The fire that you tried to burn me with, it made me who I am
All the things you said I couldn’t do
Guess what, yes I can
‘Cause I’m not weak, I’m not broken, I am bold
And the fire you put me through turned me into gold
I’m not done, I’m no loser
Watch me take on my bright future
Tonight I’m no bronze, I’m no silver
You’ll be thinking damn I knew her
But you didn’t
"Golden," Ruth B
I would first like to give a shout-out to everyone trying to heal from trauma they do not discuss, especially those who feel that their trauma is not valid.
If this is you, please know:
Your experiences are valid.
The behaviors you developed so that you could survive are valid.
You are valid, you are seen, and you are not alone.
~~~
We know that the development of eating disorders (EDs) is multifactorial. I love that the harms of dieting, toxic sociocultural values, and unrealistic body standards are being thrust into the spotlight but I can’t help but feel that a crucial, albeit uncomfortable, contributor to this mental illness is being left out of the conversation: trauma.
This is one (big) reason why it took me so long to accept, understand, and recover from my own eating disorder. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment my disordered thoughts and behaviors evolved into a full-blown ED, but I do know that it started in high school. I can break my ED down into three main stages: physical survival, sport survival, and emotional survival. I don’t know if my story is typical of most survivors of abuse or EDs, but I hope it sheds light on the functional and fluid aspects of eating disorders. I want my story to give hope to anyone who finds themselves in the same dark place I spent so many years in and, honestly, almost gave up hope that I would ever leave.
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| 20007 USATF National Running Championship, 3000m run. |
Physical Survival
Ever since I can remember, I have always loved running. It gave me a sense of freedom, a thrill of almost flying with every stride, and helped me appreciate how strong my body could be. Soon after my family moved from England to New York, we found a coach who seemed to know what she was talking about.
“Lisa” took the role of my main cross country and track and field coach, and a part of my family, for about nine years. There’s no gentle way to say this: she ended up becoming extremely manipulative and verbally, emotionally, and physically abusive. She also lived with my mum and me once I started high school, but that’s a story for another time.
I don’t doubt that Lisa had her own trauma that was not being dealt with, which manifested as extreme sadness, anger, vindictiveness, and jealousy, to name a few. I’ve heard that survivors of abuse have two options: to become the thing they hate the most, or to break the cycle. I will never know what scars she was hiding, but I do know what choice she made.
Before Lisa turned into the ringleader of my nightmares, she was one of my favorite people. My big sister. My mentor. My confidante. She, much like my own mother, saw potential in me that I didn’t. Before she moved in, she had me and some other girls from the team over for sleepovers. We’d watch movies, do each other’s hair, and (try to) dance to calypso music. She took the subway with me after practice when I had a 90-minute trek from the heart of Brooklyn back home to Queens at 7 p.m. in the dead of winter. She drove me to and from practice in the summers when my mum had work. She bought me an iPod when I was 13 after I broke 5 minutes in the 1500m for the first time.
She used these kinds of gestures to excuse all the other things—the things I was not supposed to talk about, like the time she piled bricks on my head in our backyard once I started to hit puberty and grow because “fast distance runners aren’t tall.” (This obviously isn’t true, but I took her word as gospel.) The day I left a glass on the counter and I was given a toothbrush and a bucket of chemicals to clean her whole bathroom, without a break, even when my head began to pound and my nose started to bleed. I tried to leave, but she was leaning against the door so I couldn’t get out. The few times a shirtsleeve accidentally slipped at school and I had to blame a bruise on an ill-positioned door. When I had to be sent to the hospital after a day of races mid-June for severe heat exhaustion because she didn’t allow me to eat anything other than fruit or drink anything except water the whole day.
Anyone who knows anything about food and nutrition will probably think that last thing odd, seeing as she was a coach who (supposedly) had her athletes’ best interests at heart. Funnily enough, food became her favorite way to control me. I believe it started as a genuine attempt to improve my performance (doesn’t it always). When I was 14, she had read the back of a book, The Paleo Diet for Athletes, (just the back, mind you) and slowly took it to new extremes as my high school career progressed and my body matured.
