Alison E. Sullivan
|
|
I can’t remember a time when I had a normal relationship with food. Sometimes I think back, trying to conjure a time when I could just eat and not attach some sort of value to what I was putting in my mouth, but nothing really ever materializes in my head. I don’t have a moment when I can definitively say “this is it, this is when I started to hate my body, this is when food became something I feared and loved all at the same time.” I simply have a collection of chaos from as early as I can remember to when I found myself at the bottom of a deep hole of despair and shame and figured it was about time I climbed out. I only have a void there, where I lost any real voice and became mute, allowing only my trauma, only my eating disorder, only my shame, to speak.
I was raised by divorced parents. I don’t ever remember them being together, and I can’t imagine what they would have been like if they were. They were both addicts, one to meth, one to alcohol. I lived in a constant swirling storm of their havoc. I did not grow up feeling as if I was safe; I was an afterthought, first in my mother life, then my fathers. I was tossed from meth house to meth house with my mom, and I often did not have regular access to food, as meth heads forget to eat frequently, so remembering to care for or feed a child isn’t always on the top of their list. I learned early that my mother was unpredictable and it was best to stay quiet and out of the way. It was also probably a good idea to eat as much as possible when there was food around. This is actually a behavior I still struggle with, leaving food to sit in the fridge without fear there will be no food tomorrow driving me to simply eat all of what is in front of me now. When you go days between having any food available, I think that stays with you, and I also think that is something beyond my eating disorder, that may never get better. But when I was a child, it was just my reality, I knew from TV and books not everyone lived like that, but I couldn’t really name anyone who didn’t. |
Eventually, my Dad met a woman, and they got married and she saw what he was letting me live in and swooped in like a savior bringing me to live with them. My stepmother had no experience with children, let alone damaged adolescent girls. She had no clue how to behave with me, how to react to me, nothing. She only really knew two things, that I was a bit chubby, and that I binged on junk food whenever I was alone. She also knew that behavior of eating all the food the moment it hit her cupboard was eating her out of house and home and making me fat. Her response to my slightly soft midsection and her skyrocketing grocery bill was not to tell me to embrace myself or be more active. It was not to take me to therapy or gently remind me that there will always be food for me to eat; no, it was to tell me I was fat and no one would ever want to be a fat girl’s friend. Her response to my binging was locks. She locked the cupboards, she locked our fridge until she came home from work, and when she went to bed, and she locked our big storage freezer. If she was not home with keys, I could not eat. She set out breakfast food she deemed diet worthy, she packed meager lunches, and she portioned my dinners. I did not get a few dollars to buy a snack like my peers so often did. I got what I got and that was it. She added shame to my inability to speak for myself, burying me in self-loathing.
This didn’t cure my binging. It curbed it quite a bit, but mostly it taught me to be sneaky. I binged at friends’ houses and hid the evidence. I got a job at a fast food place and binged on old fries. I spent whole paychecks at the convenience store, but the food was long gone by the time I made it home at night. Now, my binging was not just something I did because it had brought me comfort living at my moms, where I never knew if I could count on food coming home the next day, now it had become this shameful beast I could not shake. It had become a compulsion.
It got worse on my own, after I moved into my own apartment. I remember maxing out my first few credit cards at grocery stores. When the credit was all gone, I took out pay check advances. I got pregnant with my oldest child and subsequently got WIC because I was lower income. I would eat the cereal and milk they provide you well pregnant in less than 24 hours. Eventually I was working in a casino, sometimes bringing home several hundred a day in tips, and still, my binge secret left me poor, and then after having my daughter, it left me poor and what I deemed as fat.
Then at 21 I got sick. I had a daughter less than a year old. I had a great job. But one night at work I started throwing up in the customer bathrooms. It got so bad someone called security, which called 911. I remember thinking it was just my pesky gallbladder. The doctors had told me to lighten up on the fat I had been eating, and that I might need gallbladder surgery, but I had ignored it. I didn’t want a scar, and any day now, I had kept telling myself, I was going to stop secretly eating massive amounts of food. Yes, it was my gallbladder but it was also my pancreas, inflamed and eating itself alive. I was dying. Like really dying from necrotizing pancreatitis. I became septic, my lungs failed, I was put on a ventilator, and eventually, they took my pancreas in a late night surgery to save my life. I suffered after. I was warned I would die within 10 years, and that they wouldn’t be a great 10 years. They would be filled with pain, and I now would have diabetes.
