My Eating Disorder Left Me Starving For Connection
I’m seventeen years old and my best friend has just told me that she’s celebrating her birthday at a local seafood restaurant. She’s excited, talking about how you get given little hammers to smash the crab, and how delicious their fries are. I feel a familiar panic beginning to rise within me. My brain is already calculating all the future calories and searching for escape routes. But I have to go. I’ve already avoided dinner plans and brunch meetups for weeks, becoming that flakey friend who never turns up, and this is a birthday party. So I’ll go and I’ll try to eat as little as possible, and I’ll excuse myself to go the bathroom to handle the little I’ve eaten. I’ll return to the table and nervously wonder if people could hear me, if they can smell the sick I tried hard to wash away. I’ll lose that evening to my eating disorder, like every evening before it, like every evening that follows it. Every social situation was similar to this. I’d either avoid going or panic about it in the run-up to the event. I stopped being excited by the iced cake you could expect at a birthday, and instead tried to plan how I could leave the room as soon as it was being served. I didn’t trust myself to be around all that food and not give in to weakness. Because I thought I was being strong by avoiding it all. I thought that my strength was why my clothes were hanging off me and everyone kept complimenting my figure. I didn’t realise that it was an illness embedded deep within me, one I would spend a decade trying to escape.
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