My name is Keyra and I have an eating disorder.
I have always been very open and honest about my past with others. I think I’ve always been a little too open actually.
I always act like I’ve “conquered” my past. When in reality, I’ve continually struggled.
All the time that I spend helping others is time less spent on actually focusing on myself and allowing myself the freedom to be healthy.
And that is the key word in this equation.
Health.
Food has always been a problem in my life.
First I overate.
I loved coming home after a day at school and eating Oreos, Cheetos, whatever… I ate my over sensitive emotions away in food.
And when kids made fun of me for my so called “chunkiness”, I took this to heart a little too much and began to throw away the lunches my mom made for me, somehow thinking that skipping lunch would make me get skinner and make people like me.
I was probably no more than nine or ten years old at this point.
Then things progressed.
When I couldn’t control external things, I knew I could always control what I ate.
When I seemingly started to fit in again, I began to put immense pressure on myself to eat less, to be skinnier, to exercise more, to be more perfect.
I became a vegetarian and eventually a vegan. Being so strict with what I ate that I really did not eat that much. Yet, I always felt like I ate too much.
Eventually, I stopped eating altogether.
Everytime I looked in the mirror, I saw somebody wasn’t really there. All I could see was this chunky little girl who constantly got made fun of.
In reality, I was 90 pounds or less.
Luckily, I seemed to snap out of it.
I didn’t want to not live.
And everything seemed to be okay.
However, I didn’t really snap out of it.
I just got good at pretending.
By this time, I was seemingly an adult, busy with my own life. It became easier to pretend.
I would eat when I was around people, and I would eat sparingly at other times.
I was still wildly obsessed with working out to the point that I started to neglect my relations with friends and family.
And another few years seemed to go by, with periods of eating completely fine and periods of “forgetting” to eat.
Within the past year to two years, things started to get crazy again.
A lot has occurred within the last two years. But the overall scheme of things has been instability; moving continually, not knowing what I want to do with my life, feeling drained from working so hard and not knowing exactly why I am, feeling directionless and purposeless, relationship ups and downs, and the general growing up process.
I have never been one to handle stress well. By now, hopefully its obvious that I handled (i.e. controlled) what I ate because I couldn’t control these external things. In my everyday life, I felt out of control. I also had deeply rooted feelings of insecurity from things that happened early on in my life that I had never let go of.
So, what would you know? My problems with eating have seemed to amplify recently.
Just when I thought that I had overcome the many years of hard work I had put in to rebuild myself, everything came tumbling down in one swift motion.
I am tired of it!!
I literally have begun to drive myself crazy, constantly thinking of what thing I have to skip eating tomorrow because of what I felt I overate today, (at one point I flipped because I had one Ricola, something that was in addition to the other things I ate that day, and so I would have to skip something the following day). This was a red flag to me.
Things have been getting really out of hand recently. Out of nowhere, I have also become a really angry person. I have been getting so upset with people that I will verbally assault them. I have broken down way too many times, crying hysterically and loathing myself and my circumstances. I have been wound so tight that I just can’t relax and I flip out on those closest to me. And this just isn’t me.
So, why am I writing this??
I am writing this for several reasons.
The first being that I need to be completely honest with myself. I am so good at being completely honest with others, but not so much with myself. Writing down how I feel, what happened during a day, my stressors, what have you, and reading them back to myself will be a great tool for again learning how to handle this thing that I will have to deal with for the rest of my life, (because an eating disorder is with you for life)!
The second reason why I am writing this is to start a conversation with others who are dealing with the same or similar problems, or just with people who have POSITIVE feedback/insights. I want to be there for others. I am extending my hand. I truly do understand!!! I want to create an open forum with others where they will feel comfortable discussing what is happening with them as I discuss what is happening with me.
This is an open and ongoing journal that I will share because I really, really, want to be healthy!!!!!
So please let me share my journey with you and feel free to share with me!
Namaste.