Today I am…

When I was thirteen, I looked into the mirror and hated what I saw: a girl who was huge, a girl who was hideous and who ate too much. That girl was not me but I believed she was. I told myself that I would never eat again, or at least I would eat as little as possible until I no longer looked this way. I swore off of carbohydrates, junk food, and eating over 500 calories a day. I told myself I was not allowed to experience happiness again until I no longer looked huge.

For the first few months I walked around with a journal glued to my hip: it contained the calorie count of every food, it contained what foods would cut my appetite, it told me ways to trick my mind when my stomach grumbled. But most importantly, that journal told me what I had eaten today and how many calories I had left. I was cranky, mean, and, most importantly, unhappy, but those were signs of becoming skinnier, right? “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” was written all over every notebook I owned. When I felt like having a cheat day I would read that quote and deny myself the cheat. My world revolved around eating. I was no longer myself, I was an eating disorder, even if I didn’t know it.

For seven years, I did not allow myself to indulge and I was constantly fighting the urge. For seven years, I was too concerned with becoming fat to focus on anything else. I would sit at the lunch table envious of what everyone was eating, envious that they did not gain weight from that one bag of chips. I spent my days telling myself things that simply were not true. I spent my nights online, reading Pro Ana websites, learning new things which would only make me feel worse and sicker.

I started to cry every night, not knowing why I had to suffer from this disease, because one day I realized it was a disease and not me. My life was hijacked, and I was stuck. I did not want outside help; I wanted to fix it on my own, but I could not. I would cut myself, not because I wanted to die but because I was lost, scared and frustrated. The pain on my wrist made the pain in my stomach go away, not forever but for a moment, and that was one less moment to feel hungry. I was so frustrated I could not save myself. I was angry with myself for being scared to gain weight. I thought I would be stuck feeling like this forever

I am not Anna Westin, I am Jenna Somerville and, like Anna, I am a college sophomore who has struggled with Anorexia. Today, I still have days when I get nervous about gaining weight. I have days when I do not feel like eating anything because I might instantly gain ten pounds. Sometimes I look in the mirror and still see someone who is fat and ugly, but I know that it is my old self playing tricks on me. Now, when I have these thoughts and feelings I am not alone: I have friends and family who love me, people I can reach out to who support me and who will help me make these images dissolve.

I know that Ana (Rexia) was never my friend. Maybe there was never a fat or ugly girl in the mirror. There was a girl whose loneliness distorted the mirror: the veil of pain adding thick layers onto my reflection. The pro ana sites lied to us: they told us to value these layers, to bury them yet deeper by deceiving ourselves, and others, by overcompensating with losing needed weight. Ana lives on the surface and dies within: she is like the advertisements and magazines that show impossibly skinny women as the standard of health and happiness. Like these cold magazines, Ana cannot be a real friend; she cannot listen to real fears at night and then awaken to live with others, to grow, to move to new places... leaving the layers behind to blow away, unneeded, with the next storm.

At this moment, I know these bad days will happen, I know they will be okay, I will be okay, because I am strong enough to endure them. I know these days will not last, that they will go away soon enough and that they do not define me. I no longer live under the cruel spell of an eating disorder. I am currently in control of my life, as much as a person can be. I am the boss of what I eat and I always eat that cookie that is offered to me. Today I love myself, and I am happy. And when I am down, I know that I am resilient, that I have the ability to survive the darkness. I have found hope in others, I have found hope in myself. Without hope, the heart will break, distorting our vision of ourselves. With hope, Ana dissolves like the Wicked Witch of The West and the mirror is clear again.

I used to be afraid to talk about what I went through I thought it showed weakness; now I know this is not true. I am proud of what I had to experience because it created the warrior I see myself as now. The scars on my wrist are signs of not giving up. They show pain but pain is inevitable, pain is okay, and pain is not my enemy. It taught me that I needed to change. I struggle, not to win or lose, but to live and grow.

Today I am in a new life, life without Ana, and I now speak to my family differently, with new honesty, with feeling, and with regret for my actions, balanced against anger and pain over the words and actions of others. Too often I was told the simple words that were supposed to make me feel better: “tomorrow is another day;” “you need to develop a thicker skin;” “sticks and stones… but words can never hurt you.” What I heard was that people did not know what to do, that they could not help me. Their simple suggestions were, accidently, a way of telling me to be quiet, to stop making everyone uncomfortable if I brought up really difficult feelings.

An individual does not have an eating disorder, a whole family does, whether they realize it or not. I went through this with my mother. Today I am able to say to her… and she is able to say to me… Today we are able to…

I went through this with my father. Today I am able to hear him tell me that he knew, and that he did not know, about my pain. His greatest regret was never having the answer for me that would stop my suffering, even if he did not understand much of what I was experiencing. Today I am able to tell him how bad it was and how important it is. And he is able to hear this without having to defend himself and without ever telling me that “tomorrow will be a new day.” Instead, we are able to find tomorrow, today.