We met what seems like ages ago, and truthfully, it has been.

When I was first admitted as an inpatient to the hospital in December of 2015, I learned for myself that it had been years upon years since we first met. My memories trickled back to being younger and denying myself the right to eat. I would get upset with myself, or other people, and deal with that anger or sadness via the emptiness of my stomach. I thought it was normal.

When I was in my last year of middle school, we met again when I was experiencing stress within my family and in my life at school. Following graduation, I was stalked and manipulated by an individual who swore that they would always be there for me, and would not hurt me. They promised I was safe with them, but I found myself cutting myself to shreds and not eating consistently for days. I thought everyone dealt with stress this way.

When I was a junior in high school, we crossed paths at the intersection of responsibility and overworking myself. I stopped eating, resorting to only a coffee and a granola bar to get through each day. I learned that this restriction of food goes by a name - Anorexia Nervosa.

Anorexia, I find myself wanting to come back to you more and more. I hate myself for this, but I romanticize my own disease as if its a coveted prize at the end of a 5 kilometer race. I wish I could go back to being sick, to being thin, to dying.

My recovery from you feels invalid, it feels like a joke. Two hospitalizations, multiple therapists, and more medications than I can remember all feel like I never had an eating disorder at all. The people treating me tell me that eating will help me recover, that taking the pills will help me feel less sad. Yet, I’m writing while I should be eating, but I can’t bring myself to go through with it.

I lost a friend to you last September. She was purging and her heart couldn’t take any more. Now she’s gone, but that just isn’t enough to stop me from wanting to go back down the same path of absolute destruction that I lived through day in and day out for years.

Friends left me because I chose you over them, like you were the new “cool kid” in the crowd. They were tired of me choosing my own self-destruction over them. They were tired of hearing me talk about you, almost like you were a part of every waking moment of the day. But wait, you were. You are.

When Christmas came around last December, I wasn’t making goals for recovery. I was planning my complete relapse, my pursuit of thin, my goal of emaciation. I will be honest with you, I want you back even though you’ve never left. They call you an “abusive boyfriend”, but I remember you as the one who was there to catch me when the pain was too much to bare, who kept me standing when reprimanded, who listened to me when I cried. I want bones, I thinning hair, I want broken nails. There’s a line that says, “I am, I am, I am”, but now, I say, “I want, I want, I want”.

Eating disorder, we talk a lot. All day, every day it would seem. You are the one screaming when I let myself have breakfast, kicking my ass for eating when I have a break at work. You would seemingly be my everything. But here’s the thing, we need to break up.

Just because I want you, doesn’t mean I can have you. Just because I want to engage in a toxic relationship, doesn’t mean it will propel me towards health and happiness. You’ve hurt me so many times, and here I am, just wanting to come back. I hate myself for saying this, but I cannot lie to myself or to anyone else anymore. I want to come back, but I cannot and I will not.

I say I want to look like a coat hanger, with my clothes just drooping from my shoulders covering the pile of bones that I am. But I want to have children one day, and amenorrhea could very well make sure that doesn’t happen. I tell myself I can function on close to no nutrition, but the shaky hands and legs scare me too much to feel that way all day every day. I want to think I can live this way, but I’ve been there. You can’t. I can’t.

Anorexia, I want to write that I’m done with you, but even I know that I’m not ready to let go. I struggle with you, I struggle against you. I romanticize the possibility of being hospitalized again, just hoping that one day my fight with you will feel valid enough to stop engaging in behaviors and just recover. I want to be done, but I’m scared to live another way.

To my eating disorder, I will one day leave you. I will heal, whether I want that all the time or not. And eating disorder? You can go to hell.