You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

                                              - Maya Angelou

 

You know there’s a problem with your life when you identify more with the horror novel you’re reading than with your peers.

House of Leaves. It’s this wild book about a photojournalist who moves into a country house with his family and wakes up to find a door leading to a bottomless labyrinth of pitch darkness that he ultimately loses everything to, and once inside, never really comes back from.

And so Liam and I are reading this and I think - Huh. Sounds like my life… Uh oh.

My chronic pain came back just like that door. Overnight, with no warning, and over a year later I’m still fighting an uphill battle.

The first thing I do when I wake up is push my major organs back into place so that I can kind of eat, and kind of breathe, and kind of do all I need to do to be a kind of person. The rest of the day I spend white-knuckling my way through life.

Consider all the little things that’re so simple to the beats of your day, nothing but mindless reflexes.

Opening the refrigerator, your front door, the car door, bending down to pick up something you dropped, filling the tea kettle, tying your shoes, wearing pants, texting your mom, walking your dog, driving at all, carrying groceries, closing the cap on your chapstick, walking, eating, breathing, laughing, crying. Having emotions of any kind, because that wad of tension that coils up like an animal in the pit of the body when things like anger, sadness, or excitement bubble up is inconsequential for most, but excruciating for someone who’s organs don’t work right.

Thus, 'it's fine' becomes a survival tactic. Numbing out becomes default. 

And you don’t know how to talk about it or even who you’d talk to if you did, because what the hell are you supposed to say? That you started looking into medically assisted suicide? Fantasize about stepping out into traffic? Would do anything, anything to just be able to give up?

Last time you talked like that, they locked you up.

So you white-knuckle on and watch through the glass while your friends, as they should, move on with their lives - breathing, laughing, and opening the refrigerator. 

They say life isn’t fair, and listen, I never expected it to be, but I think it is fair to ask - does it really have to be this demented? Thousands of dollars, years, spent learning to reclaim your life only to discover the one body you have to live it in gave out somewhere along the line and all of those things you learned to allow yourself like eating and laughing now bring you physical pain. 

Welcome to the other side where the grass is always greener and your body makes you a passive observer in your own life! Oh, and you’ll get to spend more years and thousands more dollars getting every scan, test, poke, and prod under the Great American Healthcare System sun! And what will you learn? You’ll learn that there is no diagnosis that coincides with your experience so you must be insane and/or a danger to The System and/or someone else’s problem, and ultimately, the Great American Healthcare System doesn’t give a dime about you, but they would appreciate it if you’d pay up for all the lovely non-answers and medically-assisted abuse you’ve been provided with before they toss you to collections. 

I got one good year. Thanks to my incredible physical therapist with a roster of clients who have similar stories, broken organs - and still - no diagnosis. 

Is it wrong of me to want more? To feel owed more?

I casually told someone recently that I wasn’t a ‘loving’ person. It’s been bothering me ever since. I keep asking myself - Woof. When did that happen?

I reckon I spent too much time in the dark, being silently tortured by my own body, and gradually people’s love lives, drama, and material troubles started to look more like a privilege than something I could empathize with. When people don’t realize that shallow drama being the biggest source of pain in their lives is a gift.

At this point you might be wondering why I’m writing all this? Yeah, me too. My soap box is definately a multipack and (oops!) my cynicism is showing. I’d apologize, but that’s something I’m actively trying to do less of these days so I guess… I’m writing to prove something to no one but myself. 

That maybe using my voice will remind me that I have one, and more than anything - even more than needing all the pain to stop - I need to feel like I had the power to make it all count for something.

This is me working on that.

And maybe if my happy ending isn’t meant for me yet, but for someone else who’s lost in their own dark house of bottomless hallways and dead ends to read this and feel a little less alone in there, to feel seen, that can be enough. To my friends battling your own bodies, your own brains, and a System that seems to provide you with nothing but crippling bills. You are not alone. You are not small.

This is me extending the flashlight. 

And maybe my voiceless hiatus is excused by the fact that the hardest thing about trying is the room it leaves for disappointment. 

This is me trying. 

