Swallow Your Pride

Trigger Warning: Eating disorders, mental health/sensitive content.

BEFORE I RECOVERED

It’s 2023, I’m twelve, riding on my nonmoving bike seeing my life going one of two ways. My legs burn, I want to claw my eyes out as I investigate the forest seeing colored spots dance in my vision. A twelve-year-old shouldn’t be wishing for the one thing that can kill you. People say that being a teen is the best time of your life. My skin is pretty, not fat yet, and people “love” thin people which feels messed up. I get told I’m thin, but maybe it will catch up to me in a few years once I’m old. I refuse to let this happen. This is my downward thought pattern as I pedal my butt off wishing I was someone other than me. "You know when I was your age, I was ninety pounds too." Someone tells me.

           I get that bone-tired, wobbly feeling I always get from no food and too much exercise. I’m addicted to it. I love it when my body collapses like a castle that’s bound to crumble. I laugh at myself, best time of my life huh? I feel fat. I feel like I want to grab a knife and relieve myself of these feelings.

           No matter what I’m doing, I can’t shake the feeling that someday when my “good” era is over, I will become ugly. And I would rather die in that moment as a twelve-year-old then being seventy-three-years-old sitting on a couch hoping my granddaughter will come over. I do a plank for two minutes, and then ten-pound weights twenty times on each arm. With every movement, the more pain I feel. The voice in my head tells me. “If it doesn’t hurt, you’re not doing it correctly.” I am controlled, enslaved by this disorder. Disconnected from myself and the world. I need to look like those girls who you pray for at night. I had an ideal weight of seventy pounds, and I planned to reach it this week.

           Best time of my life. Best time of my life. Best time of my life. I inaudibly tell myself. I think of my friends, probably going home and calling each other. I wonder what they would think of me if they knew what I was really like. I want to devote myself to this pattern until it washes everything I once knew. I think I will continue exercising.

There isn't a time where I'm not exercising or dizzy or falling to the ground and smiling because that's the best feeling to me. When the world spins, and I feel like I might just leave before my life hasn't started, I feel great. I'm addicted to it.

I'm not doing this for the world, but for me. I can't stand to be in my skin unless I'm thin.

                                                        ***

           I look over the doctor’s shoulder in an exam five months later. Body as weak as a corpse.

              Diagnosis: Anorexia Nervosa.

           Symptoms: Exhaustion, anemia, low blood pressure, restriction, constipation, cutting, depression, warped vision of self.

           Height and weight: 5’4, and ** pounds.

           The doctor clicks out before I can see more. I feel gross and huge, but small and weak at the same time. I feel like hunger is going to rip through me like a gap in the space time continuum. The sound of the beeping machine of the blood pressure cuff got tighter on my arm. It turned out to be 40 over 50, I wasn’t sure what normal blood pressure was anymore, but I must be fine because I am alive. I reasoned. But then I felt a painful wave of depression. What’s the god damn point in fighting if it's clear who has already won?

                                                      ***

           Minutes, seconds, days, weeks, months, and maybe years passed, I don’t know anymore.

           I’m running and running and running and doing fifty thousand jumping jacks in my room. I’m in a ward for disordered eating and mental health. The unit is a weak excuse of a place someone calls home. The rooms reek. The walls are white and barren. The single beds are lonely as the shadows cover the floor in the room to the point where all it is, is darkness. I ran. Waiting for a reason to stop, but it never comes. I sold myself to the devil, and now I'm just a lifeless sack that does what it says. It's not an option, I'm too weak to fight it.

           Day in and night out, and then repeat. I've entered a world I didn't know existed. Where school is far away and feels like normal life is just a distance dream. When you're on the edge of death, time and time again, you begin to lose what you thought you'd have forever. I was a zombie, half dead. Sometimes in the middle of the day while I’m out in the group room, a banging sound vibrates the walls. A nurse yells, “everyone go to your rooms!” We scram.

           Stop! They scream. Let me go! They beg. Help me! They plead. Screeching, scratching the air. The staff members call for back up.

"Grab the tube!" A nurse in a blue suit beckons to the nurse's station. I hear begging, deafening and unescapable.

           It’s the same every day. Never a way out of the grave I dug. My friends are no longer mine. They forgot my last name, I was sure. The world lost its axel, it stopped spinning all together, but the outside world moved on like I was never there in the first place. Moving from one feeling to another. People were out at clubs getting wasted while I was here running. This is just the “time of my life” I tell myself while my roommate is asleep. I was tethered in the vines of the web in my head. Young and immature, I think. That’s what every adult would think of me as. Just a kid who took words the wrong way. Died alone and young like an idiot. Just wasn’t strong enough to handle the real world. My brain told me. Teenage lives are “the best time of your life.” People tell me. “God, what I wouldn’t give to be your age again.” It’s ironic as my legs are twigs, my body is all bone. I don’t have friends in this cold dump. Screw it. I run.

