This will fix me. This will solve my problems.
A Letter to Younger Me. Or Anyone Stuck in the Addiction Spiral
Tomorrow I get discharged from my eating disorder IOP. Yay! My therapist asked me to write a letter to myself 24 years ago, when I was originally in therapy for my ED but unsure of my why. What would I tell that girl? What if I could say something that would help her find her way sooner? I would like to share what I wrote because it ties to so many facets of the omnipresent struggle so many face in our own complex ways. Trigger warning: eating disorder.
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Dear 20-year old self,
Remember that time when you were little — six or seven — walking past a group of teens after swim practice and you overheard them say, “She is so cute?” And you thought maybe, just maybe, you were?
Or when your parents said their friends say you will be such a catch when you’re older because you’re pretty and blond and good at sports. And you squealed in delight because that seemed like all you could ever want. So it was. It was all you wanted.
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Then you hit fifth grade and your body started to grow, and it wasn’t always vertical. You wondered why you looked different than the other girls and questioned if those teens at the pool would still call you cute. Because the magazine and TV shows showed you otherwise. Something was wrong with your body. Something about this — you — felt wrong.
Your parents poo-poo’d it, saying you’re ‘just big boned’ and suggested trying Weight Watchers and bringing “diet cheese” to school for snacks. And you thought, Yes! This will fix me. This will solve my problems.
But the weight remained and your body grew and morphed in more surprisingly awkward ways. So people said let’s try Slim Fast and Nutrisystem and Snackwells, and you thought Yes! This will fix me. This will solve my problems.
But one day after practice, the gymnastics coach encouraged you to quit the sport and find something else to do — you’re “too fat for gymnastics.” And your father looked you dead in the eye as he nodded his head and said “She’s right. You are fat.” That’s when you knew; when everything clicked. You aren’t cute, you thought. You aren’t a catch. This is going to take more than diets and fat free cookies, you realized.
Big bones create obstacles towards happy endings. A pudgy Cinderella will never fit the glass slipper. You can’t do the things you love if you’re thick, pudgy, soft in the middle. But what’s more? You can’t be loved. Not like this. Never like this.
Remember when you discovered that if you stopped eating, the fat melted away? Remember when you discovered how to violently force food out of your stomach? And you thought, Yes! This will fix me. This will solve my problems.
I know how it all started. We both do. But I also know how it ends. And I’m sitting here at 40-something telling you it didn’t end after college, like you hoped. Or in your 20’s. It didn’t end with pregnancy and little babies. It morphed and molded, moved and merged. Food binges turned to alcohol binges and what started as pizza and candy later looked like Redbull vodkas, beers, and blackouts.
And it might surprise you when I say this: your body’s not the problem.
Your weight’s not the problem.
Your bones are not the problem. Nor are you genetics. Or foods with fat. Calories. Everything you are looking at right now as the enemy.
You think this is just about your body, the size jeans you wear, the flat tummy. It’s not. It’s about self preservation in a vortex, wanting to please the unpleasable, feeling desirable in an undesirable world.
And from over here, I want so much more for you, beautiful girl. Life has so much more for you than secret binge and purge sessions. Life is about so much more than numbers on a scale. It’s about pursuing yourself. Finding your passions. Moving your body. Travel, adventure, curiosity, learning.
Eating disorders, alcohol/drugs and self-sabotage rob you from feeling and finding any of it. They suck you empty like a guttural riptide. Soon you’re ocean-bound with no landmarks and you can’t even remember what the beach of genuine passion and pleasure looked like.
You will never reach a size where it feels just right because that size does not exist. And until you feed yourself with the nutrients of self love and self respect, you will always be just five pounds from your goal weight. One purge from your perfect body. And eventually? One drink from melting all that insecurity away.
I am telling you this now because if you don’t fix what’s hurting on the inside now? You will be 44 back in treatment for an eating disorder. You will be in recovery for alcohol use disorder. You will be sporting veneers and serious acid reflux, in therapy for trauma and praying you didn’t permanently screw up your kids. You will be doing the very thing I’m telling you needed to happen all along — but with 20 years to spare.
And that’s okay too. We will get there and persevere regardless. But I promise you one thing. Whether you decide to take the scenic route or fast lane, you are and always will be just right. Beautiful inside and out.
Not because of the size of your LBD but because you are a sparkling, gorgeous, magical creature on a beautiful floating ball in the galaxy.
Not because you have big bones. Because you have good bones. You always have. And I love every bone in this body and I want more than anything for us to recover.
Not for them but for us.
Not to drop pounds but to drop the weight that what anyone else thought ever mattered in the first place.
Yes! This will help us heal. This is what will fix us.
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