Getting out of bed, every damn day, and pushing my organs into place first thing. Meeting the day when I know it’s going to hurt the whole way through and that I’ll push my stupid organs back into place several times before the day is over. Writing into the void here like there’s some kind of point, which there can be, if we remember that at it’s root ‘trying’ means ‘not giving up’. 

And that that tiny, impossible flicker deep in the dark maze of my life might be the part of my life that still belongs to me. That might be me - buried in those fleeting moments, when the faint gleams of light trickle down through the cracks in the walls, reaching for it with my fingertips, and believing that there could truly be something out there - something brighter, something worth it - on the other side.

How to Fight for Yourself

How to Fight for Yourself

Starving is so much

easier

than not.

How do you explain that?

Or what its like to know

The Voices

will never leave?

How do you fight when

your ribs are splintered,

your eyes are bloody,

and the bones 

of your knuckles are raw and 

exposed?

When you’re dead.

You’re certain.

But you can’t say how it happened.

What do you fight for?

Fight for

them.

Fight for

her.

Him.

The ones who’s eyes reflect

the person you were

and could be

when you’re too cold to remember your name.

The ones who stayed.

Fight for the ones who said

you couldn’t.

Make them fools.

Fight for the other

aliens like you.

Show them what they’re capable of.

And one day, honey, 

I hope

you will understand.

How to fight for yourself. 

A Cautionary Tale

There is no magic cure, no making it go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.

Laurie Halse Anderson

I knew from the moment she walked in the room that she wasn’t going to help me. I knew by the way she looked at me - a mix of downward scrutiny and trepidation, gift-wrapped in a shiny layer of self-righteousness that could easily be mistook for clinical professionalism. 

For the sake of preserving this doctor’s identity, because I don’t believe in an eye for an eye, let’s call her Dr. Ignorance.  

Like so many doctors before her, Dr. Ignorance took one look at my medical records and swiftly tossed my credibility out the window thanks to that 8 letter diagnosis that’s haunted me since childhood.

Anorexia.

Or Anorexia - Nervosa (Restrictive Type), if we want to get specific. 

See, in the Summer of 2017, I began experiencing severe pain in my abdomen.

The following year of my life looked a whole lot like monkeys playing catch with a banana. 

The banana was me. The monkeys were doctors.

I had every test imaginable - Ultra Sound, Endoscopy, CT, MRI, SAT, ACT and even one called a Stomach Emptying Survey where I had to eat radioactive eggs and spend a day at the hospital to have images taken hourly of said radioactive eggs as they made their way through my mutilated digestive system. 

I was sorely disappointed when the radioactivity didn’t grant me super powers, but I can report they did give me the worst gas imaginable. 

Each test came back with more puzzles and every doctor’s visit ended with a frustrated doctor sending me away with a referral for another doctor who also couldn’t help me. 

24/7, I felt like I had a knife in my abdomen. With any movement that engaged my abdomen or diaphragm, the knife became a machete. And every time I ate, the knife became a chainsaw. 

To the doctor’s small credit, when someone with anorexia complains that it hurts to eat, that can be confusing. But I assure you, dear doctors, that nobody with anorexia who’s actively in their disorder would make excuses to do sit-ups. 

During this season, I woke up each morning knowing that the day was going to be painful. And the fact that eating hurt worst of all seemed like a sick joke for someone like me who’s already fought a life long battle with food. But hope is a powerful thing, friends. Underneath the black haze of depression and anger, remained a quiet spark of hope. At the time, I didn’t know it was there. 

Things that small can only be seen in retrospect. 

Something inside me chose to keep fighting. With a fork. Against a chainsaw. 

Every time I ate, I was Lieutenant Dan in the crow’s nest during the hurricane, screaming at the sky, “IS THAT ALL YOU GOT? IF YOU’RE TRYING TO KILL ME, WHY DON’T YOU JUST DO IT? I DARE YOU!!!!”

Except I kept my shirt on.

And, here, on a sunny Wednesday morning, Dr. Ignorance had the audacity to give me that look.

