Things got a lot worse before they got better. There were many days I spent sitting at the dining tables, staring out the hospital window with absolutely no hope. My obsession with losing weight, ‘disappearing,’ completely owned me. It controlled my thoughts, my actions, my entire being. I would hide food, disobey the nurses, pour supplements in my shoes; there was nothing I wasn’t willing to do if I thought it would make the scale go down. Furthermore, I was prohibited from calling or having any visitors when I lost weight. But not even that threat was enough to persuade me into making good, healthy decisions. I was in deep.
‘Nothing changes if nothing changes,’ my dad said to me one evening, as he drove me to an outpatient therapy session. Something about his words that night clicked. I saw the pain that my disease was causing and wanted for it to stop. It was a long, hard road to recovery and one that certainly didn’t come overnight. But little by little, step by step, with a whole lot of love, prayer, and support, I got well. While disappearing may have been my plan at that time, it was clear that it wasn’t someone else’s.
