Eating Disorder Awareness Week 2023
Eating isn’t hard anymore. I can notice the taste, the smell, the texture of food now. I can listen to my friends, joking and laughing over a shared meal now. I can enjoy food that I want to, but I can also not think about food and focus on other things now. Like when my next class is, a book I’ve been reading, or someone I’ve been meaning to talk to. And sometimes, I look over from my table at my university hall and outside the wall of windows, over the bustling motorways and the resting townhouses, towards Starship Children’s Hospital.
The irony, or perhaps fate, of this is not lost on me. I remember looking out from the hospital, over the bustling motorways and the resting townhouses, with a fighting mum to my right and an obs machine to my left. As the cuff squeezed my arm and a lead tapped into my heartrate, my mum and nurse exchange despairing glances, Mum and I both trying to visualise a future beyond the walls of the hospital where I can go to university as I had always wanted—always failing to see me alive by then.
Next month, the amount of days spent in the hall will be more than the days spent in hospital. My time there will be nothing more than a little blip in my life. Won’t it? But as I get lost in the day dream over a dinner of roast beef I think of the girl I was, watching me from my old room. As much as I tell myself I am different now that I am recovered, I can still feel her lingering. I could feel her being proud of me when I graduated high school. She breathed a sigh of relief when I started choosing people who loved me as much as I loved them. She enjoys the food she never could when I try something new that she would find scary. Instead of spending time proving that my illness doesn’t hurt me anymore, time is better spent giving my sick self the experiences and love she never thought she deserved.
What I hold now, from an age I never thought I’d reach, is that it gets better. Storms pass, terror subsides. There will be a time when you realise it was not irony or fate that got you through—it was blind hope. When my future was completely dark and could not be seen, I kept moving. Not because I thought I was going in the right direction but because everyone else was moving too and there was nothing better to do. Even as I fumbled in the shadows, feeling powerless over my own body, hope steered me. As the hate in my head drowned me over and over, not allowing me a second to breathe, hope filled my lungs. When my body was running on no energy it was hope that gave me strength—even though I didn’t ask it and, quite frankly, didn’t want it.
When your voice is hijacked by your eating disorder, and you don’t feel like you anymore, know that you are not lost. You will get better. You will be more than okay, you will be happy. Your inner hope will prevail and you will live in a future you cannot even imagine.
