Just a Bump in the Road by Sydney

Just a Bump in the Road by Sydney - February 2017 Scholarship Essay

No form of recovery is straightforward. The road is full of dips and potholes and sometimes chasms that seem far too wide to cross. However, most people don’t actually come to this realization until they are forced to walk this road themselves. I walked it my freshman year – at which point I had developed severe anorexia, anxiety, and depression.

At first, I refused to get help. I didn’t want to get better – to me, organ and heart failure was a consequence worth suffering as long as I was thin and perfect by the time I was in my coffin. After I nearly fainted at marching band rehearsal from a severe lack of blood sugar, my parents found out that I had been skipping meals and hiding food and that I had dropped 20 pounds in the past two and a half months alone. They forced me into therapy.

I’ll never forget the threats – to force me into inpatient treatment, to send me to an “insane asylum.” But I stood my ground and said that I would, I WOULD find a way to die if that was to be the case. So my parents and I met at a compromise and I was sent to see a therapist, just to talk. I was extremely unwilling at first – she asked too many questions, none of which I wanted to answer. How much do you weigh now? I don’t know. Yes you do, tell me. I don’t want to.

It was an endless struggle, me arguing futilely, and eventually my therapist looked me dead in the eye, up to her ears in exasperation, and told me that she couldn’t help me, she just couldn’t. Not unless I truly wanted to get better.

I didn’t want to get better. But I also hated seeing my mom (who has always been unconditionally supportive of me) sad because of what I was doing to myself. It was for her, not for me, that I agreed to cooperate, that I agreed to raise my calorie count bit by bit until I had gained back enough weight as to not be a risk to myself. There was a period of time where I agreed to let her hide all the scales in the house, without telling me, so that when I would relapse into my old way of thinking, I wouldn’t be able to find them and obsess over them again.

It was going great, and then my world turned upside down. There was no “trigger,” there was no “last straw.” The self-hatred simply became uncontrollable, and I started drinking water excessively to suppress my hunger, and to trick my doctors into thinking that I weighed much more when in reality, I had started starving again. My mother was terrified when she found out, and I daresay disappointed as well – but it was nothing compared to the amount of disappointment that I held for myself. I had failed – I was weak, I gave in, I couldn’t hold up against the mindset that still lurked within me. There was no climbing out of this hole, I thought, because I tried, I tried even against my will, and I still slid down and ended up even deeper than I had been before.

I started contemplating suicide. At least I wouldn’t be a burden, I thought. At least I couldn’t worry anyone anymore because once I was dead, there was nothing more that I could do to let myself, to let everyone that cared about me down again.

It was at that point that my attempts to hide what I was going through from the marching band, from anyone other than my immediate family, fell short. People started noticing that I was acting strange at rehearsal, that I moved sluggishly and like I was delusional, according to them, and I couldn’t exactly bring myself to lie to those that I considered to be my second family. A select few of the marchers that were particularly close to me approached me, and I told them everything. Shamefully, tearfully, because I was embarrassed, because I had failed, and because I was dead certain that I didn’t deserve to live another day longer because I had wasted so much of everyone’s (my parents, my sister, anyone who held any kind of attachment to me) time.

But they didn’t scorn me, like I had thought. It took time, but through their support, I realized that my huge relapse was only one step of the journey. In fact, if I had not failed in the first place, I never would have discovered that I had such a huge support system behind me, and that I don’t have to keep my troubles bottled up inside of me, and that no, being overwhelmed is not weakness. Asking for help is not weakness. I became much less critical, of myself and of others, and overall, I do not think I would be the healthy and fully physically recovered person I am today if I had not fallen first.