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.