No matter how long and hard I try, I can never remember when it started. I know I wasn’t born with it and I know I didn’t decide one day that this was how I wanted to be. I know it wasn’t one of the billions of life skills my momma taught me as a little girl and I know it wasn’t in my elementary school curriculum. But somewhere along the way I picked up this life-threatening habit of restricting my food and self-induced vomiting when I did eat.

My eating disorder didn’t start on one day and end on another. The beginning and the end were both a process. The first time I ever made myself throw up, I was just an innocent third grader trying to relieve the pressure in my too-full tummy. Unfortunately, I soon learned that this act could also get me out of school whenever I wanted because to Mrs. Maugins, my teacher at the time, I just had an upset stomach and needed to go home. I indulged in my secret activity at least every other week so that I could go home and watch cartoons instead of participating in the usual third grade activities I was supposed to be doing like reading the latest Junnie B. Jones or learning to write in cursive.

Despite my biweekly dances with trying to get out of school in the third grade, the rest of elementary school and most of middle school don’t stick out to me when I think of my battle with eating. I was always concerned with my looks and appearance, but I never took any action to change it. I was thoroughly convinced I was larger than my classmates and that was the only thing people could notice about me. In elementary school, I was the average weight and height for a growing girl, but in my junior-high years I did grow larger than my peers. While I was surrounded by my very best, very prepubescent friends who resembled walking sticks because they were lucky enough to lose their baby fat, I was a cubby preteen who had long started the journey to becoming a woman and clung to my baby fat like a dear friend.

Everything changed in high school. My mom started dating for the first time since my parent’s divorce in kindergarten. I was not used to my mother’s attention being on anyone else but myself and my brother. We were her entire world and now all of a sudden, some strange man had come into the picture and took our place. Some psychologists say that people with bulimia feel a lack of love from people in their life and that’s why they turn to an eating disorder. I never believed this until I was deep into my treatment and therapy.

My freshmen year I was about twenty pounds overweight, but I was happy, at least on the outside. I remember sitting at Pineapple Willy’s the summer before sophomore year with some family friends that I had joined on a beach trip, crying because I felt like my mom didn’t love me anymore. I could tell in all of our pictures that I was bigger than my two friends I was with and it didn’t sit well with me.

I don’t know when I persistently started purging and restricting, but by October of my sophomore year, I had lost 30 pounds. I lost 30 pounds in three months. I didn’t think I had a problem. It didn’t even occur to me that was I was doing was unhealthy and eventually life threatening. It was my dirty little secret. It was like a game to me. People started noticing my weight loss. I finally wasn’t the bigger girl in a group of friends; I was beginning to be the smallest.

Two days after Christmas that year, my mom caught me playing my game. She found me purging. There had been several circumstances where I had left evidence or my timing wasn’t right, but I had always talked my way out of these. I knew there was no way I could cover this up and I had to tell her I what I was doing. I sat on my bed and looked into my mom’s eyes and said, “Mom, I make myself throw up.” She was so confused because I said it so nonchalantly. I said it as if was a common habit like leaving the light on in a room I leave. She started crying and within two days I had visited three doctors, including my pediatrician, a cardiologist and a psychologist, and my whole family knew what was going on.

My eating disorder was what I turned to in my time of need. I purged to get rid of feelings, or so I thought. I was really just stuffing them farther down inside of me and I was going to blow soon. During the last weekend of January, I had a deep sadness that I had never felt before. I was acting weird and my mom could tell, but I didn’t know how to explain it. Saturday night I went to a friend’s birthday party and while I was in a room full of girls that I had been friends with for years, I felt like a complete stranger. I was isolating myself and not talking to any of the girls. While at the party I consumed one cupcake and a handful of chips that of course the second I returned home, I was going to get rid of.

After a painfully quiet drive home from one of my friends, I went to my bathroom and did my almost ritualistic act of purging what I had eaten. This time, however, nothing came up. It had been too long between consumption and purging for anything to come up. I freaked out. I bursted into tears. I had such a strong emotion inside of me that I usually got rid of by purging. I had to do something. I had to relieve this feeling. This night was the first time I self-harmed. I made three small, very superficial cuts on my left wrist. I was so scared. I had never felt so hopelessness and depression and so many intense feelings all at once.

When my mother and her boyfriend returned from dinner that evening, I was sitting on my bed with a bloody washcloth pushed against my wrist. My mom didn’t even know how to react. Within ten minutes we were rushing to a hospital because my mom had no idea what else to do. After being admitted to the ER, questioned and lectured by the doctor that was there and had a psych-eval from a psychiatrist, it was decided that I was going to treatment for my eating disorder that night.