Let's Get Personal: Part III: My Experiences with an Eating Disorder (part 2)

This thing has claws, hooked in

your flesh, tugging on your frame.

One minute you're sure it's gone; 

the next, you realize it will

always remain.

It wraps its dark wings around you

creating a sort of cocoon.

The blackness it brings envelopes you, 

the light you once enjoyed, gone too soon.

You scream for help, begging and pleading,

for your life is on the line, as is your soul.

But the darkness weighs you down

and with your hoarse voice you realize

you no longer have control.

I wrote that poem in August of 2013, five years into my toxic and abusive relationship with food. In my last post I wrote about feeling like I was in control - that I could decide what I ate and what was or was not allowed to stay in my body. Little did I know that I was actually at the mercy of something greater than I thought. My mind had turned on me but had disguised it as self-control and choice. I lived my life in a dark blur a lot of the times. The thought of food ran my every waking thought: what I could eat; what I couldn't eat (going out to eat with friends was a real bitch...the menu was like a battlefield and really the only "safe" food I could order was plain green salad with chicken breast and no dressing); what I would binge on later; how I would expel said binge food; struggling with the ecstatic highs of the binge and the extreme lows of the aftermath. Guilt ran my life, but I kept my struggles to myself. It was exhausting.

I remember one Friday morning at work, we got donuts from Krispy Kreme (my co-worker walked in carrying that box and I'm certain I eyed it with equal parts lust and hate). They sat the box on the front desk in our office, plucked out a donut, and happily went about their day, I'm sure not thinking twice about it. I, however, whose desk was within sight of the box, found my thoughts 100% dominated about the lightly glazed and fluffy-as-a-cloud donuts I knew resided within. Having only a few bites of yogurt for breakfast, all I wanted was one of those donuts, but I didn't trust myself with being able to eat just one. Donuts were a binge food, not a "normal" food. I tried desperately to focus on my work, but my eyes kept wandering to the front desk.

At lunchtime, everyone left to go eat their mid-day meals or hit up the gym, but I stayed behind. I put the "Out to lunch" sign on the door to our office, locked it, and scooped up the box of donuts. I was delighted to see that only a couple of donuts had been taken, which meant that I had the rest of the box to myself. The only way I can describe how I ate those donuts is this: I didn't make love to them, taking my time to savor and enjoy the sweet confections; no, I fucked those donuts and made them mine. I ravished them and destroyed them. I took my anger about all of the unfair things in life out on them. Looking back, I feel really bad for all of the innocent food that I used like that. 

And, like the user I was, as soon as I got what I wanted, I immediately wanted nothing to fucking do with it anymore. It had to *go*. My body was full of "bad" food and I needed to cleanse it ASAP. I couldn't risk walking to and using a stall in the public bathroom (this was a government building, and my office area was just one of many in it), so I pulled out my trash can, got on my knees, and purged out the sweet icky-ness that filled my stomach right there in the middle of my office. My eyes swollen and red (one tends to break a lot of tiny blood vessels in their eyes and eyelids when going through that process), my guilt heavy as a leaden blanket, I zombie-like cleaned up my mess and went out to refill my water bottle (one also becomes very dehydrated). When my co-workers slowly started trickling back from lunch, I sat quietly at my desk, trying desperately to avoid any and all eye contact. I ended up leaving work early that day, claiming to feel sick (which was actually the truth), and went home to work out in my apartment gym. I don't remember anyone actually asking what happened to the donuts. 

The point of me telling this story is to show how fucked up my life had gotten. I hardly cared about anything else. No, I take that back. I cared about a lot of things, but my disease had invaded every aspect of my life. It had become a virus that overtook everything important and special to me. I remember one night, when my then-husband was supposed to be working and came home early to suprise me. He did surprise me, but only because I was in the middle of a binge (thinking he wouldn't come home until the next morning). He knew about my struggles and sat with me on the kitchen floor, surrounded by food wrappers and packages, and held me as I wept. He thought I was weeping because of my disorder (which was probably partially true), not really knowing I was weeping because I knew, with him home, there was no way in hell I could purge out all of the food I had just eaten and it made me sick knowing it was just going to sit in my stomach and make me "fat". This was a fucked up period of my life, guys.

I look back and wonder how I held it together as well as I did, considering. Only one or two people knew a tiny bit of what I was going through. Most people looked at me as a happy-go-lucky, bubbly and intelligent woman. Which, honestly, my true self is that way. But this darkness had hooked its claws into me and resided just beneath the surface. Beneath my smile was a tortured soul screaming to be rescued, but I felt so guilty about what had happened to me that I couldn't ask for help. So, I chose for a very long time to suffer through it alone, surrounded by people who loved me.