Dear Body:

I stand in front of the floor length mirror in a baggy t-shirt and comfortable shorts, feeling my hair stick itself to the back of my neck in the sickly humidity of a warm July day. As has become habit, I wrap the shirt tightly around my frame and study you from every angle, noticing every inch of you. I heave a giant sigh and let go of the shirt, allowing it to settle in a way that disguises you and hides you from the view of the world.

It has been some time since I waged a war against you. For several months, we were enemies. I sought with every fiber, every ounce of my being, to destroy you. To make you so small that you altogether disappeared. I denied you the nutrition and the care that you needed and instead worked you to the bone without adequate compensation. I expected you to perform all the necessary tasks to keep me alive without the energy to do so.

I want to say I'm sorry.

I'm sorry for striving to be smaller and smaller and shrinking you in ways that were unhealthy and potentially deadly. I am sorry for staring at you in the mirror, determinedly noticing every little flaw or imperfection and focusing on it until it became the only thing I could see. I am sorry for hating the way you have curves instead of flat surfaces and sharp angles. I am sorry for feeling such an intense dislike for the features of my face. I am sorry for loathing the way my thighs brush up against each other like old friends who need each other for support when I stand with my feet together.

I still remember the first day I was ever admitted into eating disorder care. I sat on the comfy, cushioned chair with my legs drawn uncomfortably close to my chest, my arms circling my knees in a desperate attempt to appear as minute as possible. They had just weighed me and gone through a questionnaire designed to reveal whether or not I was acutely suffering from an eating disorder. Then the woman who had kindly guided me through the whole process invited me back into her office, where she revealed I would have to enter a program meant to rehabilitate me.

So I went home and tearfully packed clothes into a suitcase, preparing to leave my home behind and go to a strange environment full of people I didn't know and challenges I didn't believe I could face. I remember lamenting how fat I thought I was, even as I sat there wasting away minute by minute. My hair was thin, breakable and dull. My cheeks were sunken and my skin was pallid and sickly. My smile seldom appeared, and when it did, it was empty and emotionless, like my eyes.

I would love to say that you and I became friends immediately in this new environment. I would love to say that I instantly wanted to get better and worked my ass off to do so.

That is not what happened. Instead, I continued to cruelly torture you, subjecting you to intense starvation and copious amounts of over exercising. Behind closed doors, I sobbed my eyes out, wanting nothing more than to return home and escape the confines of the treatment center, as my fragile bones creaked and moaned under the birdlike weight sitting on them.

I am sorry for not treating you with the respect you deserve. I am sorry for being content with watching you shrink and shrink until my heart was barely capable of beating enough to keep me alive and my organs began to shut down, futilely struggling to function and failing to do so. I am sorry for landing myself in the hospital, hooked up to an IV drip pumping fluids into my body because I was so terrified to put anything past my lips and into you. I am sorry for spending countless hours locked in the trap of over exercising, tearing open your skin against the rough floors and causing you to bleed profusely. I am sorry for rendering you permanently scarred as a very potent and powerful reminder of just how ill I was. I am sorry it took me so long to discover why I was worth fighting for—why you were worth fighting to save. And I am sorry that sometimes this is not enough.

It's true. Sometimes, I long with a passion that burns through my veins, to torture you again like I used to do. I wish for the ability to refuse you nutrition and instead subject you to sweaty hours spent bent over an exercise mat until you ache with the desire to stop—please, just stop. I want more than anything in the world to relegate myself to a life of hospital Johnnies and three short walks a day that sent my heart rate skyrocketing and the hospital staff rushing to make sure that I was still alive.

Sometimes I hate you.

But still, you haven't given up on me. Like the best friend I don't deserve, you have fought to keep my heart moving and my eyes open when I had all but lost the desire for them to continue doing so. You have refused to break under the extreme duress to which I subjected you. You have suffered through endless pricks of needles into my skin as they performed daily blood work, horrible bloating and distension as I painfully put food into you, and a constant barrage of hateful, vitriolic words that I shouted out into the empty room that was my home for so long.

It has now been several weeks since I have been in any level of eating disorder care. And for every ounce of me that wishes to stay away from it forever and ever, there is sometimes an equal part of me that longs with such a desperate ache that it physically hurts to return. My mind is locked in an endless battle with you. My eating disorder poisons my thoughts and convinces me that you are ugly, disgusting and worthless. It looks at the way my stomach curves instead of lying flat and convinces me that I am fat and swollen like a balloon. It examines how my thighs and calves now touch together where you used to be able to see straight through the space between them into the frightening reality of just how sick I was and whispers that I am the most repulsive creature on the face of the earth. It analyzes every square inch of weight that has been restored to my frame and strives to make me believe that each is a black mark on my soul.

I'm sorry for not loving you. I'm sorry for not treating you with the care and respect that you deserve. I'm sorry for letting the numbers on clothes, the numbers on nutrition fact labels and the number on the scale dictate your worth. I'm sorry for becoming so paranoid of certain foods that I was reduced to a sobbing wreck when they were placed in front of me. I'm sorry for sometimes wishing I was dead, and that you would simply stop working, because it felt like the cold stillness of death would be more bearable than the searing hot, agonizing pain of living.

Despite everything I've done to you, everything I've put you through, you've stuck with me. You've endured trials and tribulations to which nobody should be subjected. And you're still here. You're relearning how to trust me to take care of you. It's a long road ahead of us. There's still a lot of broken promises and empty words that need to be repaired. But I am forever thankful that you haven't given up on me.

So besides saying I'm sorry, I also want to say I'm grateful.

I'm grateful for your ability to keep my heart beating and blood circulating through my veins, to allow me to breathe in and out the smell of fresh air and rain on the wind, and my brain for thinking rational, healthy thoughts. I'm grateful for the way your legs are strong and powerfully built—the fact that my thighs touch together is simply because my weight set point does not entail a thigh gap. I'm grateful that your bones have regained some of their vitality, so that I am carried and supported throughout each and every day. I'm grateful for the way your face has filled out so that you don't look so gaunt and skeletal. I'm grateful for how your hair, skin and nails have regained their shine and luster. I'm grateful for the fact that your smile is now real and full and vibrant. I'm grateful that you laugh with your entirety, because laughter is a beautiful thing that for so long was gone from my life. I'm grateful that you now have healthy, soft edges where you used to have sickly, sharp corners that jutted out at terrifying angles. I'm grateful for the scars you bear, because they show the dark places I've been and the way I've carried on despite them.

And most of all, I am grateful that you are mine.

Dear body:

I love you, just the way you are.