Dying for Perfection

Some people strive for perfection. I was willing to sacrifice it all for it

When you spend your entire life a certain way, you assume that the way you are is fine. You accept who you are. You don’t realize it isn’t good until someone points it out.

Fat. It was just another word used to describe me. When I was a kid, it never really bothered me. As I got older, though, it began to. 

It started over the summer after my freshman year of high school. I had heard some negative comments about my weight and, added with myself already struggling with depression and self-harm, I felt like I needed some form of control over my life. And I figured that my weight was the place to do it. 

It didn’t necessarily start out the way one may think a “normal” eating disorder would. I did not go straight into starving myself or purging all the time. I knew that if I wanted this to work without me being found out, I would have to be clever. I started out the healthy way, eating healthy foods and exercising so that no one would catch on to what I was planning to do later on. 

I started to see the pounds drops steadily, but not at a quick enough rate. “It wasn’t good enough” I would think to myself. I thought that in order for me to be truly happy, I would need to be thin. 

I kept losing weight, but because in my mind it wasn’t happening fast enough, I turned to the next phase of my plan: starvation.

I’ll admit, it wasn’t easy at first. It was hard to avoid the hunger pains and the noise from my stomach growling. I kept going, though, my desire to be perfect far outweighing any of the physical pain I was feeling. Every time I started to feel hungry, I would snap a rubber band against my wrist or chew a piece of gum to distract my brain from the horrors I was beginning to put my body through. 

The weight started coming off even quicker now. Sometimes I would even average about 3 or 4 pounds lost a week. I felt myself spiraling out of control but my mind didn’t see it that way. According to my mind, I was finally in control. In the form of everything else, my life was falling apart. I was constantly dizzy and cold from a lack of nutrients, I could never focus, I started losing some of my hair, and my grades began to suffer. I tried to hold my life together as best as I could, but someone was bound to find out sooner or later. 

Here’s the problem though with an eating disorder: You quickly begin to fall in love with it. Since I was not thin to begin with, everyone would congratulate me on my weight loss and constantly tell me how good I looked now that I lost weight. When you hear things like that, how can one not expect you to fall in love with your illness?

Now, flash forward to the end of my senior year of high school. By that time, this disorder has held me captive for 3 years. I had attempted to get my life together, but various failed attempts and the reemergence of my self-harming habit landed me in an outpatient treatment program. There I would be surrounded by various doctors all trying to help me overcome my demons. 

I worked really hard while in treatment, but soon feel into my old ways once being discharged. I just could not let myself accept recovery. Anyone that ever tries to tell you that recovery is easy is a liar. Recovery is the hardest thing in the world, especially in a society that is as cruel and unforgiving as ours. I saw what this disorder turned me into. I knew it made me a monster. I knew that no one wanted to be around me anymore. But to me none of that stuff mattered. All that mattered was achieving perfection, no matter the costs. 

To this day I am still a fairly difficult person to be around. I tend to be triggered extremely easily and tend not to see reason when making decisions regarding my body. I did a lot of bad things because of this disorder. I let this disease hold me captive for so long and while I’m still a prisoner, I feel like I am not alone. A little while ago, I got the eating disorder recovery symbol tattooed behind my right ear as a message to myself to never give up. While I am still struggling, it gives me hope that one day I can look back and say that I lived. 

I once read a poem that said, “If you aren’t recovering, you are dying.” And it’s crazy how true those words actually are.