the long story…

This is going to be a long one.

Let’s just say these last few months (years?) have been quite the adventure.

Fall of 2018, I started to spiral into a depression. What started as a your brother may be getting deployed to Afghanistan turned into a your brother is going to get blown up and mom and dad are going to think that you should’ve died instead and also you’re fat and worthless and Brandon’s going to come back in a body bag and somehow that’ll be all your fault. Looking at it now, I know I just talked myself deeper and deeper into a hole that had no actual evidence, but at the time, it felt so, so real. I was just so sure that Brandon was going to die in Afghanistan that I was already planning his funeral in my head.

I cut myself for the first time in over a year about a week later. I called my parents in tears, saying I was scared he was going to die and scared because I hurt myself again. My parents assured me that it was going to be okay and that nothing was definite.

As months passed, I mostly got over my intense fear of him dying (at least as much as one can when a loved one is in the army). No other news came about him being deployed or not, and to this day, he still hasn’t left. But for some reason, even though my fear of my brother dying in combat ebbed away to what I think is a fairly healthy amount of fear, rather than the the-world-is-imploding amount, my sadness and sense of worthlessness and insignificance stayed. And stayed. And stayed.

I started staying in bed later, talking less, eating more, going to the gym less, and started saving my homework to do until closer and closer to the deadline, until eventually I stopped going to the gym, was eating like crap, and started turning in uncompleted homework assignments. My roommate was getting concerned. I stopped hurting myself for a short time after I called my parents that initial time, but eventually it escalated and I began wearing more and more layers as more and more of my body was marred by sharper and sharper objects. I’d convince myself that I wasn’t going to eat, and then try and fail at throwing up when I did, something I hadn’t done since high school. My thoughts continued getting darker and more intense, and I started having panic attacks in public while wishing I was dead.

This continued for a while. My roommate at the time and best friend, Carly, grew more and more worried about me. In late October, she went to one of our trusted dance professors, who urged me to make an appointment with a psychiatrist with the university’s health services. I kept it a secret from my parents and told the psychiatrist that I didn’t want any medication since my parents would see it on our insurance. Things continued to spiral.

Around Thanksgiving, I found myself in CVS, looking for something to kill myself with. I bought a chopping knife, the sharpest thing I could find. Carly walked in on me on the floor, bingeing on two different flavors of Oreos and fiddling lightly with the knife. I scooped up everything as I heard the door unlock and acted like everything was normal. Later that night, while we were both in bed, I texted her, telling her I bought the knife and saying I wanted to die. She asked if she could take it and said she was going to call someone while I sat in my bed sobbing. She called the Crisis line and she talked to them for a little while without much help. Then she urged me to call my parents and I did, and then we went to bed.

A few weeks after, I found myself wanting to die again. A lot. I had gone through our medicine cabinet and gone and bought some other medicines that I thought could kill me if I ‘needed’ it. I texted Carly that I was feeling like wanting to die, and we watched some Cars 3 on her laptop. When she shut it off, she asked if I was feeling better. I said not really, that I just didn’t care. She asked if I was safe to go to bed, and I said I didn’t know, not wanting to outright lie, but also not wanting to admit just how badly I wanted to get the pills. She begged to call my parents, but I wouldn’t let her. I said she could call literally anyone else. She called her parents, who said to get the RA in our Residence Hall. We got the RA, who had to call the on-call professional staff, who had to call the police, who gave me the option of going to the hospital or getting people from the Crisis Line to come. I chose the Crisis Line option. We stayed up past four in the morning waiting for and then talking to people from the Crisis Line only to wake up at nine the next day to study for finals a few days later.

A week later, my professor called the police and brought me to the hospital for the first time. They put me on Prozac and my parents came to pick me up. The rest of winter break I spent under the supervision of my parents, making sure that I didn’t freak out and hurt myself or have any adverse side effects to the medication. I was still sad.

