‘Eating disorders disguise themselves in achievement’: What it’s like recovering from a 7 year struggle with anorexia

Eating disorders. A touchy topic with me. I try to divert conversations around it, tiptoe across if I must – but it’s National Eating Disorders Week, so no more hiding. Here we go:

My name is Mulan and I’ve struggled with anorexia for 7 years.

God, saying it out loud really emphasizes how long it’s been.

7 years, and I haven’t yet learned to peel myself from the label of anorexic, to run from its destruction of relationships and distortions of reality. Ask me to tell you about my eating disorder, and you’ll still hear a silver lining of romanticism: a little love for it.

To be in love with being frail and small; to be in love with disappearing.

Maybe that’s my issue.

I was 8 the first time I looked into the mirror and saw a reflection that didn’t belong to me. Instead of seeing a face, a smile, a human being – I saw thighs and a stomach and areas that needed to be carved in, carved hollow, carved out. It became a sort of obsession, catching my reflection in passing windows.

Like the beginning of all things, my eating disorder started out small: a skipped meal here, a pass-on-dessert there. But also like all things, it grew. Starve the brain and emotions and senses are dulled. You stop feeling, but sometimes that’s all we need.

Eating disorders disguise themselves in achievement. They work by destroying the body and sanity, transforming your loss of self worth into motivation to improve. Disciplined enough to set a schedule which planned out every hour of my life, I was then motivated to follow it by a disgust to be better. And I had the willpower to sustain this schedule. But I was miserable. Living was a chore.

Recovery took a long time. And it wasn’t my choice. Between numerous hospitalizations and nutritionists, recovery was forced on me. Maybe it was because I hadn’t hit rock bottom yet, but for me, recovery was losing trade-off with the self control I had worked so hard to cultivate. With eating disorders, you sacrifice all your happiness in exchange for betterment. I could give back my self control, but no one could prove to me that this would make me happy again. So why would I let go?

“You’re hurting your parents with your eating disorder.”

“If you don’t eat, you can get out of this house.”

“You’re going to make me cry.”

I must have heard those phrases a dozen times a day. But they only angered me. Nobody understood: I was starving myself, not them. This was my situation, but everyone was trying to make it about them. 

My turning point was the prospect of university. Senior year, we were all applying to college, worried about rejection. Maybe we lacked the extracurriculars; maybe our grades weren’t up to standard. Well, that’s what everyone else was worrying about.  I was worried about not being allowed to go because my parents didn’t trust me to feed myself.

I remember thinking: how stupid is that? And for the first time since the nightmare of anorexia began, I finally started hurting from my own self-destruction.

It’s not the stigmatization of eating disorders which is the issue; it’s our acceptance of them. Don’t tell me that you believe it’s normal for a girl to puke because she ate too many nachos. Don’t tell me you think it’s acceptable that we use liquid diets to maintain our weight. Running for 4 hours on a treadmill is not discipline, but an obsession.

In this world which is developing in ways no one could have possibly foretold, we value control. We desire the ability to manipulate ourselves and our surroundings to our whim. We envy self-discipline because it shows others that we have control.

It’s not healthy.

Most people diet in their lifetime, but only 3% are ever categorized to have an eating disorder. Even fewer are hospitalized. Why was I not lucky enough to be amongst the normal dieters? Today, I am stuck in an uncomfortable limbo of appearing healthy while wishing I could halve my weight.

Sometimes I am told I need to lose weight or that I don’t go to the gym enough. And it brings 8 year old me back, stopping in front of windows to judge the size of my thighs. It inserts itself as a reasonable doubt between my hunger and the second brownie. My eating disorder tells me I don’t deserve food. But no one deserves anything. We nourish our bodies, not because we have earned it, but because we want to exist and we have the right to exist.

Recovery is awkward. With most illnesses and addictions, you stay away from the trigger: the alcoholic avoids the liquor store. With an eating disorder, you must face the food which started it all, head on. But as someone from the other side, I can confidently promise that it’s worth it. There is a forgotten happiness which arises from just the experiences of life. No amount of weight loss is worth losing this.

I am now 19, in the curious adventure of redefining what my body is, and who I am beyond the physicality’s. I am learning to appreciate and reclaim a definition of beauty. I am learning to accept my own vulnerability. I used to be afraid of losing myself without my eating disorder, but I am not my eating disorder. I am something more, with an entire life to live for.

I am now 19, and I think everything is going to be ok.