In my sophomore year of high school, I was a skeleton for Halloween. I don’t mean that I dressed up in a skeleton costume. I literally was ninety pounds of skin and bone. I had become so thin due to months of excessive dieting and exercising. I was hungry all the time and barely ate more than one-thousand calories a day, on top of running six days a week. My starving body could only take so much loss of essential body fat before it retaliated against the severe dieting I was doing. I didn’t realize I was underweight, even though I could have passed for a Halloween decoration on my neighbor’s lawn. Little did I know that something much scarier than a ghost or monster was hiding just around the corner.
In early November, my starving body finally retaliated against my calorie-restrictive diet, and I developed bulimia. bulimia is an eating disorder characterized by a vicious cycle of compulsive overeating or bingeing, usually followed by self0induced vomiting, laxative or diuretic abuse, or any other attempt to avoid weight gain, and is often accompanied by guilt and depression. When I first developed bulimia, I was confused and terrified because I had no idea what was happening to me. I found out that what I was experiencing was an eating disorder when I called my mother one night, crying into the phone because I didn’t know why I suddenly couldn’t control myself.
Bulimia was a horrific experience that took over my life for the next two years. Having bulimia was like being trapped in a situation with no way to escape. Twenty four hours a dya, seven days a week, I was imprisoned by an illness that was slowly destroying my physical, emotional, and social health. I wanted to be better more than anything. The problem was that I didn’t know how. I searched far and wide for a treatment, a solution, or a cure that would show me a way out. I tried everything and anything, yet noting seemed to work no matter how much or how hard I tried. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t break the vicious cycle of binge eating, feeling guilty, and purging. Like an addiction, it felt like bulimia had taken control of my life.
Because of my feelings of helplessness, I longed for someone else to come and save me. I was very lucky to have supportive friends and family who always had my back through that tough time. But it became clear that they couldn’t save me from the disorder. Since nobody I knew seemed to be able to “fix” me, I imagined some unknown hero that had yet to rescue me from my suffering. In more realistic terms, I sought the help of a therapist.
Going into therapy, I had high hopes that my therapist, Dr. Shapel, had the ability to help me recover from bulimia. However, not log after seeing her on a weekly basis, it became clear to me that she wasn’t the hero I was searching for. Everything I learned in therapy, I already knew from my own extensive research. Even though Dr. Shapel was a professional trained to treat people with eating disorders, it felt like the sessions I had with her helped me no more than a long conversation I might have with a friend about my disorder. During my time in therapy, I became complacent, believing that Dr. Shapel had the power to “cure” me, and without her help I would never get better. I stopped trying to find the answers on my own, and allowed her to tell me the answers. I thought less and less about what I could do to help myself, and more about what Dr. Shapel could do to help me because why work so hard when someone else with more knowledge and competency could do the work for me?
I’m not saying that people should disregard therapy as an option. Everybody’s life is still different and some people may find success from professional help. But it doesn’t work for everyone. In my case, therapy didn’t work because it contradicted the most important thing I needed to know in order to beat bulimia, which was the fact that only I could save myself. Before therapy, I expected my family or friends to save me. I prayed for a knight in shining armor to save me. All therapy gave me was one more person to see as a potential hero. I was so caught up in the idea that I could only recover when somebody came along with the ability to save me, that I rejected the idea that I had the strength to do it on my own.
By the time I quit therapy, it was the spring of my junior year. I carried out the rest of the school year with the same goal that I had since the beginning of my sophomore year: to recover from my eating disorder. I’ll never forget that first day of summer vacation because that was the day I was finally free. Something very small but indispensable changed in me when I woke up that morning. I finally came to accept the fact that nobody else was going to save me. I had to be the one responsible for my recovery. When I realized this, I was finally able to focus all my energy on recovering.
There was no secret cure or treatment to help me recover from bulimia. I wasn’t a princess locked in a tower waiting for a prince to come slay the dragon and set me free. The hero I was looking for was in the last place I thought to look: the mirror. All the time that I was fighting bulimia, I was holding back because I kept looking over my shoulder to see if anyone was coming to help me. My friends, family, and therapist did help and support me, and I’m thankful for that. But there’s a big difference between helping someone and saving someone.
When I finally realized that nobody could save me, I was left with only two options: either save myself or give up. The choice was clear. I was going to save myself because I was never going to give up fighting. Once I came to that conclusion, defeating bulimia was no problem because I had nothing left to lose.
Looking back, I’m glad that I had to be my own hero. By saving myself, I got to be the one in control of taking back my life. I thought before that if somebody could come and save me, everything would be okay. No matter how I look at it now, that doesn’t make any sense. To be free, I had to beat the disorder independently. If somebody else was responsible for my recovery, what use was I? Would I have control over my life again or would I wave to always wait for that person to come back and save me whenever trouble came? That wouldn’t have been freedom at all, but dependency. Only by beating bulimia with my own bare hands and inner strength could I feel like I had control of my life again. Now if bulimia or any other monster ever comes back and tries to take over my life, I only have to look in the mirror to find a hero.