I lie awake some nights worried that I’m beating a dead horse by continuing this conversation. And then I read another post about how people need to “get over” eating disorders, or hear someone refer to themselves jokingly as “anorexic,” or see yet another misguided documentary on eating disorders. That’s a massive wake-up call to me that this needs to keep being talked about. If that means I end up being the “eating disorder awareness” student, so be it. I will embrace that label, because people’s lives, including my own, are at stake.

The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, ANAD, calculates that over 30 million people of all ages and genders currently suffer from some form of eating disorder in the US. Almost half of them report onset of the disorder between 16-20 years of age. Anorexia in particular has a higher mortality rate than any other psychiatric disorder. An estimates 10-15% of Americans with anorexia and/or bulimia are men, and roughly 20% of gay men suffer from an eating disorder.

I am one of these people; I am in that 20% of gay men. I have anorexia and bulimia.

I have suffered from this since my junior year of high school, when Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Depression collided with puberty and manifested in this chronicly disordered eating. By the time I graduated high school, I had lost over 60 pounds. It was my little secret.

I was terrified of starting college. Here I was, 1300 miles from my home of Tampa, FL, surrounded by thousands of strangers. The kicker of college is that I went in at 140 pounds, so I was setting myself up for failure in my mind. I came in at my low, and I couldn’t bear the thought of gaining weight. Even if I believed the self-help blogs saying that I was returning to my normal body weight, that didn’t matter to me because no one else was going to see it that way.

I want to stress here that, though they seem superficial in this context, eating disorders are anything but. Having an eating disorder is not just about looking skinny; it’s about obsessing over your body. It’s about not being able to walk past a mirror without stopping to look at the parts of your body you want to change. It’s about compulsively changing your outfit numerous times in one day, each time taking far longer than it should. It’s about spending your hard-earned money on laxatives because you can’t afford not to. It’s about feeling that, no matter how dangerous you know it is, you cannot stop. It feels like someone else has taken control of your body; you lose who you thought you were.

There are days that I cannot get myself to get out of bed, or go to class, and on the days that I do I am so plagued by obsessive thoughts of food and body image that it is difficult to focus on anything else. When I abuse laxatives, my body is so drained of energy, my digestive system so inflamed, that something as simple as putting on jeans becomes insurmountable. I’ve been going through treatment and therapy for over two years now, and I’ve come a long way from the sickly and unstable freshman I once was. But eating disorders are rarely “cured.” There are few cases of people actually being rid of these illnesses. What most learn to do, myself included, is to take control back.

Eating disorders are not the same for everyone. What I’m writing about here is my own personal experiences, as one person among millions suffering from this illness. But what I can say for certain is that we need to talk about these disorders as the real life-threatening illnesses they are. We as a society need to break the stigma around mental illnesses and specifically around eating disorders, because I promise you the most enabling action for an eating disorder is silence.