When you live in such a distorted reality, when your life has been based around one obsession for so long can you ever go back to living a life that resembles something normal? Do the thoughts and voices ever disappear or do they stay there at the back of your mind ready to haunt you with every old or new insecurity that surfaces?  Will they forever test your strength each day?  Will you continue to fight only to be pulled back in, time after time?

How do you explain what you’ve been through? How do you explain the absurd fears, the uncontrollable impulses? How do you explain something that seems so normal to you but so obscene to everyone else? It’s like a prison. It shuts you in at the same time as it shuts everyone else out. Things that mattered to you, friends, family, hobbies, interests, the things you enjoyed, the things you appreciated no longer exist. It takes over everything like a tumor growing and expanding over every aspect of your life. Happiness becomes impossible to obtain.

But you, on the outside, you don’t see all of this. You don’t see the pain that it brings.  You don’t know of the thoughts that go through my head. You don’t feel the fears that hold me back. You only see my behavior and the result of my behavior.  But the reality is the things that go on inside my head are far worse than what you could ever see on the outside. An eating disorder is soul destroying. It is in no way fantastical or fulfilling. The emotional and physical tolls it takes on a day to day basis are overbearing and exhausting.  The alienation… the confusion… the isolation…the silence… the self-hatred…the pain. Everything fuels the cycle and takes away another piece of me everyday.