My Journey

With Depression

‘My friends are just with me because they pity me,’ I was 13 when I first started thinking this. I truly believed what I was thinking. I kept thinking this thought over and over until eventually I pulled myself so far away from my friends that I lost them. For the next two years my depression got overwhelming to the point that I would pretend to be sick so I didn’t have school because I could not find the motivation to leave my bed. Eventually my depression made me suicidal. I can’t remember the first time I thought about something bad happening to me but it started around the time I was 15. Most people think that suicidal thoughts is just about killing yourself however that’s not the case; at least it wasn’t with me. It started with me not caring about if something happened to myself. I wouldn’t look both ways before crossing the street or count how many pills I had in my hand before taking them. Overtime, the thoughts got to the point where I actively started thinking about killing myself. I won’t go into detail about how because I know they’re are people out there like me who would look online for suggestions and for triggers. I suffered with depression until I eventually I managed to break myself free from the thoughts. Even still I have days where I’m depressed but there is not a single person on earth who doesn’t have a day where they are depressed.

With Eating Disorders

In 8th grade I started going through puberty and gained weight; because of this, my grandmother started commenting here and there about my weight and I started hiding my body beneath layers of clothes and baggy clothes. The summer after 8th grade my grandmother gave me diet pills and they became my lifeline. I would take two pills right after waking up and watch everything I put in my body. Gradually, throughout the summer I started taking more and more of the pills thinking that maybe they would help me lose weight faster; at one point I was taking six a day. Eventually, I stopped taking the diet pills because I knew it wasn’t right; however, I still watched what I was eating. Three months after ninth grade started I started to use the pills again and slowly started to skip meals, I rarely ate breakfast and lunch was forbidden, I would eat a very small snack after getting home and normally ate dinner. The scale in the bathroom became my partner in crime I weighed myself at least 7 times a day, normally more. I went to a impatient facility after attempting suicide and being there I gained 10 pounds. I broke down crying in the bathroom after finding out, I think that is really what set my downward spiral into motion. I started to exercise 4-5 hours a day, never taking a rest day. I allowed myself only water and diet coke to drink. I allowed myself only 750 calories a day and I would purge after every little thing I ate. I would dump my food down the drain, hide it in the trash, eat at different time so no one would notice and no one did. I would take freezing cold baths just to burn a few extra calories. I would look in the mirror and breakdown in tears thinking I was huge when in reality I wasn’t. At one point I stopped allowing myself to eat or drink anything, including water. I remember my now ex boyfriend telling me I was always so cold and that’s because my body was unable to keep itself warm. I also remembering shaking so bad from starvation that I had to hide my hands around others. No one ever noticed what I was going through, I don’t know how I managed to hid it but I managed to. I can’t remember exactly what happened but I remember thinking about how wrong what I was doing was. I started to cross out all the rules I made and it was a long process alone. I would start eating but the thoughts were still there and I would still weigh myself and as soon as the weight went up more than 3 pounds I went right back to my rules. Eventually, I managed to stop weighing myself and started eating regularly. The negative thoughts around my body image and around food stayed to same. It took over a year to train my thoughts so that I wasn’t crying when I looked in the mirror and until I stopped hating myself for eating. To this day I still don’t like to weight myself because it is a trigger but the last time I was at the doctors and got weighed I almost cried in joy when I stepped on the scaled and didn’t hate myself for what I weighed. This is my journey with dealing with my eating disorders alone.