                                                     ***

           My dad is screaming at me because I kept disappearing in the woods after I ate. It’s the same every day. Months later and I’m still breathing. I learned a knew “trick” so I can eat what I want and then get rid of it. Friends text. They complain about school and talk about me. “Is Ellise going to die?” It’s under control, I tell myself. Tearing the last shreds of hope. This is what I wished for, and this is what I got.

           Time was a simple concept that didn’t catch my understanding. I didn’t understand the meaning of time as the clock ticked on while my life stopped. How come time can go on forever while my world has ended?

"How are you, Ellise?" A friend asks me.

"I'm great!" I smile while trying to tell myself that I didn't swallow my pride.

Two months later, its winter, my fingertips are losing feeling, and I wouldn't be surprised if I lost circulation; I'm home alone. I stuff food down my mouth, chew aggressively to stop the raging hunger that's inside of me and then bend over the toilet. Again and again, I vomit and with each purge the more out of place I feel. After I'm done, I get that utterly empty feeling I get after each purge. I run to my knifes, slice, cut, bleed, repeat. I feel happy when a red mouth gape's open up on my arm. Slash, again and again. I need this. This is all I'll ever be since I've been discarded. Blood falls down my arm, it's like a beautiful waterfall. It drips onto the floor. I tell myself, "No pain, no game." Swallow your pride for Christ sakes!! The eating disorders scream loudly, their hands, wrap around me; their knuckles have calluses from self-induced vomiting. Its controlling everything I do like a ventriloquist. Ever watched a puppet show?

                                                        ***

                                         AFTER I RECOVERED

           The light from the windows filters in as I regard the change in me. It’s been forever since I last restricted or cut or ran in an unhealthy way. The road I had chosen seemed obvious. “That kid is Destin to death.” But I wasn’t going to sit politely while my life was taken over.

           I’m having dinner at a friend’s house. It’s nearly six o’clock and the sun is setting. I remember back in the dark ages when I would eat, and then rush to the woods or run or just not eat. But I’m sitting at the table with her. Not just some emaciated kid seeing if they can fit their hand around the top of their arm. Not a person who was so out of it that she wouldn't know if World War Three had broken out.

           “Do you want a slice of pizza?” She asks with a smile, but I can tell she’s nervous.

           “Yes please!” I smile, grabbing a slice.

           If you don’t understand the significance of this, well maybe it’s not the story for you. I spent years of my life in a haze of eating disorders. Some may say it changed me, but they don’t mean it in a good way. If I didn’t fall the way I did, I’d never be where I’m at now. Taking this slice of pizza is hugely important to me. I can eat whenever the hell I want without worrying about getting big because all sizes are fine. Everyone is perfect the way they are, and I would never change that.

           They say live, laugh, love life. They tell me to stay positive even when my life is butt. People say sometimes, “Everything happens for a reason." But then people could do whatever they want and then say it’s meant to happen. But I believe it’s ok to be negative. It’s ok to be sad or to grieve for the Darkside, to fall and cry, but even when the bullets belt into me, I still get up.

           You look healthy. They rub my back as if they told me a true compliment. Then, when I came back from residential treatment, someone told me, “You being admitted was the worst time of my life, worse than when Jim divorced me. Worse than when I got breast cancer. You are my reason of living.” And just then, I knew people had the power to knock the breath out of me, but that didn’t mean I should let it. It broke my heart that my pain wasn’t my own. I took others down with me.

           As I hang out with people, I begin to realize that there isn’t anything anyone has made that someone didn’t hate on. There is always something someone will comment on. Your skin is oily. Your song is two noted. Your voice needs work. The writing isn’t well said, you need more details. To become someone in the world, you need to start somewhere in the world. Everything I say or write, or sing, or draw, will always get hate or get criticized somewhere in the world and it messes with my head that it is impossible to not get hate. I got unspoken hate when my illness took over. As time ceased for me, time went on and people were more aware of my every breath than I realized. Maybe praying at night that this wouldn’t be the last one. While I thought I stopped time all together, put it in my pocket, it really kept ticking by.

           I never thought a perspective could change, and that in the end I would want it to change. But it did. I twirl as recovery offers me a cupcake. I spin as the audience claps. I fly when I was given the chance to fall. The world knocked me out of the frame which confirmed the fact that once your potential is gone, the world will throw you out like a banana peel.