After I provided a brief summary of my puzzling symptoms, none of which she listened to, Dr. Ignorance cleared her throat and said, “I can’t help you with your… eating problems. That’s not what we do here.”

I felt myself shrinking under her tone. “And just what ‘eating problems’ are you referring to?”

She pushed her fingerprint-stained glasses further up her nose, annoyed, and replied, “Your eating disorder.”

Hot tears began to surface. Then something inside me snapped. Something that believed for a fleeting, fearless second I didn’t deserve to be belittled.

“In case you have any other patients with eating disorders, I want you to know that its incredibly disrespectful for you to automatically discredit me because of my disorder. We’re human beings. And we deserve to be treated like human beings.”

At first she was silent, gawking at me with her jaw ajar. Then she squirmed and muttered a jumbled apology, obviously already reading the 1 star review I was mentally composing for her google profile.

I’d love to say I felt like a badass for standing up for myself, but I cried the whole way home.

There is a severe deficiency in understanding when it comes to eating disorders. And since it is human nature to fear what we don’t understand, doctors see ‘eating disorder’ on a patient’s records and read ‘liability’. This lack of adequate understanding automatically makes us dangerous animals. 

Who knows? We might do something crazy like eat a leg off the examination table and puke if back up before dear doctor’s very eyes.

A mental illness that literally turns the laws of nature on its side by forcing us to starve ourselves or engage in a number of other equally unnatural eating tendencies is confusing. Oh, and by the way, the root problem has nothing to do with eating. The ‘eating’ in ‘eating disorder’ is merely a side effect of something deeper… Cue further confusion.

After my visit with Dr. Ignorance, I was tossed around to a handful of other doctors before giving up. I was through with being treated like an idiot and resigned to live in chronic pain.

Through the grape vine, my beyond last resort came in the form of a highly recommended physical therapist. She specialized in some sort of voodoo called, visceral manipulation and had experience with unusual cases. 

I went to the consultation with my guard up, expecting to get thrown in the trash again. To my surprise, she listened to my odd assortment of symptoms with interest (not annoyance) and replied with, “I’m not certain what’s wrong with you, but I have a hunch. And I’m going to stick with you until we figure it out.”

I cried on the way home from that appointment too. But for different reasons. I cried, because I was so taken aback, after so many beatings, that someone would be willing to take me seriously. 

Since then, I spent months going to PT twice a week for visceral manipulation. The diagnosis she arrived at was an issue that commonly occurs in individuals with anorexia.

If you went months or years without using your legs, the muscles in your legs would atrophy which means they’d essentially stop performing the normal functions they were made to perform. Well, when you have anorexia, and you go years without using your stomach on the basis in which it was made to be used, your stomach can atrophy. So can other organs, because most organs participate in energy processing and are thus fueled by your food intake. 

This is why when someone severely underweight first arrives in ED treatment, they aren’t allowed to eat large portions upon immediate arrival. Doing so is incredibly dangerous, because it could result in a heart attack or organ atrophy when your body isn’t used to having to process normal amounts of energy. 

Stomach and organ atrophy in individuals with anorexia is a prolonged problem. Years of starvation and enormous amounts of exercise weakened my insides to the point of exhaustion. The pain was a result of trying to force my insides to do things they no longer had the strength or even instinct to do - something as simple as digest food.

Since this diagnosis, twice a week, my PT performed visceral manipulation which can best be described as reteaching my organs to do their job. The way in which that’s achieved is a bit graphic so let’s just refer to it as organ voodoo. 

Ultimately, before being led to this PT, I’d reached rock bottom. 

A place I frequent so often, they gave me a key.

But my life was given new light purely because I sought one last attempt at help and someone was willing to see me as a human being rather than an inconvenience. 

And really, my physical therapist has changed my life. 

Now a days, I live with a functional amount of pain that allows me to pursue the work I love. Because my stomach doesn’t operate the way a normal stomach works, my diet is very limited to what I can and can’t digest, but I’m happy to live off mud for the rest of my days as long as I can chase my calling.

Let’s call this a cautionary tale for two audiences. 

