I started binging and purging right about the time I started high school. Right about the time my world was expanding and the rules to keep me safe were getting more restrictive. As a child, I’d had very few rules about where I could go exploring solo on my bike. The world was my oyster and my curfew an empty belly, but when I started bleeding and growing breasts, the rules got much more confining. Looking back, I interpret this change in structure to the disappearance of trust, both my parents’ trust that the world was a safe place for me and my own trust that I had the skills I needed to navigate it. Freedom was pulled out from under me, and I’m pretty sure I simply handed my sovereignty away. There were new unnameable threats of which to be wary and new ways of operating to be learned. My parents’ fear was not unfounded. This was decades before #metoo, long before sex was talked about.
No matter, I knew that it was dirty. The message I got at home, from church and from Midwestern culture in general was that sex was a big no-no. Bad girls wanted it, and I so very much wanted to be a good girl. I was already a good student, so just like I picked up chemistry formulas, Spanish verb conjugations and algebraic equations, I also picked up social rules.
Good girls are asexual, thin and co-dependent.
I took it upon myself to stuff my budding sexuality, to strive toward thinness and to find myself a boyfriend. Before long, I’d gained twenty pounds, a nutritionist telling me what to eat, a therapist with whom I shared codified bits and pieces, and boyfriends with whom I played damsel in distress. Somehow, between all the binging and high-mileage running purges, I managed to be both class president and homecoming queen, a sure result of my strict adherence to aforementioned good girl rules.
I continued playing out a pattern of physical and mental self-abuse, self-mistrust and deep shame throughout high school. And though I’m still shaking off its remnants today, I share here the story that sparked my healing journey, the story that sowed the seeds of self-trust, self-care and sovereignty that I tend to so mindfully today.
________________
Freshman year of college I attended a women’s retreat. There, a woman came to share with us her story of escaping an abusive marriage. She told of making the decision to stop waiting for her husband to get better and instead choosing to take care of herself— right then and there. She sneaked out of the house with her children in the middle of the night to take refuge in a shelter and save her life.
I was 19, and her story of rising up and owning her role in that story, of leaving behind everything she knew in order to choose herself sparked in me for the first time the thought that I too could choose to take care of myself. I could choose to choose me, instead of choosing to succumb to whatever force was trying to confine me, keep me stuffed and sedated, constantly eating and running. I could choose myself when making the decision to eat or not to eat an entire pizza, loaf of banana bread or batch of cookie dough. I could choose to leave behind patterns that were slowly killing me from the inside, one bite at a time. I could choose to let go of behaviors keeping me from addressing the issues behind the incessant consuming..
Typing I can choose me today seems so silly. So obvious. But at the time, the idea of choosing myself and acting in my own best interest was completely novel. Completely rebellious. And completely empowering. It was one of those time-seems-to-stop moments when I was able to watch my thinking shift in a way that allowed healing to begin. The journey certainly hasn’t been linear, but the insight that I could step out of victimhood and into agency was the impetus toward a new paradigm, one that I am continuing to grow and one that I hope for every human on the planet.
I have agency. I have choice. I can choose me.
I hope for the feeling of sovereignty and freedom for all humans, and I celebrate the micro-moments and micro-choices that lead us there. I celebrate that earlier this week, in the midst of severe anxiety and the deep and ancient eating-disorder urge to stuff, control and numb, I chose me. I tended to myself carefully and with love: asking for what I needed, applying boundaries and nourishing and resting the body. The issues that were behind the anxiety didn’t disappear or transform with my nap or the chopping of vegetables, but instead of compounding the issues, I brag that I minimized collateral damage, leaving more energy for examination of those issues.
In these weeks of Mercury moving in retrograde, of communication being compromised, of old patterns being brought to light and of campaigns bringing deep emotion to the surface, I celebrate the thread of learning that begins in adolescence and continues throughout a lifetime. I celebrate the self-awareness and self-reflection happening at the individual level that lead to life-promoting cultural shifts at the global level. I celebrate expanding trust and appreciation for the wisdom and autonomy of every human body.
