Over Exposure

Superman,
That’s what you want me to be.
To be your everything.
I only wish you could see.

If I could fly,
From all the pain and the fear,
Tell me why,
Why would I be standing here?
from “Superman”
by Luna Halo

I love this song, it’s so pretty. It makes me think of all the people I’ve known who want others to fix their problems for them. If I could fix you, don’t you think I could fix me? However, if you just need a friend, that’s another matter altogether.

On a a different note, I was once again reading someone else’s blog and they were talking about a memory of something that happened when they were young. A food-related incident. I got me thinking, when I told my family about my eating disorder back in January (which I still regret), I’m sure they felt blind sighted. My mom is the only one who had wondered. (Likely because she said she frequently heard me purging. I’m a lot quieter now *big grin*)

I’m very good at being secretive. I always have been. I learned that young. I can’t remember a time I didn’t keep secrets. Maybe when I was a toddler, but I remember being 5 and having secrets and being afraid to tell anyone about myself.

A lot of this stemmed from run ins with social workers and my fear of being taken away from my family. I was afraid that if I said or did the wrong thing, they’d think my parents were bad parents and my family would be split up and we’d all be put in foster care. A little background about my family. No, my parents weren’t bad parents. The situation was they’ve never had a lot of money. Often, we lived in motels in the winter and went camping in the summer. Camping was much more inexpensive and we all loved it. And apparently, camping is fine for families that have a house too. But not for families that don’t. The state considered my family homeless (I never did, but I was just a kid enjoying myself) and they didn’t think living in a tent was an appropriate situation for young kids. I don’t really understand the logic, myself.

During the winter, as I said, we lived in motels. Usually one or two room motels. Now, up until I was 11, I had 5 siblings (that’s 6 kids total, in case you don’t like math). When I was 11, my youngest brother was born. So we had between 6 and 7 kids plus 2 adults, so 8-9 people in one to two rooms. The state didn’t like that either. It didn’t help that our neighbors would call child protective services because of how many kids we had living in that little space.

So I learned, when others are around, you’re on your best behavior and you watch everything you say. The other reason I have always been secretive is because I was sexually abused as a young child and that was something else I couldn’t tell people. (Wow, that’s the first time I’ve shared that…) So all my life has been a collection of secrets and pretending to be perfect no matter what.

I started self-harming when I was about 7. It started with things like punching my legs and it evolved over the years to conclude with cutting and burning. That’s something I’ve been working to stop for about a year and a half now. I started dieting around 8 or 9. It was never anything consistent at first. It’d be for a few days or a week and then I’d stop. Somehow, I “knew” I shouldn’t tell anyone about that either.

How did it start? Well, I’d always been a chubby child. My older sister was 2.5 years older but always thinner than me. My whole childhood, she was referred to as “Skinny Minny”, so where did that leave me? When we were kids, she and I always got the same Christmas presents and we did nearly everything together. But she was better than I because my parents like the way she looked better. She was skinny.

Honestly, I think this put a lot of pressure on her as well. When I was around 11, she started dieting with me. She was 13 at the time. Anyway, when I was…I don’t even know, about 6 or 7, I was in the bathroom playing (we only had 2 rooms) and my mom came in. She told me I looked pregnant. That comment stuck with me. Then, when I was 11, we started going to a new church. The 5th and 6th graders went to Pizza Hut after church one day. I didn’t eat. I remember thinking that if they saw me eat, they’d know why I was so fat. I spent the afternoon drawing on napkins to try to impress people.

It’s been pretty much the same my whole life. Not eating in public. Feeling (and being) fat. Now, I was homeschooled from kindergarten through 12th grade, so I didn’t have to eat in a cafeteria. But when I was 19, I attended a special program at a local alternative high school that would result in me getting a diploma from a real high school and getting to take a lot of interesting classes. However, this is when things started to get worse. I started cutting out carbs. I’d take a piece of turkey wrapped in lettuce for lunch. I started drinking lots of water.

When I started college the next year, I was excited that I now had access to a gym and a long distraction from food. I did as much as I could to take up my time. I rode the bus, which took up plenty, then I’d exercise before classes. Go to class, go to work in the Administration office, got to my office as the honor society president and work on honors projects for the school. I got to experience so many fun things in college. However, one of them wasn’t food. My parents were going through tough times financially so I felt guilty if I ate their food. My school’s student life office gave out free popcorn. So each day, after work, I’d grab a bag and eat that while I worked on honors stuff and home work. Then I’d go home and sleep. On the weekends I didn’t eat.

It caught up to me in my second year. I got sick and didn’t have the stamina or strength to fight it off. I ended up missing weeks of classes and eventually had to withdraw. Two months shy of completing my sophomore year. I spent the summer recuperating and switched to a school out of state for the fall. I lived in the dorms, an experience I wouldn’t trade for the world. However, eating was still not my strong point. We had a gym on my floor and the girls and I would go there to study. Sometimes for hours. It was the first place I hit in the morning and the last at night (well, other than the shower).

I rarely went in the cafeteria during meal times. Sometimes, I’d be with friends and they’d decide to go to grab something to eat and I’d remember I forgot this or that or had to study for some test or whatever. Toward the end of the year, a couple of the girls on my floor started noticing. They started bringing me food from the cafeteria. Talk about awkward!

Anyway, at the end of classes, I decided I missed my family too much and moved back home. That’s when my eating got critical. I started fasting more. Sometimes for a couple weeks at a time. I never let myself eat more than 500 calories. My family was really starting to notice me losing weight, but they all thought I was trying to be healthy. They told me they were proud of me. My sisters said they were jealous. This only fueled my ED thoughts. Best of all was when my dad told me he was proud. He’d never told me that before. If it took loosing weight to make him proud, that’s what I’d do.

Last June, I went to work at a summer camp. I admit, I took the job mostly because I knew I’d be able to lose a lot over the summer, but it was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. I did lose a lot. But I also came across a problem. I had to eat every meal with dozens of other people. Now, I had purged occasionally since I was about 15, but I was never very good at it and I preferred (and still do) restricting. But now I couldn’t do that as easily. Especially since, as part of our staff training, everyone was told how to spot signs of an eating disorder. I had to eat. So I figured out a way of purging that worked for me. So I’ve been purging pretty constantly since last July. (I started purging on my birthday, by the way. How sad is that?)

So that’s pretty much the history of my eating disorder. That turned out a lot longer and a lot more detailed than I had originally intended.

And looking back, maybe this wasn’t on a different note. I don’t seem to be able to fix myself, do I?