Anorexia & How It Rules my Life, Part 2

This is Part 2 in a series that I’ve decided to publish about my struggles with Anorexia and how it affects me every single day.  You can find Part 1 HERE. 

8 1/2 years ago I moved back to my hometown.  I was newly single, had no friends around me, no job, and really wasn’t sure where my life was going.  I felt it all starting again and yet the “sick” part of me didn’t care. I was very depressed and just wanted to feel better.  I wanted to feel wanted again (by someone else).  The last several months of my relationship hadn’t been happy (even though they should have been since I was planning my wedding) and I had a lot of recovering to do not only from ending my relationship, but also the psychological damages that had been done the 6 months prior to that.  My way of dealing with it was to walk and eventually start running and not eating.  I was going to show the world that I was ok by having an amazing body!  (Or at least that is the lie I was telling myself, which in fact I know now was giving the opposite message!)  Over the next year or two I dropped a lot of weight and got down to my smallest size ever (in my adult life).  I felt great on the outside, but not on the inside.

I dated a few guys, made new friends, got a new job, had my own home and was establishing my own life.  But, it wasn’t until my mom said something to me because people in the community had said something to her about me getting “really skinny” that I started taking a look at myself.  Now, let me stop and give you a little insight into what goes through someones head that has an eating disorder when they hear that they are looking “really skinny”.

Oh, they think I look really skinny?  That’s awesome! Because that’s what we want! Oh, they are concerned?  That’s not good!  We don’t want people to be concerned because we don’t want them asking us questions or mentioning treatment or counseling to us. I wonder how I can stay skinny without alarming them and not being concerned?  Again, we want to look skinny, but don’t want people bugging us about it.  Am I too skinny?  Should I be alarmed?  Nah, I am feeling good.  

But, I did start thinking about it.  I started praying about it.  For some reason, that I only attribute to God, I started working on being healthy and not skinny.  I brought my weight up a little bit and started focusing on eating healthy and working out on a healthy level.  After I did that and worked to find some happy within myself and not in my body weight, I started dating T.  Life with him and the boys began and that doesn’t leave much room for extremes.

Part 3 will include how anorexia still controls my life today even though I’ve learned how to “deal with it”.