration and sorrow and resentment built up so much. My fear and panic that had lived inside started coming out of me - in the form of terrified shrieks. I refused to leave my sweat-stained sheets for a full 24 hours. The terror edged its way out of me over that period, as I desperately found something, anything to keep between my legs so no one could assault me from behind. The people in my place began to understand by my screams the reality of my pain. Trash cans don't have mouths. And they don't scream. I was turning human. 

  Finally, exhausted and wrung like a discarded cloth, I settled to a real sleep. I was granted a short respite from horror.

  The demons of emotional and sexual violation of boundaries did not want to leave my body. They resisted the expulsion I fought so desperately for. They clung to my skin, leaving marks of self-doubt, shame and worthlessness. I bled from those wounds, but I kept fighting.

  It made it harder to buck the old messages coming from the old source, but with patience and rationality and by abandoning expectation and exercising boundaries - a miraculous turn occurred. Well, perhaps not just because of my virtues, also because of my reaching the end of my wits and screaming profanities and stating my feelings and insecurities in not-so-dulcet tones. Just as the fearful demons of bodily violation had to leave as dramatically as they had come, demons of emotional violation made emotional exits. They still occasionally do to that source, but now with full validation and apology and accountability, miraculously.

  A great many things are so miraculously better. The sun has shone through more often than the clouds have hidden God's love from me lately, and it only gets better. 

What has changed lately?

So much has changed. But, just as I acknowledged my fears and my struggles and my hurts with compassion for myself, I decided, with compassion for myself, I didn't want to hate and punish my body anymore. I decided that my two saving graces - compassionate, forgiving, miraculous capacity for kindness and love and bodily strength and athleticism - needed feeding. I found people to help me feed my body and my soul. There is too much goodness in those individuals for it to be a random coincidence. They help me handle my struggle and my shame that I'm not yet ready to acknowledge with tenderness and compassion. They challenge me, gently and with love. There has been many a miracle there - they are still occurring.

Do you doubt that I am living in a miracle? I don't.

From here and forever, I get to decide what I am. I don't need to control my body with the iron fist of self-loathing because I can gently guide it with compassion. I don't need to discipline myself with perfection because I can improve every day.

I can be 

      gentle

      sensitive

      intuitive

      deep

      thoughtful

      slow-moving

      joyful

      compassionate

      full of dreams

      idealistic

      sassy

      confident

I can achieve

    growth

    love

    relationship goals, reaching for motherhood

    compassion

    anything!

Thank you for your love. You probably have no idea how much it means to me, and I really can't convey it, except to say: any kindness has likely stood between me and the brink of my sanity on multiple occasions. Moments of compassion are hard to come by, sometimes, and they taught me to love myself. Many of the strongest people have struggled in ways you've never imagined. It seems a lot of people have admired my strength over the years, never questioned it.

  There's no need now, either. My strength is greater than its ever been. This is just the beginning of my story. I get to act of my own volition and temperament now, not react to circumstance.

  I don't need anorexia anymore, for I am worthy and strong, even in times of imperfection.

Love and Admiration,

Shareeta