Content Warning: Eating Disorder
Things are much easier to learn than to unlearn — this is not a concrete fact but rather an experience.
This isn’t for all things like Latin vocabulary words and your ex boyfriend’s address. The things you can’t forget aren’t the things you wanted to forget. They’re harder to forget: your parent’s phone number, the address of your childhood home, the lyrics to a sad song you once played on repeat for three straight days. Those things, that you cling so tightly to that your palms bleed, are facts — pieces we use to live as a mantra, as a lifeline. These things are much more difficult to forget.
From a young age I loved math — I loved counting. I loved manipulating and finding a sense of control within a sea of numbers. I counted down hours, and then minutes, and then seconds left in the day in first grade and felt comfort in knowing. At swim practice I chased the T at the bottom of the pool for hours on end, calculating exactly how much of the set remained, how much of practice we had left.
I still find that sense of comfort in numbers. The spreadsheets that accumulate on my desktop don’t feel like clutter. They are the bed of numbers I find solace in and can rest my head upon.
When I turned 14, however, I started to turn the numbers against myself. They became ammunition. Just entering high school, I stumbled into a storm of self-doubt, confusion and loneliness. When old friendships and athletics started to dwindle in my new ecosystems, I returned to numbers.
It started by downloading an app designed for racing thoughts and hyper fixations. My mom was worried about losing me on the Instagram I had begged for weeks to get, yet she didn’t bat an eye when my coach recommended MyFitnessPal. At the dawn of social media it wasn’t strangers who took away that 14 year old girl; it was arithmetic.
Things got worse and I became weak. My body — the one vessel which I entered this world with — turned into a battlefield. My mind and body no longer played in harmony but destructively interfered, cutting each one to its core. The one true shelter I was given in the world became the thing I hated most. I didn’t see the beauty in my own smile and I didn’t see the privilege to walk, swim, bike, and hike that my legs gave me. I was stuck on how they didn’t look the arbitrary way I wanted them to.
I couldn’t love myself among the disarray I created, but even more so I couldn’t love those around me. In the crossfire, I left everyone I loved as collateral and hid in my self-hatred. By feeding the insecurities, the numbers, and the mirror, I convinced myself that ritualistic self-criticism was a practice of discipline and control rather than a cry for help.
While I could list 20 numbers about the energy in a granola bar, I couldn’t have listed off 20 things I loved and enjoyed. In the counting and the measuring, I lost track of who I was. More importantly, I lost track of who I loved and who loved me.
It was a process to regain the strength I had lost. I began with grounding my sense of self and worth not in numbers but in myself as a person. I am still not back to where I was when I was 14, and I can still name off the stupid amount of energy in all the foods I eat every day. But this time, I don’t lose sleep.
Since then, I’ve learned to see that it’s really fucking stupid to be afraid of muffins and it’s more fucking stupid to lose sleep over it. I’ve learned that it’s fucking stupid to fill my brain with numbers to use them as ammunition against myself, and I’ve learned It’s a lot less stupid to fill my head with memories. I learned that it’s really fucking stupid to turn the sanctuary of my body into a nuclear war zone. And its fucking stupid to hate my legs. They are the gift that takes me places.
By Anonymous