I was on a strict diet of mainly meat, fruits, vegetables, and water throughout high school. Carbohydrates became contraband, except the night before and morning of races. By the time I reached senior year of high school, food consumed almost every waking (and sleeping) thought. I would dream of brownie mountains and never-ending pasta bowls. One time, I woke up drooling and chewing on my pillow because I thought it was a marshmallow. I don’t even like mallows, unless they’re sandwiched between some grahams and chocolate! When I was at school, I would take bathroom breaks to scour the halls for change with the hope of buying animal crackers from the vending machine. When we had class parties and friends brought food in, I would take what I could fit in my backpack and hide it deep in the back of a drawer under my bed as soon as I got home. If I got home before my coach, I would raid the kitchen cabinets to find where she had hidden forbidden foods and then strategically take just enough to relieve the pain in my stomach but not so much that she would notice any was missing, because if she did, there would be hell to pay. I was hungry all the time, and eventually got so desperate that I would steal food out of our kitchen rubbish bin when nobody was around.
Throughout this time, I did not willingly engage in restriction. For four years, it was imposed upon me under the guise of discipline and concern for my running performance, ultimately instilling a chaotic, primal, rebellious, “fuck you” attitude toward food and anyone who told me how or what to eat.
So, when I finally went off to college several hundred miles away, surrounded by dining courts with a generous meal plan at my fingertips, shit very quickly hit the fan. I was finally free, and for the first time in a long time, I felt safe. I also felt extremely out of control, but I revelled in it. My body had been starved for so long, it was virtually impossible to override the signals it was sending me. I would pile plate after plate of food and dessert in front of me at dinner, full of excitement, gratitude, relief, and pride. I would challenge other athletes twice my size to eating competitions, and win. I felt like a bottomless pit. My body frequently retaliated when I walked back to my dorm, and several bushes became regular receptacles for the food my stomach physically just could not handle. Even so, I found myself fantasizing about my next meal as soon as I was done with one.
I was in heaven—and in retrospect denial. I was making up for all the years of not getting enough, which showed when I grew a couple inches my freshman year. In my mind, I was taking care of my body and giving it what it had so desperately needed but never been given. It didn’t occur to me that I might need to make a change until it started affecting my running. I had several sub-par workouts because I scarfed down a whole sleeve of Oreos or a large milkshake an hour before practice. My new teammates and coaches were also noticing my body change, which is the last thing any young woman running around half-naked in Spandex wants to happen.
I thought some people back home might actually be happy about my newfound curves…NOPE.
Sport Survival
Going back “home” to New York for Christmas break freshman year was a rude awakening. Well, it really wasn’t even an awakening, it was just straight-up rude. Everyone—and I mean everyone—had a comment to share about my body.
I also wasn’t running well. More than anything, I was terrified of losing my scholarship and being shipped back to New York for good, which was absolutely not an option. That summer, I hunkered down and made it a mission to lose most of the weight I had gained that year, since that was so obviously the root of all my issues (isn’t it always). I weighed myself daily, Lisa took various measurements once a week, I swam and ran for at least two hours a day most days, and I found low-fat, low-calorie alternatives for every food product imaginable. I was still obsessed with food, but in a totally different capacity. I became hyper-focused on my body size and shape and freaked out if I didn’t hit my weekly weight loss goals. I needed to become a “lean, mean, racing machine” if I wanted to keep my spot on the team and out of New York.
Again, in retrospect, these are pretty concerning behaviors and thought patterns. And, at the same time, even though my eating disorder had morphed from binge eating to restriction, it served the same exact purpose as it did in the beginning: to protect me. It ebbed and flowed depending on stress level and my performance on the track. Come the end of sophomore year, I thought I had it mostly under control. There was still quite a lot of anxiety (which I wasn’t even able to identify as anxiety at the time) around food and some binges here and there, but I was running decently and largely maintaining my weight, so I wasn’t too bothered.
Then, junior year happened.
Emotional Survival
If there were one meme that could perfectly encapsulate my junior year of college, it would be the cartoon dog sitting in a burning room surrounded by flames calmly saying, “This is fine.”
