"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

Eleanor Roosevelt

To anyone who ever made me feel small, 

                First I want to say, I forgive you.

I forgive you for every critical remark and disapproving expression that let me know I was being judged without your complete understanding of my situation. 

Conversations like…

“So where do you go to school?”

I’m taking some time off for my health.

“…oh.” 

Your reactions made me feel unworthy, weak, dirty, less than, and like a failure. Nobody gave you that power.

I could have lied. 

Or I could have been blatantly honest and explained that I had to withdraw from my freshman year of college because I was seventy five pounds sick and suicidal. Laying in bed each night with my heart palpitating out of my chest, praying to God that I’d just fall asleep. Praying even harder that I just wouldn’t wake up.

Maybe then you would have reacted differently. Maybe not. But to be honest, I didn’t know how to explain myself and I shouldn’t have had to. 

I’m different. I live a life that falls outside of society’s narrow-minded standards of ‘How Things Should Be Done’. 

It has taken me years to learn that the struggles I've faced aren't my fault and there's no way I'm going to let you or anyone else make me feel otherwise. 

I didn't ask to be sick, trust me. But I wouldn't exchange my beautiful mess for any cookie cutter convention because I’ve learned more about life by fighting for mine than I could ever hope to learn in a classroom. 

And I will not apologize. Not anymore. 

I’m writing this letter because I know there are others like me who live outside the status quo. When you meet them, I ask that you treat them with more kindness, respect, and grace than you did me. 

I have a hunch that you’ve made your fair share of mistakes. Because pitfalls are part of the human experience. 

Treat everyone with kindness. Greet all without judgment. We are all doing the best we can with the cards we’ve been dealt and we should never have to apologize for that. 

With love,

Ren

A Little Prologue

“In a strange way we were free. We'd reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: all of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of ourselves.” 

 Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

I cannot promise you eloquence.

My story isn’t pretty and it can’t pretend to be. Despite misconception, there is nothing glamorous about living with an eating disorder. 

The following installments are journal entries, letters, conversations, and memories.

I ask you to please excuse any brevity or lack of style in some places. Pieces of this are from times in my life where my disorder had me so deep in the rabbit hole, I was nothing but a ghost of the person I am today. 

You see, your body requires a certain amount of food in order to function. When it gets less than that amount, it uses what it does get to fuel the basic functions like breathing and maintaining your heart beat. This leaves no energy left for the less fundamental functions like creativity.

Journal entries from times when I was most sick are notably less flowery. In fact, on many pages from those times are scribbled nothing but a word or fragments of disjointed thoughts. 

But for the sake of authenticity and to provide deeper insight into what it feels like to share your mind with ED, I’ve decided to leave all of these entries ‘as is’ in my telling. 

Unpolished. No embellishment. Raw. 

My life and mind could never be described as linear so in telling my story it only makes sense to me to start somewhere in the middle.

So welcome to my reality. 

Here, I cannot promise you eloquence. 

But I can promise you truth. 

July 4th, 2015

(Journal entry written bout a week after entering residential ED treatment.)

We just want to be normal and celebrate holidays like normal Americans who don’t obsess over food. 

Whatever that means. 

So we made s’mores which seems typical July Fourth fair (given the rest of America likely doesn’t wash their s'mores down with Ensure) then loaded up in the great big van to go watch fireworks.

As I sat there on the grass watching the sky explode in bursts of patriotic glitter, I pressed this memory like a dried out flower into my heart for safe keeping. Just like the rest of society.

But we aren't like the rest of society. 

We are seven girls. Who live in a big old house, eat six plus times a day, and feel things perhaps more deeply than the rest of the world. 

This is our reality.

Are we crazy? Who knows.

Are we the sane ones who recognize our lack of sanity enough to get help while the rest of the crazies roam free, chained by denial? Possibly.

These thought run through my head as I scan the crowd of people around us who don't have Ensure bottles in their fists. I wonder if we should envy their freedom or if they should envy ours. 

Normal is irrational.

Crazy is irrelevant. 

Because we are here in life which is a victory so many with our same condition never live to see. 

As I sat there swigging Ensure on the side of that mountain road, for the first time in ages I felt grateful to be alive. Grateful to feel my heart beating along with the exploding fireworks. 

Deep down, I felt that those fireworks were for us. 

Courage Out Loud.

I was at an acting conference in Orlando about a month ago when volunteers from our crowd of performers were asked to come forward and share their 'story'. This may sound strange to all my non-actors out there, but actors are odd and nothing if not storytellers. 

I’m a chronically impulsive person. I like to blame this on my theatrical upbringing where I was taught to ACT ON IMPULSE because thinking gets in the way of truthful acting. Unfortunately, outside of acting, in many instances acting on impulse can land you up to your ears in hot water. 

I know this to be true, because this is the story of my life.

So naturally, I blinked an found myself in front of a crowd of expectant faces waiting on me to eloquently regale them with the tale of how I came to be in the there and then. 

I shy away from sharing really any details of my life with others, because I can't tell the story of my life without talking about the thing that consumed most of it.

My eating disorder. 

So I’m standing up there, my inner dialogue going, “Okaaaay, how the heck am I going to do this? I won’t know what to say and I’m just going to end up making a big fool of myself.” (Which is something I am all too familiar with.)

But my inner dialogue dialogued back with, “Just be honest and I’ll take care of the ‘how’.”

And so I stood up there, 5 feet 3 inches of terrified, and shared the story of Me, Anorexia, and How I Was Saved From Myself. 

And a funny thing happened. Rather than being flooded with the shame of airing my dirty laundry before a crowd, that shame that I drag with me through my daily life actually lightened in load. To my surprise, people were coming up to me the rest of the week saying things like, “Thank you for sharing your story. That was so brave and it really spoke to me.”

This led me to some rather interesting epiphanies.

I hate talking about my eating disorder, because people don’t understand. There are so many misconceptions and stigmas surrounding the topic that honestly I can’t fault people for not being able to grasp such a foreign reality. 

HOWEVER, the only way to dispel those nasty stigmas and misconceptions is for somebody who lives with ED every day (i.e ME) to be brave enough to explain my reality. 

Furthermore, my getting up the gumption to share my experience, could help those who are struggling with the same experience realize they’re not fighting those eating disorder dragons alone. 

Wow. 

If that isn’t powerful I don’t know what is. 

And that’s why I’m here, sticking my flag in the ground, and claiming this space. 

I invite you to be an active audience member as I share with you the installments of my story in hopes that it touches your heart and inspires you to use your own voice. 

In addition to my personal yarn, I hope to open the floor to answer questions and have conversations that might provide some insight on what living with an eating disorder is like.

Additionally, I’d like to invite guest authors to come forward and share their personal tales. 

No matter what that thing is that you’ve been afraid to share, I promise you that flaw is the very thing that makes you uniquely beautiful. 

And you wanna know something else?

I also promise you’re not the only one who wrestles with your particular vice.

By being willing to have those taboo conversations you’re opening the door to be a light to somebody else. 

We are all hopelessly flawed.

The secret? We must embrace those flaws and recognize them as the bright stars that make up the constellations of our soul, connecting us to the greater universe.

And in doing so I think we’ll find that we’re all just little black sheep in our own right.