Disordered appetites

you can't just stop eating

I learned how to count calories in my sophomore year health class. 

Perhaps it was inevitable that this was my drug of choice - the “good girl’s” addiction. Maybe I would have latched onto the idea even without that misguided assignment. I’ll never know. What I do know is that my world was on fire and someone handed me something that looked like it could put out flames. So I stopped eating. Then, when my body’s good desire to stay alive became too hard to resist, I turned to exercise to squelch the ever running mathematical tally that haunted my waking hours. 

As a young teen living through things I didn’t have tools to cope with, this allowed me to survive. But the heartbreaking truth is that sometimes the very thing helping you survive leaves you barely alive. I could have chosen something “worse” - drugs, alcohol, sex. Perhaps these would have been more destructive, taken longer to come back from or been harder to quit, but I don’t believe they would have been any worse for my soul. …