By March, I crashed again. This time more definitively. Carly studied abroad for the semester, so I had no roommate, making it much easier to keep to myself and hide my self destructive behaviors. I bought bleach this time and had a day and time I was going to kill myself–the Friday before Spring Break. I had a meeting earlier in the week with that same professor, who I had, right before, given a lot of my blades to so that I wouldn’t have them. She asked if I had bought any more, and I said no, but that I had bought something else. She asked what I bought, and without thinking, I said bleach and laughed. She said if I had a plan that she had to call the police again, and off I went to the hospital a second time.

They changed my medication to Lexapro, but that didn’t help either. I stayed sad and continued hurting myself, buying more blades, and stopped trying to come off as functioning. Near the end of the semester was the first time I successfully made myself throw up a lot, and I remember sitting on the bathroom floor wondering what in hell I was doing.

The summer was much the same. I stayed on campus to take some classes and work. My eating was a little more stable than before, but I continued hurting myself and felt awful and unmotivated. I went home for two weeks at the end of the summer feeling mediocre at best. The moment I got back to school, I got back to hurting myself.

Junior year started and I took on way too much. To cope I continued hurting myself and started throwing up consistently. I would go, at most, a week without throwing up for the next five months, mostly purging two to three times a day. I would have panic attacks 2-3 times a week at least, started sleeping less, drinking caffeine like it was my job, and looking like a disaster. Some of my friends knew what was going on but didn’t know how to help. My therapist was helping a lot, and I’d do my best to do what she suggested, but I still felt like I’d be better off not here. Somehow I ended up staying out of the hospital for the semester, even though things kept getting worse.

Over winter break I stayed on campus, and with the dining halls closed my eating really spun out of control. My therapist was out of town for about a month, and so I did my best to function but struggled immensely. With more free time I had more and more time to self destruct. The semester started, and I was excited to get back to routine.

I soon saw that I yet again had taken on far too much, and struggled more than I ever had before to understand what was going on in my classes. This struggling pushed me to not enjoy my other classes either, as I continued focusing on my failures. Within a month, Carly insisted on taking me to the hospital, where they put me on Zoloft and sent me on my way. I didn’t really feel better, but tried for a couple days, only to fall into my old habits within the week and wonder why I was still alive.

Less than two weeks later, I had a performance I was supposed to be in for the dance program at my college. I threw up before all the dress rehearsals, and, the last night of dress rehearsal, on my walk home, I ended up on a bridge with the intention of jumping off. I looked out over the traffic below and pondered whether or not it was high enough and wondered how on earth I got there.

I started hyperventilating but wouldn’t leave the bridge. I kept thinking I was a chicken for not just jumping and getting it over with. But something was keeping me that I couldn’t place. For whatever reason, I couldn’t do it, and that made me feel like even more of a failure, that I couldn’t even kill myself ‘right.’ I texted Carly panicking that I shouldn’t have gone there, and she asked where I was, called me and talked me off the bridge, and then picked me up to spend the night at her apartment.

I left early the next morning to go to my therapy appointment. I told my therapist that I kept wanting to be dead, and that I couldn’t shut it off. I told her about the bridge and about Carly picking me up, and how I didn’t want to do anything anymore. She asked if I felt safe to go home and I said that I wasn’t sure. I said I felt bad about missing the show and school but that I didn’t want to do any of that, either, that I just wanted to be dead.

My therapist said she was willing to let me do the show for the week if I knew that I was going to stay alive for it, and that I could admit myself to the ER after the last show. I started crying (for the first time in front of my therapist ever), recognizing fully for the first time that I didn’t think I was going to last. She walked me to the Emergency Room (her office is in a hospital), and sat with me for four hours as I admitted myself to the emergency unit to wait while they found an inpatient bed in a psych ward.

They transferred me to a nearby hospital for inpatient, where I stayed for six days. While I was in the ER and then the first day or two inpatient, I remember oscillating between thoughts of wow, you did this and I’m so proud of you and what on earth have you done?! By the second or third day, I came to an important realization–I wasn’t accepting love from anyone in my life. Instead, I’d gloss over it, telling myself that they were faking it and not letting myself feel any of it. And I realized that that would have to change in order for me to want to be alive and stay that way.