Audience number one: my ED comrades. Don’t be me. When you have an eating disorder, everyone and their mother will warn you about the catastrophic health consequences of mistreating your body. And you sure as hell won’t believe any of them, because it won’t happen to you. You have everything under control, right?

Funny, that’s exactly what I thought too. And, sure, I went years evading the inevitable, but everything catches up in the end. Our bodies are more fragile then we'd like to think. 

Audience number two: doctors, anyone and everyone who’s ever made negative assumptions about someone with an eating disorder. 

What you need to understand is this: 

Every time we’re made to feel ashamed, we stay silent. 

And every time we stay silent, ED wins. 

And as long as ED keeps winning, eating disorders will continue to have the highest morality rate of any other mental illness. 

Though it may be difficult to understand, those of us with eating disorders don’t choose to do what we do. Trust me. We’d give anything to be able to have a normal relationship with food. With our bodies. With our minds. With other people. And we’re just as responsible for our disorders as a cancer patient is for their illness. Nobody shames cancer patients and therefore nobody has the right to shame us. 

We didn't ask for this. We didn't choose this or cause it. We were born with it. 

Happy Birthday, ED.

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

I can point to where it started. On the floor of my shower in a mangled mess of tears. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. And I would’ve given anything to die right there on the wet linoleum, leaving my body to wash down the drain. 

That was the day I turned 10.

I’d eaten a slice of birthday cake as is customary on birthdays, but for tiny 10 year old me, consuming cake meant I was a worthless no nothing who deserved a death sentence.

By age twelve I was crunching my calories and exercising roughly three hours a day. Maximum input I allowed myself - 200 calories. Minimum output - well over 1000, not including calories required to simply be alive. 

That was the year I was formally diagnosed with anorexia. 

For years I wanted to know why. 

Why was I born with a monster inside of me and what had I done to awaken the beast?

I’ve heard every theory out there.

Some professionals think eating disorders are genetic. My Daddy was a wrestler in high school which means he spent his teenage years exercising in a trash bag through Florida heat, sweating out all the calories he hadn’t eaten in order to cut weight. 

Glimpse into wrestling culture and you’ll find a first class study on anorexia and bulimia. 

I had lyme disease as a child. Other research believes that the long term neurological effects of lyme can result in the development of anorexia. 

Oh and let’s not forget the suspicion every therapist, nutritionist, and doctor has when they learn… “You’re an actress?”

No. The societal “pressure” of being an actress is not the cause of my eating disorder. On the contrary, the physical requirements of acting demand a certain level of health in order to do the job.

None the less, I always thought pinpointing why could lead me to how.

How to jump the train. How to erase a lifetime of apologies, alienation, medical bills, and shame.

Shame. 

Or maybe I thought knowing why might give me something to blame other than myself. 

Truth is, knowing why the match was struck can’t put out the forest fire. 

So here’s the best answer I’ve found as to why eating disorders manifest… 

A. Those of us with eating disorders are born with brains that are chemically predisposed to the development of ED. 

B. We also tend to be born with certain personality traits. Perfectionism. Self-control. Unmatched work ethic. High ambitions. All positive traits, if left to their own devices. 

C. IN COMES THE TRIGGERING EVENT! This comes in the form of an intensely stressful incident. The death of a loved one, sexual abuse, a drastic move, trauma, trauma, trauma, and trauma all qualify as triggering events. When the emotional toll of said event ignites our chemical predisposition and personality traits, the eating disorder is set in motion.

In reaction to the triggering event, our brain chemicals say, “I know this hurts, honey, but if you give up food and spend the majority of your waking hours on the treadmill, all those nasty feelings will disappear. Poof!”

The ED brain fails to mention all those other things that disappear in the wake of our disorder.

Like our hair and will to live.

Those perfectionistic personality traits transform Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde and become the characteristics that make us “successful” at our eating disorders. The result? We discover a sense of worth in ED, who then becomes our abusive best friend. 

Thus begins the vicious cycle. The eating disorder becomes our brain and body’s go-to coping mechanism. 

