I never thought I would ever experience the feeling of crawling to the bottom of a dark ocean floor with my daughter. The feeling of the cold dark water as I held on to her for dear life, as I kept crawling forward, my hands gripping the black sand.
In high school, I was the classic overachiever. My identity was (and to a certain extent still is) wrapped up in doing everything and doing it well. I did debate, mock trial, volunteered, danced and loved it. After graduation, I moved away from home to start school at the University of Alaska. Spring semester of my freshman year, I started to run a little tired and achy, but chalked it up to stress and kept going. That summer, I came home and slept for the better part of three months. I started going to doctors and running test after test without any concrete results.
When I left treatment several months ago, it was all I had known for twelve years. I was excited to start my new life, but I also realized that I had no clue what I was doing. I had never had to be an adult, and I was now in my early 30s and trying to navigate the world. I had missed out on so much growth, and I had no idea if it would be possible to catch up. I still have no idea, but at least I am fumbling through trying to figure it out.
Talking openly about my feelings has never come easily to me. Even when I was younger, I would rather deliver a vague response of “okay” or “I’m fine” than engage in a lengthy discussion with someone else. And that was never really a problem—at least not until people started expecting me to speak.
To a person who has never had an eating disorder, they’re virtually impossible to understand. The concept of deliberately depriving yourself of food, the building block for our species’ survival, seems irrational, illogical, and, as I’ve heard many times before, crazy.
The Holiday Season is here, and Thanksgiving is right around the corner – which means, if you’re anything like me, so is your anxiety. Being surrounded by endless talks of food and diets can be enough to make you want to scream, and seeing family who may or may not be supportive of your recovery (or even know what recovery is) can threaten to put you over the edge. So here are a few tips I’ve learned over the years to help set yourself up for success:
Know (or create) your support system
Yoga, with its tenets of peacefulness, self-compassion, mindfulness, and self- empathy, both empowers and enhances recovery from eating disorders and body image despair. Yoga promotes harmony within and strengthens the relationship with the body through physical poses (asanas), breathing exercises (pranayama), non-harmful self-care (ahimsa), and meditation,
At 10 years old, I lost my mom to cancer. My dad moved us from where we’d lived for almost five years back home to be closer to relatives who could help, since he was now a single dad. I didn’t know how to process my mom’s death or the move. I don’t think anyone expects a kid or an adult to know how to process losing a parent, and my dad did the absolute best he could. Unfortunately, as the youngest child, I got preferential treatment during the grieving process. My dad would often tell my older brother and sister to go easy on me.
The biggest lie that Tumblr ever told me was that an androgynous body is a thin body.
As a genderqueer person, someone who doesn’t strictly identify as a man or a woman, I had always craved a more “androgynous body.” I wanted to be a mish-mash of masculinity and femininity, so that when people looked at me, they could not immediately categorize me.
And so I clung to the beautiful photo sets on Tumblr, the ones with impeccably genderless bodies… which all just so happened to be thin.
As someone who engages in community-based radical mental health work, I believe in the power of narratives in the fight against mentalism. Although not everybody has the privilege, capacity, or desire to share their narrative, the narratives that are shared re-shape the social perception of psychological disorders. These narratives force those who are unaffected to view mental illness from a humanizing and empowered perspective.