The diabetes part, they weren’t sure, they had left a little bitty piece of pancreatic tissue, in hopes it would produce insulin for me, and when I first went home from the hospital I was given drugs for type 2 diabetics in hopes I would never need insulin. I was put on a radical low fat diet. I swiftly began to lose nearly 100 pounds. It fell off of me so fast that my doctor barely had time to put two and two together that I wasn’t producing near enough insulin and that was why I was losing weight so rapidly. Finally, he put two and two together and told me that I would need insulin. It would help me put weight back on and keep me alive. I only heard weight. That was it. I began a 10-year journey of balancing a fine line between how much insulin I could take and still force my body to eat itself alive, and how much was so little that I would end up in the hospital. I often found myself lying in an ER, nearly dying, because that line shouldn’t be balanced.
Then, I found an old shape magazine article online, about diabulimia. I remember running to a friend’s apartment a few down from me with a printout of the article in hand, making her read it and just sobbing, that it was exactly me. But even with that article in hand, it took me getting pregnant with my second child to seek help. I found Diabulimia Helpline and the diabulimia awareness group on Facebook. I started just kind of reading the posts in the group at first. Hearing other girls talk about what I regularly felt inside was comforting. I started to feel like maybe I would be okay, I was taking all of my insulin due to pregnancy and I felt really really good. I hadn’t binged in months. I thought I was set.
But I crashed hard after my first son was born. I was so dissatisfied with my body. My then husband made constant remarks. It started a little bit at a time, and then one day, I was just right back where I started, and then, a little after that I was worse than I had ever been. I was in a bad marriage. I was barely able to get off the couch because I never had any insulin in my system. I was in a job I hated but worked for health insurance I barely utilized except to pay for ER visits. I was going to die. Then, within the Diabulimia Helpline’s diabulimia awareness group, a girl posted a video just talking about how damn happy she finally felt in recovery. She was halfway across the world, with a Scottish accent but in the moments that I watched her I realized I finally wanted to just be that happy.
I tried to go to inpatient, that didn’t work with kids and costs even with insurance, but with the urging of those within that support group I started with an outpatient therapist. I printed some information from the Diabulimia Helpline website and went to have a confession with my endocrinologist. As soon as I started to tell my story, he tried to point me to the website that I had information in hand from. He promised me we would work together to fix all this, and for the last over 4 years, we have. He got me a pump. He stopped weighing me. He tells me I am amazing regularly. He encouraged me to pursue my current career, nursing.
In recovery I have gained so much, I left a terrible marriage and gained a husband who loves and supports me at every turn, I gained a relationship with my children, I gained a relationship with my mother who is now a recovering addict, I went to nursing school and gained a career as a Diabetes Case Management Nurse, I gained a healthy ability to approach exercise and became one of those people who runs for feeling it gives me not the size of my waist, and more than anything I gained a voice. I am not a slave to the demons that shout from my childhood, I have a voice to shout back. I am not a slave to the people I feel like I have to please in my life, I have a voice to say no. I am not a slave to the space that the eating disorder used to occupy in my head, I have a voice to talk myself off ledges. I am a slave to no one and nothing, my voice is powerful, and it speaks loudly now for others.
It speaks for those who cannot in my job, as an advocate for others with diabetes. It speaks to others within that same group where I got help. It encourages those still struggling. It gently nudges those who feel like their lives will never be happy towards the idea that a happy and recovered place really does exist. It speaks, with that Scottish girls video all those years ago as its guide. It speaks for health and pride and an end to shame and misery. It speaks for who I am and what I can achieve and what I already have. My voice in recovery is beautiful and I am proud of it.
This didn’t cure my binging. It curbed it quite a bit, but mostly it taught me to be sneaky. I binged at friends’ houses and hid the evidence. I got a job at a fast food place and binged on old fries. I spent whole paychecks at the convenience store, but the food was long gone by the time I made it home at night. Now, my binging was not just something I did because it had brought me comfort living at my moms, where I never knew if I could count on food coming home the next day, now it had become this shameful beast I could not shake. It had become a compulsion.
It got worse on my own, after I moved into my own apartment. I remember maxing out my first few credit cards at grocery stores. When the credit was all gone, I took out pay check advances. I got pregnant with my oldest child and subsequently got WIC because I was lower income. I would eat the cereal and milk they provide you well pregnant in less than 24 hours. Eventually I was working in a casino, sometimes bringing home several hundred a day in tips, and still, my binge secret left me poor, and then after having my daughter, it left me poor and what I deemed as fat.
