NATIONAL EATING DISORDER AWARENESS WEEK “Come As You Are”

This is me. I am 28 years old. I struggled with an eating disorder of many shades (anorexia, orthorexia, bulimia, exercise bulimia, and binge eating)….for a decade.

Eating disorders affect SO many of us, whether diagnosed or not. Whether life threatening or “manageable.” Men, women, children, people of color, straight, queer, non-binary. Eating disorders do not discriminate. They affect those strongly prone to anxiety, high achieving, perfectionism, those who have undergone sexual or emotional trauma or neglect, those that came from more “whole” families and those more broken ones.

My eating disorder started when I was 12 years old. It re flared when I was 16. For the next ten years, on and off, starvation and bulimic episodes.

I don’t always look back with great pride for how I acted in those very dark years of my life. But I can see now how much deep unresolved pain that younger version of me was in. Food and deprivation of nourishment was her survival tool to get through very painful moments of self abandonment and self betrayal.

Her emotions always felt unsafe. Her body even more unsafe. Pain was the only understood feeling.

I don’t say this for pity or admiration. I say these things because still you could have looked at me and NEVER thought how disordered I was. How much pain I truly would put myself in.

So many of us suffer silently. When there are so many affected by this dis-ease. Dis-ease in mind, body and spirit.

Eating disorders steal your life in deep, profound and all encompassing ways. I truly didn’t know for ten years what it would be like to live free of one. It was an uphill battle most of the way. Years and years of therapy to get to the understanding that deep within my body was so much unprocessed pain and grief and trauma.

I needed A LOT of support during my time trying to heal. I needed a lot of tools. I always have held to my faith in spirit, in a higher source to help me.

I realized that this source was within me. My divine essence as a spirit. My spirit saved me. Each day, she saves me. Each day, she supports me.

Her support came in many forms.

In family and friends. Healers. Sisters also struggling. Kindness and love from others when I couldn’t give it to myself.

I share so much about my journey because I want anyone out there to know that I have been there. I have been in the utmost despair over been “unable” to heal.

Some days, I still feel “unhealed.”

I have been able to heal in ways I never thought possible for me. For everyone else it was but not for me.

I hope you reading this can be reminded how even in the utter hopefulness, someone out there has been where you have been.

Don’t ever ever lose faith in your resilience and deep connection to who you really are.

This is where the healing is. Remembrance. No more striving to be something than who we are.

I continue to learn in my two years recovered that food and my body were such wise tools I needed to cope.

Until, I found deeper resources in myself to support myself in times of intense emotion and pain.

Recovery doesn’t mean you are now perfect with food, exercise and body image.

It simply means you are willing and doing the work every damn day to heal.

Showing up for yourself. Showing up as your wholest self.

Trusting that unwinding the patterns takes time, so much self compassion and forgiveness and courage.

To those suffering, to those healing, to those unsure if they want to heal, I see you. I see how brave you are. I see how beautiful you already are.

My eating disorder story will possibly forever remind me of my wounding, and my service in healing this wound and sharing my woundings process in the hopes it may help feel someone less alone and burdened.

So much love to all you Ed warriors. You’re so much stronger than you could ever imagine. And also have total and complete permission to come as you are every damn day of this one precious life.