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It is incredibly difficult to say those three words within your own mind, let alone unleashing them aloud: I need help.
We live in a world where our society defines us. A world where we must look perfect and act perfect to fit in. But what is perfect? What is normal?
Eight years of suffering from an eating disorder. Almost eight years spent in utter denial over the fact anything was wrong. Even in the darkest times spent as an inpatient in hospital never once did I use the “a word” because that was something other people struggled with.
I suffered from an eating disorder from the age of 12 to 22 and throughout this time and in the years after, I experienced social isolation and loneliness in many forms.
We're delighted to feature a guest post by Eva Musby, author of Anorexia and other Eating Disorders: how to help your child eat well and be well, about our campaign to introduce waiting times standards in Scotland to match those laid out for young people in England.
The thing I would like to talk about is the support that I have received from my family and close friends. At times I have tried to hide everything from everyone, but I did a terrible job because the problem became clearly visible when my weight plummeted.
I have always thought of myself as a very logical, objective person. But looking at the person that anorexia has made me become, I couldn’t be any further from that.
An eating disorder is not about an extremely low Body Mass Index (BMI) or an emaciated figure, and even though this is how it ended up for me it makes me wonder, now I am on the road to recovery, if my road could have been different.
As a sufferer of a severe eating disorder, I have spent a substantial amount of time throughout my journey reading stories of people who are recovered and have beaten their eating disorders and of those who have learned to beat or cope with other mental illnesses too.
So what are you supposed to do? When you no longer look broken, needing to be repaired. By the people surrounding you, to be nurtured and protected from the outside world.
Writing from a position of almost seven years symptom-free from my once old friend bulimia nervosa, and fully recovered, I read all these stories with such a tangible sadness. Everything described is so horribly familiar at the same time as feeling like a lifetime ago.
What I can tell you about my experience of the early stages of relapse I hope will be helpful to friends/family/colleagues and employers and people in recovery, to make helpful choices and not ones that mirror the eating disorder anxiety and control.