It’s not about what you look like. It’s the fine line between elation and panic; the split second between when the spoon hits your mouth and when you swallow mental poison. It’s being five years, 40 pounds, since starvation, and yet fifteen minutes ago you laid on the kitchen floor slapping tile until your palms went red. It's the irony of recovery, the invisibility of pounds; weight that suddenly makes you "healthy" on the outside. It’s not about what you look like. It’s tho

"nihil fit ex nihilo" Nothing comes from nothing. The rain washes over the streets of Manhattan in April and all that’s left behind is the occasional rotting cardboard sign. Months of darkness will soon dissolve into the sheen of another hot summer, but for now, I run along the drizzly East River just after sunrise. Beside me is my dog Remington, who is afraid of canes, small people, and sudden movements. She trips me at least twice, dodging something that isn’t actually ther

For some reason, I can only remember tiny snippets of the life I had before society decided I was suddenly an “adult.” The number eighteen is as arbitrary as any other digit; some have been through the unimaginable prior to the landmark, others haven’t. For me, early years were lost somewhere in time. I do hope someday I will find them again. Few and far between, the moments I remember involve pain, food, an animal - or some combination of the three - and were predictive of w

I wake up in the morning to 20 seconds of contemplation; the inevitable thought storm. It’s a new day with potential for all the good things I’ve only ever had for fleeting moments, but without fail, the mental game plays itself on. Will it be one of the good days or one of the bad ones, and do I determine the answer? Recovery has been a five-year-process; it will be a course of many more. But it still tortures me to wonder why on the outside I look so shiny and yet the mess

Resilience Project, Middlebury College Sand to Stone Lately I’ve found terror on my dinner plate again. Please, have a side of paralysis with your chicken. The mirror is no enemy to me anymore. It’s learning to unlearn the art of starvation that once robbed me minutes, seconds, hours of my life. It’s “losing control” each and every day and going to sleep knowing I may never have it back. And they say that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. It’s falling out of love with the fi

“What you are going through today, and who you are as a person, are two different things.” -Unkown “EDNOS”: what does the acronym written in my medical records actually mean for my life? The “eating disorder not otherwise specified” diagnosis is a tricky one. I’m not quite this and I’m not quite that but I have however been irrationally fearful  of the calories in a stick of gum, wondered for hours on end whether having that half a banana earlier today will proceed to haunt m