When I walked off the plane coming home from London and saw my mom and dad waving, I felt a sigh of relief that I was home. But then as I got closer to them, I watched my mom’s face as she had a very worried look on her face and heard to faintly gasp to my dad, “she’s so thin.”
The ride home was pretty quiet as I was just glad to be home, to be in the hands of my parents, I felt safe and I felt scared too. Would they find out?
I moved into my own apartment right on the lake in downtown Chicago that fall. I wanted to be on my own, to feel that same independence I felt when I was in London. This clearly was not a good decision knowing the state that I was in, but I did it anyways. The next couple of months were some of the darkest days of my life. I was depressed, cold, thin, and hungry. I was in my senior year at college, I was pretty isolated from life, and from my friends and family because social outings usually meant some sort of food was involved, and that was just too much work explaining how I couldn’t eat. I would usually blame the diabetes and say my sugars were high, even though they were more perfect than ever. I would come home from class, do my homework, and then get to printing out recipes of food I would never eat or make, print out health resources, look at medical journals of diabetes related illness, or just obsess about the perfect diet.
During the last part of that semester (trimester) I barely was living at my apartment because I was home so much going to see different doctors and just being around my family. To put it lightly, I was not a happy person. I was filled with self-hate, horrible body image, and a general hopelessness and sadness I have never felt before. This was the darkest time in my life, and I will leave out a lot of the dark moments I had, but it was a very hard time for my family and I. I was angry I was treating my family and myself how I was, but I couldn’t do anything to stop it. The disease had taken over my mind and thoughts, and I was powerless against it.
The disease was anorexia.
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