Chemical Predisposition + Personality Traits + Triggering Event = Eating Disorder

I know I’m not the only one swimming in circles over this. I’ve found that most of us with ED under our beds spend the bulk of our therapy sessions hunting down clues to how he got there.

Over the years, I’ve learned the key is to quit chasing why and spend that energy constructing your bomb shelter against life’s inevitable nuclear triggers.

What makes your heart beat? Gives you a sense of belonging and fulfillment? 

Let these questions lead you to your gifts and there you’ll find your building materials.

God. People. Art. Those are the floorboards and walls of my emotional shelter. 

But ultimately, I have to remind myself on a minute by minute basis that

My 

Eating 

Disorder

Is

Not

My 

Fault.

When I end up looking like Severus Snape because I tried to be economical and cut my own hair, that’s my fault. 

But my eating disorder is not my fault. I was born with the thing inside of me. 

That being said, now a days, my question isn’t so much, “Why did it start?”

but,

“Why me?”

I’ll spend a lifetime mourning the person I might have been without anorexia, but I’m learning to celebrate the person I’ve become, having survived. 

No Place Like Treatment for the Holidays

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

               David Whyte

As many of you already know, I’ve been in an uphill battle against health complications brought on by my eating disorder. Trees are being trimmed, carols are being sung, and I’m headed back to residential treatment. 

I pray that one day we will live in a world where ED treatment is as accessible and affordable as other chronic illnesses, but the reality is that today eating disorders have the highest fatality rate of any mental illness. One third of those who suffer from ED will die of complications related to their disorder, many of them because they didn’t have access to treatment.

A person with cancer is rallied around. A person with an eating disorder is shushed. 

These past months I’ve even felt incriminated by medical professionals who lack understanding and compassion for eating disorders as a result of miseducation. I kid you not, I’ve sat in doctor’s offices only to be accused and reprimanded as if my disorder were something that were shamefully my fault. 

And you wonder why so many don’t seek treatment or even speak out. 

What’s more, the lack of understanding our health care system possesses on eating disorders makes treatment unattainably expensive. To put things in perspective, my family is losing our home of twenty one years to medical expenses.

Miraculously, I’ve been blessed to glimpse foreshadows of change in the support and generosity of loved ones through these past months. My family started a GoFundMePage to try to alleviate some of our medical debt and the response has been overwhelming. In the first twenty four hours, we received over $1000 dollars. In just thirteen days, we’ve received nearly $5000. These contributions have already helped us significantly. 

https://www.gofundme.com/clevelands-medical-fund

If you’re reading this, would you do me a favor? Please continue to share my family’s GoFundMe page. All I want for Christmas is for my family not to lose our home my eating disorder. 

In addition, dear friends, I invite you to share my story. Its funny, anyone who knows me will tell you that I really hate being the center of attention, but I’m learning that the only way to give meaning to this pain is to use my story to prevent others from going through the same experiences. 

Learn from my life. I know I am.

I often feel like Harry Potter. Not in the sense that I have a lightning bolt scar or a stag patronus, but I feel like Harry in that nothing in my life has ever been achieved without the help of golden friends. 

A person can only take so much. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said this in the past year and every time I think things can’t get any tougher, the sky turns from rain to hail. Right now I’m standing in a torrential downpour of porcupines. 

Oh, and they’re rabid. And on fire. 

Truth be told, I’m in the midst of the most difficult season of life thus far. Physically, emotionally, mentally. 

A person can only take so much. This much is true. 

But I’ve been reminded that when you can take no more, true friends step in and carry you. Or in Harry’s case, true friends step in and stupefy your enemies. 

Friendship is God’s greatest gift to humanity. I am only breathing today because of all the blessed fools who’ve stuck with me through every twist and turn of my insane life.

Everything - home, health, sanity - don’t place any stock in any of it. None of it lasts. 

The only stable ground we have to stand on is love. 

If it takes a lifetime of suffering to solidify this truth, then bring on the rain. 

I don’t have words to adequately express the gravity of my gratitude. 

Rather, I raise my glass of Ensure to all the beautiful people who’ve reminded me that life is worth fighting for. I will spend my eternity trying to become a person worthy of everyone’s generosity. 

