A Letter To My Bulimia

You were excited to go away to college, but when you got there, you kept to yourself. You don’t fit in, rolled through your head incessantly. You strived to be a starter on the field hockey team your freshman year, so you dove headfirst.

You started to exercise. A lot.

After breakfast, after lunch, and after dinner. A run, followed by a weightlifting session. And while you know now that you were at a healthy weight, back then, you thought you were fat.

You never felt good enough at anything you did. But you could be thin. That was in your control. If you’re thin, you thought, you’ll be happier. You’ll fit in. Everything will be better.

You were hard on yourself, sure, but you were an athlete. You were used to pushing yourself beyond your limits. Harder and harder and harder, came those internal thoughts. You needed to be better. Friends, coaches, and teammates rallied you to train more, play harder, run faster. Their praise for your dedication propelled you to exercise more.

Slowly, before you even realized what was happening, you began to binge on sweets. You bought huge tubs of Cool Whip and giant bags of chocolate chips and ate them all in one sitting. You tried to exercise off the calories, but at some point, you realized there simply wasn’t enough time in the day—or energy in your body—to train away all those calories (and, yes, you kept track of every calorie that went into your body).

So you started to purge the calories another way … You started to throw up.

You did this all in secret. It was all-consuming. Eating, exercising, throwing up. A continuous cycle that seemed to fuel itself. Eating all those sweets provided the dopamine hit you craved, but then, the guilt and shame arose inside your body. You needed to get rid of it, whether it was by running 10 miles a day, or vomiting furtively in the bathroom.

Then, one day, you sat shaking on the floor of your bedroom. You’d just inhaled a huge bag of chocolate chips, then vomited it all out. Your heart pounded so hard, you could hardly breathe. You were scared for your life. If you kept going like this, you might not make it.

You didn’t want to live like this anymore. You had no friends, no life, absolutely nothing but this eating disorder. You had to make a change. You were still under your parents’ health insurance plan and you didn’t want them to know. But you had to find a way out of this. You felt so tethered to the disorder that your why to get out of it became stronger than your why to stay in it.

You confided in a high school friend, and together, you devised a plan. You’d decrease the amount of exercise you did by one minute every day. You read books and talked with your friend. And eventually, you gained control of your life.

Later, the excessive exercise and stress on your body showed up in the form of chronic back pain. You cursed the disorder, because it had compelled you to abuse your body for so many years. But you also realized that something good could come of it. With the knowledge you’d gained, you could help people who were in that hopeless place you had been in at one time. So you went to physical therapy school and learned about the nervous system and breathwork, and how important it is to pair the two in order to help ease pain.

And you realized that all those years later, you still had unresolved microtraumas from the eating disorder. So you worked on self-regulating tools and how to breathe. And that chronic back pain you’d suffered gradually disappeared.

So while it might seem like an impossible climb out, that worst moment—sitting on the floor, surrounded by empty bags of chocolate chips—wasn’t for nothing. No, instead it’s gotten you to the place you are now.

A place of gratitude for having gone through it because now you can help others.

Today, you’re a physical therapist, specializing in helping women who have chronic pain subsequent to an eating disorder. That experience gave you the appreciation for what your body can do, and how it can heal. And you can express to others that no matter how hopeless things seem, you can always turn it around.

You can show women how to harness their own profound ability to shift from surviving to thriving.

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