In one year, my mum got diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer and started her first round of radiation and chemo; I contracted Lyme disease that went undiagnosed for several months; my mum was working with a lawyer to get Lisa forcibly removed from our house because she refused to leave and had become a threat; and finally, within weeks of returning to my sport after I recovered from Lyme, I developed a torn hip labrum that also went undiagnosed for several months and swiftly ended my running career. I’m not sharing any of this for sympathy; I believe that everyone has their own shitstorms to get through and we’re all just trying not to drown. I’m telling you about a big one I went through because my eating disorder was my life jacket. It was a shitty life jacket, but a life jacket nonetheless.
Lo and behold, by some stroke of divine luck I made it to senior year with a minimal dent in my scholarship—I was so close to the finish line. By all accounts, I was in the midst of a deep depression for most of that year. I think a lot of people view depression as a lack of feeling or apathy. At least, that’s what I thought it was until I felt it first-hand. I could feel so many thoughts and emotions that had been building over the last eight years whirling around inside of me that I did not want or know how to deal with, so I did the only thing I knew how to do (well): numb—usually with food, sometimes with alcohol, frequently with both.
I isolated myself as often as I could. I always got dinner to go, made excuses to bail on meals with friends, went through a solid week of hermitage wherein I didn’t leave my bedroom at all except to raid my fridge and cupboards, and didn’t see any point to life except for food. I am not exaggerating when my first thought upon waking each morning was, “Shit, another day. What am I gonna eat to make this less painful?” Food was the only reason I got out of bed for a while, and sometimes even that wasn’t enough.
Food had, ironically, replaced my former coach. It became my best friend, my closest confidante, and my worst enemy. I hated it just as much as I loved it. It was the only thing that kept me going. It gave me a sense of fulfillment and escape, it didn’t disappoint me, it was always there when I needed it. But I also felt guilty and disgusted every time I ate, because it became so hard for me to just eat. Eating became a sacred, secret ritual, and my previous forbidden foods were on the highest pedestal possible. I forgot what hunger and fullness felt like. All I knew was that the idea of hunger terrified me and thrust me back into old memories of neglect and hurt. Filling my stomach meant filling my heart; it made me feel warm, safe, and loved. I overate and binged compulsively, even when I didn’t want to, when I was so full I couldn’t stand up straight, with tears streaming down my face as I just kept reaching for more, more, more—it never felt like enough, could never be enough to right all the wrongs that were no longer in my body, but in my mind and very being.
I didn’t accept that I needed help until I found myself on the floor of my shower, fully clothed, cold water running over me with a razor in my hand. The only thing that stopped me was a single thought—not of food, but of my mum. I couldn’t do that to her, not after everything she had been through. I picked myself up, dried myself off, and went down to the track. I broke down in front of my athletic trainer and agreed to try counselling. I thought I was going to crumple up into a ball and die right there.
Instead, it felt like a cloud had moved out from over me. I let the secret out, and I was still OK (relatively speaking). I finally let go of everything I had kept trapped inside, things that were in turn trapping me, and…the world still turned. Nothing blew up. No one came to take me away. I was still existing, and I had taken my first step forward toward healing, toward recovery—toward life.
And I was not turning back.
~~~
For everyone who is clinging on to their own shitty life jacket:
Yes, you are still here because of it and all the comfortable yet sorta self-destructive skills you have developed. They have served a purpose.
But those skills that helped you survive, are not the same ones that will let you thrive.
It’s scary. It’s daunting. It’s overwhelming. It feels as though it will never get better.
I can’t promise that “it,” whatever that is for you, will ever get better.
But from one shitstorm survivor to the next, I can promise you this:
You will learn how to take care of yourself when the waves get rough(er).
You will know how to show kindness to yourself when most of what you’ve been given is hurt.
You will accept your scars and, eventually, weave them into your story and strengths.
You will learn how to live again, and you will get better.
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| At a picnic with friends at Loughborough University, 2018. |
Lizzie recently accepted a position with a behavioral health clinic in North Carolina as a dietitian specializing in sports performance and eating disorder recovery. You can reach her at elizabeth.briasco [AT] gmail [DOT] com.
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