Merry Christmas, everybody. Thank you. God bless you.

Your Ren

Bigger Than My Body

When I first created this blog, I promised to be vulnerable. 

However, when my life gets messy I have a tendency to shove all my dirty laundry under the bed. The trouble with this strategy is that dirty socks still stink when they’re out of sight. The only way for laundry to get clean is to wash and hang it up to dry in the sunlight. 

Truth be told, my pile of unclean laundry has become so horrendously neglected that I’ve run out of clothes and am presently doing life naked. 

I’ve been battling health problems that have made eating very painful. After years of working to establish a positive relationship with food, in my present situation, food equals pain. 

Some sick joke, huh?

What’s more, my present state has forced me to relinquish all physical activity for the time being. The body can change remarkably quickly over a short period of time. I was speaking with a friend about the impact of all this on body image and came upon the following epiphany. 

For a great deal of my life I’ve worked hard to have cut abs yet I can't recall anyone ever approaching me to lift up my shirt and exclaim, “You have a six pack? Remarkable! I'm gonna name my first born after you and establish an international holiday in your honor because your six pack makes you a pristine and down right impeccable human being worthy of grandiose celebration!”

On the contrary, I doubt many people know or care whether I have abs or a baby kangaroo under my shirt. Any compliment I’ve ever received that genuinely meant something has had to do with my character. 

I had a friend of mine’s mother ask me once, “Isn’t an eating disorder all about vanity? I mean, my daughter knew this girl in high school who starved herself because she wanted to look skinny.” 

I flat out laughed at her. I don’t fault her ignorance. Rather, I blame society for feeding her misinformation.

Let me be candid.

An eating disorder is a mental illness, meaning that the disordered habits and distorted relationship with food are a result of chemical imbalances in the brain. There are a million and one reasons why an eating disorder surfaces in an individual, but ultimately, having an eating disorder is as much a choice as having cancer. 

Vanity plays zero part in the matter. In fact, those of us who know ED live in crippling bondage to our own self-loathing. The physical aspects of an eating disorder are side effects of a problem rooted in the emotional and psychological. 

For instance, I have anorexia which means when life gets impossibly overwhelming my brain immediately decides that the starvation high I’ll get from restricting will protect me from the negative emotions I don’t want to feel. My life might be a maelstrom, but if I run six miles and eat less than a canary, I can achieve stability and worth.

Engaging in said habits over a period of time results in weight loss, and thus, thinness. My mind then creates a connection between the physical sensation of thin with the emotional and psychological feeling of safety and fulfillment. Being skinny does not make me these things, but my boney body is evidence that I’m successfully engaging in the habits that I’ve implemented to shield myself from the world. 

If this sounds crazy, that’s because it is. 

But this is my reality. Trust me, when tangled up in the disorder, these thoughts become disturbingly rational. 

Where am I going with this? I’m losing my abs and if I’m being honest, I’m scared. For years, my body has been to me as Linus’s blanket is to Linus. But as with any lesson in life, we must make sacrifices to gain wisdom. 

I am not my body. You aren’t your body either. 

Our bodies are purely vessels for our souls which hold infinitely more value. 

Our bodies do not determine our security, worth, or legacy.

How many eulogies have you heard that mention physical appearance? When our flesh and bones have returned to dust, our thumbprints will be found in the echoes of our words and the contributions we made to others.

I know I’m not the only one who feels they’re vessel is capsizing. Pain is the double-edged backbone of the human condition. Without it we could never fully appreciate health or joy. But amidst external turmoil, we must take care to safeguard our internal character. Because character is all we’re left with in the end. 

Show me an elderly person with washboard abs and I’ll give them my teeth. 

Life Lessons From A Rock

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

                                       Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

              Walt Whitman

I came across this rock whilst walking my dog. It was sitting unassumingly next to a trash can I pass every day when it caught my eye. Just before my one year old pit lab could pee on it (And it was a close save, mind you. He had is leg lifted.) I bent down to pick it up.