In the hospital I met some really great people. Some seemed sad, some seemed anxious, and some it was hard to tell why they were there. But I really valued getting to know them and them sharing their stories. I built a 1000 piece puzzle with another patient in three days, I watched Frozen and Elf with another, I gave a stress ball we made as an activity to a man who looked like he needed it. The psychiatrist described what recovery would look like, and I found myself, for the first time in a really long time, that I wanted it. I found myself a little bit excited to be alive.

While I was there, we weren’t allowed our phones, but there was a phone we were able to use to call people. I called two–Carly and my other lovely friend, Julia. Carly visited on Sunday, and Julia on Monday. Carly brought me books and told me all about the show. She also brought me a card from the cast in the show that made me cry a ton after she left. For the first time I noticed how much Carly cared about me and let myself feel it. And man, did that feel good.

The day Julia visited we got a pass from the psychiatrist to go to dinner with the challenge of my not throwing it up. (While I had been there, I was monitored after I ate so that they were sure I didn’t go purge.) She told me all about the show and her classes, and I told her all about the hospital and how I was feeling and some of the more fun stories and tidbits. We got dinner at a buffet and then got Frosties at Wendy’s, eating them in her car before we went back to the hospital.

When we got back, I told her I had something for her. I gave her a letter explaining what I couldn’t get myself to say out loud–how I was afraid everyone was going to leave and about how letting myself feel loved felt dangerous, but that I didn’t want her to stop. We hugged and she went home and I cried for a long, long time, realizing that I had to figure out how to let that fear go and that I really was loved.

The psychiatrist gave me a book to read while I was there, called Eating in the Light of the Moon by Anita Johnston. There was one part of the book that really resonated with me, and here it is:

One of the first things a woman on the path of recovery from disordered eating must do is to reframe her concept of who she really is. She must recognize her bright, intuitive nature for the gift that it is even though others’ discomfort with it has brought upon her some struggles and emotional wounding. She must begin to assert, both to her self and the world around her, that she is not defective. She must begin to review and retell the story of her life from the understanding that there is nothing wrong with her, that although she has been hurt, she is not damaged goods. Her disordered eating behavior is not evidence that she is a faulty human being in desperate need of repair.

Anita Johnston, Eating in the Light of the Moon, pp. 18-19

I finished that book the morning I left, and that excerpt is one that continues to ring through my head. Whether or not I completely believed it, I had to take a chance in believing I was worth it and in acting like it. I’ve kept this in mind as I’ve begun allowing myself to ask my friends for help. I’ve begun letting myself be seen as vulnerable and fully being honest with people. I’ve been more open in sharing what I’m working through, and working to not do it by myself, because I don’t have to.

Since I got out of the hospital, I’ve made a number of life changes. The day I got out, I chopped off a bunch of my hair. When I was purging a lot, my chin and neck would get really swollen, and I’d hide it behind my hair. I took away that safety blanket and it has provided yet another deterrent from throwing up. I dropped my computer science major, which I was originally getting with my dance major, and with it, three of my classes. I also moved to a new dorm on the other side of campus, much closer to my classes, as at night on my long walk home I would often talk myself into and plan how I was going to hurt myself.

I think most importantly, though, I have started reaching out to my friends to help me. I’ve been open with my professors, asking how to better handle looking in a mirror at my body for multiple hours a day. I’ve read books on eating disorder recovery and have incited the help of Julia and Carly in completing the exercises and activities with me so that it seems less scary. Together we’ve created a system where I will text Julia to keep myself accountable when I want to engage in problem behaviors.

It’s been about a month. And it has been CRAZY. But I think I’m doing good things for myself for the first time in a long time. I’m letting myself feel the love and support and letting myself get the help because I deserve it. I wrote extensively in my time inpatient, and looking back I can see the growth in optimism and hope. And I’m going to end this story with something I wrote the day before I left:

“I’m doing my best to believe I deserve this–that I deserve to be loved, that I deserve to feel better, that I deserve to get the help I need, and that I deserve to be here.”

All my love,

Allie