Then at 21 I got sick. I had a daughter less than a year old. I had a great job. But one night at work I started throwing up in the customer bathrooms. It got so bad someone called security, which called 911. I remember thinking it was just my pesky gallbladder. The doctors had told me to lighten up on the fat I had been eating, and that I might need gallbladder surgery, but I had ignored it. I didn’t want a scar, and any day now, I had kept telling myself, I was going to stop secretly eating massive amounts of food. Yes, it was my gallbladder but it was also my pancreas, inflamed and eating itself alive. I was dying. Like really dying from necrotizing pancreatitis. I became septic, my lungs failed, I was put on a ventilator, and eventually, they took my pancreas in a late night surgery to save my life. I suffered after. I was warned I would die within 10 years, and that they wouldn’t be a great 10 years. They would be filled with pain, and I now would have diabetes.
The diabetes part, they weren’t sure, they had left a little bitty piece of pancreatic tissue, in hopes it would produce insulin for me, and when I first went home from the hospital I was given drugs for type 2 diabetics in hopes I would never need insulin. I was put on a radical low fat diet. I swiftly began to lose nearly 100 pounds. It fell off of me so fast that my doctor barely had time to put two and two together that I wasn’t producing near enough insulin and that was why I was losing weight so rapidly. Finally, he put two and two together and told me that I would need insulin. It would help me put weight back on and keep me alive. I only heard weight. That was it. I began a 10-year journey of balancing a fine line between how much insulin I could take and still force my body to eat itself alive, and how much was so little that I would end up in the hospital. I often found myself lying in an ER, nearly dying, because that line shouldn’t be balanced.
Then, I found an old shape magazine article online, about diabulimia. I remember running to a friend’s apartment a few down from me with a printout of the article in hand, making her read it and just sobbing, that it was exactly me. But even with that article in hand, it took me getting pregnant with my second child to seek help. I found Diabulimia Helpline and the diabulimia awareness group on Facebook. I started just kind of reading the posts in the group at first. Hearing other girls talk about what I regularly felt inside was comforting. I started to feel like maybe I would be okay, I was taking all of my insulin due to pregnancy and I felt really really good. I hadn’t binged in months. I thought I was set.
But I crashed hard after my first son was born. I was so dissatisfied with my body. My then husband made constant remarks. It started a little bit at a time, and then one day, I was just right back where I started, and then, a little after that I was worse than I had ever been. I was in a bad marriage. I was barely able to get off the couch because I never had any insulin in my system. I was in a job I hated but worked for health insurance I barely utilized except to pay for ER visits. I was going to die. Then, within the Diabulimia Helpline’s diabulimia awareness group, a girl posted a video just talking about how damn happy she finally felt in recovery. She was halfway across the world, with a Scottish accent but in the moments that I watched her I realized I finally wanted to just be that happy.
I tried to go to inpatient, that didn’t work with kids and costs even with insurance, but with the urging of those within that support group I started with an outpatient therapist. I printed some information from the Diabulimia Helpline website and went to have a confession with my endocrinologist. As soon as I started to tell my story, he tried to point me to the website that I had information in hand from. He promised me we would work together to fix all this, and for the last over 4 years, we have. He got me a pump. He stopped weighing me. He tells me I am amazing regularly. He encouraged me to pursue my current career, nursing.
In recovery I have gained so much, I left a terrible marriage and gained a husband who loves and supports me at every turn, I gained a relationship with my children, I gained a relationship with my mother who is now a recovering addict, I went to nursing school and gained a career as a Diabetes Case Management Nurse, I gained a healthy ability to approach exercise and became one of those people who runs for feeling it gives me not the size of my waist, and more than anything I gained a voice. I am not a slave to the demons that shout from my childhood, I have a voice to shout back. I am not a slave to the people I feel like I have to please in my life, I have a voice to say no. I am not a slave to the space that the eating disorder used to occupy in my head, I have a voice to talk myself off ledges. I am a slave to no one and nothing, my voice is powerful, and it speaks loudly now for others.
It speaks for those who cannot in my job, as an advocate for others with diabetes. It speaks to others within that same group where I got help. It encourages those still struggling. It gently nudges those who feel like their lives will never be happy towards the idea that a happy and recovered place really does exist. It speaks, with that Scottish girls video all those years ago as its guide. It speaks for health and pride and an end to shame and misery. It speaks for who I am and what I can achieve and what I already have. My voice in recovery is beautiful and I am proud of it.