It reads simply, ‘Don’t give up.’  With a semicolon on the top. 

;

I don’t know where it came from or who put it there, but I can honestly tell you that this little rock changed my life today. 

Routine. To do lists. Monotony. Tragically, these have become driving forces of society.

When I find myself tangled in the rat race, the animal inside my ribcage gets restless. Restlessness turns to panic. And panic turns to disease that poisons me from the inside out. 

Depression. Anxiety. Hysteria. Self-destruction. 

Someone once told me to never go anywhere without having an escape plan in place. For much of my life, suicidal inklings were a way of keeping a window unlocked when madness caught fire to my inner room. 

I’m confident that I’m not the only one who’s felt this way. I’m just one of the few who’s willing to admit that underneath the smiles, I sought sick solace in living with one foot out the door. 

We all want to feel that our lives are significant. 

That ‘the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.’ 

Society has led us to believe that unless our verse is in all capitals and dotted with an explanation point it isn’t worth contributing. 

This way of thinking is a trap. It will chain our hands behind our back in cuffs of existential anxiety and the irony is that we need free hands to live a life of contribution. 

Significance cannot be measured. 

We must see that each day, simple interactions present great opportunities to deeply impact each other’s lives. 

Your smile, compliment, or rock might be the courage that someone needs to choose a semicolon over a period. 

By underestimating the gravity of seemingly small actions, we are robbing ourselves and each other of true fulfillment. 

I want my legacy to be like this rock. 

For if generosity and optimism are heady tonic, we should all wake up every morning with the intention of drinking each other under the table in sunshine cocktails. 

Little Lost Girls

 

"The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply because they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings."

J.M Barrie

The window on the left corner of the group therapy room was the only one in the house that could be opened without setting off the alarm. 

That was the rumor we were banking on when we decided to escape through it. 

And we did. At roughly 5 a.m. on a thursday, my roommate Caitlin, and I crept downstairs in our pjs, slid open the window, and clambered out into the misty mountain air. 

We scurried over to the neighboring day program apartments to scribble a cheeky message on the kitchen white board before returning through our window. We tucked ourselves back into bed just in time for wake up call, satisfied with our humble flight. 

It wasn’t an act of rebellion. It was a metaphor. 

The irony of treatment was that even though we lived in this environment where our daily lives were structured around our meal plans, for many of us, we were more free than we had been in a long time.

For some of us, we were freer than we’d ever been. 

One day we were all brought gifts. Caitlin and I were given foam swords that immediately transformed us into pirates. We’d “Parry!” and “On guard!” all through the halls and up the stairs. 

I remember one day in particular we’d been squash-buckling through the upstairs hall when Caitlin dropped her sword and said, “I’ve never had fun before.”

I froze mid-lunge and cocked my head. “What do you mean?”

“Before I came here, I don’t think I ever had fun.”

In that moment, I saw in her doe brown eyes the child that had been prematurely slaughtered by a lifetime of starvation. 

Each one of us had grown up too fast. We’d been ten year olds who counted calories. We’d restricted our bodies through puberty, flirting with death before we’d ever fully tasted life. 

In treatment we were being reborn. Rediscovering our our bodies, our souls, and the wonder that is ice cream.

We ate picnics on the roof. We played baseball in the back yard with Ensure bottles.

We frolicked around barefoot like Lost Boys. We drank in sunsets from the tops of mountains, dipped our feet in waterfalls. 

We woke up singing, had sword fights in the hall, choreographed dances in the living room. We wrote, we painted, we danced, created, spoke up, sang, screamed, sobbed, broke plates. 

We lived. 

Vibrantly. Unapologetically.

Without our disorders, we had nothing left to hide behind so we collided with life in a way that transcends wordily description.

We kept photographs of ourselves as children by our dining room place matts. The children pictured reminded us that even if we couldn’t remember, there was a time in life where we weren’t afraid of ourselves. 

These photos also served as proof that underneath all our scarred years of self-inflicted suffering, our inner child still had a heart beat.

Note: This essay was published in the 2019 America's Emerging Writers Anthology 

Dear Belittler,

"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.