It’s some colorless day in the year 2019.
You don’t know what season it is, because everything is gray now. There’s no defining features to anything, no exciting events to pinpoint this moment in your brain.
All you know is that you’re 19 years old. And your chief enemy is every mirror you walk by.
That day in 2019, I turned the mirror in my bedroom around so I couldn’t see myself anymore. Because I couldn’t face her.
The more I open up with my friends, the more I fear that a majority of females have struggled with body dysmorphia and disordered eating at one time another.
For one friend, it was in her mid-20s when she was stuck in a thankless job in a new city.
For another, it’s been all her life.
For me? It was in 2019, when I was navigating my first breakup. And then: my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was just one loss after another.
As a young adult, you suddenly wake up to a world where you have zero control, and you wonder — is living a permanent state of loss?
We turn to the things we can control, in those moments. Mine was food.
I found peace in skipping breakfast, limiting portions, and switching my Starbucks Mocha to a Skinny Mocha, coconut milk, no whip. I downloaded a meal planning app and found a new way to restrict, one that gamified it. I loved confirming at the end of the day that I’d had 1200 calories.
Soon, the number dipped to below 1000.
I wondered why I struggled to hold the mug in which I poured my daily cup of coffee. I wondered why I had to focus so hard to keep my grip on pens, to keep my grip on the world around me. Brain fog hit hard.
I discovered a new addition to my strict regimen: I was in charge of my brother’s soccer practice commute. If, in the 30 minutes between getting back home and then taking him to practice, I could just not eat or pack myself a dinner, then I’d be stuck in the car for 2–3 hours.
No dinner? Excellent.
I smiled, because good Christians don’t frown.
800 calories, daily.
The mental load an eating disorder can weigh you down with is heavy.
Whenever my friends invited me to go to a restaurant, I panicked. I began looking at the menu before heading out, searching desperately for something made without the things that (I thought) were making me sick: gluten and dairy.
The greasy, fast food is cheapest; it’s the foods that I could eat that had the highest ticket price. So then, I was debating if I could afford the $30 salmon-and-broccoli platter while my friends were giggling and digging into fries that made my stomach turn.
I. Didn’t. Want. To. Eat. Anymore. I just didn’t. The decision fatigue before, the blackout during, then the regret and shame and — still — the emptiness after. This was repeated every meal, every day.
I will, unfortunately, never forget the extreme focus I had to connect to in order to make it through the day. I woke up every morning with a pit in my stomach from severe hunger. I prayed it wouldn’t rumble during a class.
Just make it to lunch, just make it to lunch, was my mantra. But those hours from 8 to 12 were excruciating. I started living for 12:00, because my body knew there would be neither food before nor after.
I’ll never forget my Cinematography elective teacher handing out books during one class to make some point about storytelling. He said he chose each book according to how he saw the person.
He gave me Cinderella, because he thought I was like a princess. I smiled and teared up.
I was crumbling on the inside.
Why couldn’t I see myself like he did?
I’ve hinted at this disordered eating experience on my previous blog. I even wrote a devotional about it.
But now, it’s going in a novel.
This story came to me in a dream. I knew, immediately, that it would be a romance about a sunshine girl with a food blog who secretly struggles with an eating disorder, and the grumpy guy who turns her whole world upside down.
Through it, I hope to represent well the experience that many women go through.
Sometimes, still, I see myself in a mirror and catch myself thinking I’m overweight. It’s like you don’t see what’s really there.
But writing about things I’ve been through is a deeply healing experience. Every novel I write is me working out something that’s been embedded in me for a long time, and righting the wrongs.
This one will be no different.
And I want you to know, if you’re in this boat, you aren’t alone. Please open up to someone.
Turn the mirror back around.
No one is judging you as hard as you are judging you.
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