By the time I was 16, I’d given several motivational talks detailing my experiences with anorexia, which I developed at age 12 after my mother died of breast cancer. On stages across my home state of Massachusetts, I spoke about how sick I had been and how—over the course of five hospitalizations and a year and a half in residential treatment—I got better. I prided myself on having reached the gold standard: full recovery.
But the truth is, I didn’t know exactly what “full recovery” meant, and I couldn’t recall anyone ever defining it for me. (Today, the eating-disorder field has still not arrived at a consensus definition.) In my mind, it was the ultimate measure of success: a life completely free from anorexia. And so I shaped a narrative around this life. I told people that my disorder had “gone away” and wouldn’t come back, in effect mistaking my recovery for invincibility.
My talks were met with standing ovations and words of praise. I started limiting my food intake, and I soon found myself caught in a vicious cycle of binge-eating one day and restricting the next. The cycle would last for almost a decade—a stretch during which every slip would turn into a slide.
I was supposed to be “all better” and couldn’t bear to admit I had fallen back into my disorder. So I kept my behaviors hidden and continued telling everyone I was fully recovered. Every night I vowed to do better the following day.
But each day was a broken promise. To renege was to constantly wrestle with a question that had no easy answer: What if I never get over my eating disorder? This was my deepest dread.
This dread followed me after college, when I began my career as a journalist. Alone in my apartment at night, I would get lost in Google rabbit holes, searching for media coverage and books about other people who were navigating the messiness of recovery. But all I found were stories about people who were either sick or fully recovered.
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