Julia Prescott

I read this post and knew I had to respond with my own story. 

Thanks in advance for reading what I deem an un-tumblr-worthy post of lengthiness. 

I remember it was winter, because the rowdy kids from Oakland Tech High School had ceased camping out underneath my dorm window and loudly riffing on each other, and beat boxing off-beat while they waited for their parents to pick them up. The weather had dropped a whopping 50-degrees in the past couple of days and even the jumping up and down they would do while shouting at each other wasn’t enough to warm them up.

This had only seemed to bother me, not my Spanish-speaking Graphic Design major roommate because I was in our dorm room most of the time, and she was usually out with some of the other Spanish-speakers in our building. She would come back later, usually waking me up as she trickled in noisily shouting in Spanish on her Nextel phone. In the moment I was pissed, but back then waking me up in the middle of my sleep wasn’t difficult to do. I went to bed pretty early, around 9pm. I never thought I would be like my Mother, turning in the moment the sun set, but I couldn’t help it – I was exhausted, and there was only one way to stave off my exhaustion.

 This was the first day I started to see them: the bones jutting out of my clavicle. They eased in at first, shifting to the surface over the past couple of weeks. Admittedly, I was too distracted by my new jean size to notice, but here they were : shouting for all the world to see, becoming a problem as soon as they were a triumph.

I made a mental note to not wear any necklace or any jewelry to bring attention to that area of my body, as if I could stop wandering eyes from looking and judging. As if I could do anything to keep the outside world from silently witnessing my self-inflicted punishment.

My jeans drooped as I walked up the stairs to my job at the Berkeley Movie Theater, I turned and commented to my co-worker proudly. “Look at this! Crazy, right?” I extended the waistband of my black work jeans directly mimicking any weight loss ad. “I just bought these like a month or so ago.”

I beamed with the thought of being slim. I did it. All day people talk about mustering the courage and the strength to become healthy, and I’ve done it. I clutched a mug of hot water I gathered from the sink and shivered as I desperately tried to allow the steam wash over me. Despite the heater blasting through out the lobby, I was always cold.

The ratio of women to men at the theater was 5:1, so naturally when long afternoons stretched on at the speed of molasses, the conversation shifts from being about movies, to TV, to books, to diets. That’s just female science. I had the early traces of an eating disorder when I was in Middle School – often pocketing my Mother’s lunch money in exchange for nibbling on my friend’s foods. This was fueled in equal parts of wanting to be as thin as my prettier friends, and also to get some padding on my weekly allowance. Thanks to a low developing sense of will power, and good parenting from my Mother in feeding me frequent well-rounded meals, I was able to slip by into High School without converting myself into full-fledged malnourishment.

If my toxic curiosity of dieting as a 13-year old was the little leagues of eating disorders, the knowledge I gathered at the theater was the majors. I don’t blame the environment I was in, hardly at all – I was at a point in my life of my highest vulnerability: Living alone for the first time, encumbered into a small art school I didn’t believe in, and my Grandmother was going through cancer concurrently – bingo, there you have it. One ill-willed glance in a hallway would’ve set me off, and unfortunately for me, it took much less.

I had graduated from High School just a handful of months before – beaming as a scholarship-winner to attend film school, being told repeatedly on a loop that I “held the keys to the future” or some similar brand of motivational babble. I thought college would be spent writing essays, drafting scripts, shooting movies – but more often than not I found my thoughts occupied in logging food, roaming grocery stores, going to bed early as my stomach rumbled exhaustively. 

I was so caught up within the delusion of my hard work, that when the compliments turned into comments – ones that sunk with the trace of mild horror, I was numbly unaware. I took shocked glances as jealousy, feeding the irony of my expanding ego with my dwindling frame.

One day I visited my Grandmother at the hospital. My Mother drove up from Los Angeles to pick me up from my dorm and take me over there. I fought back tears as I talked to my Grandma, trying to remain positive as she sat in her hospital gown looking so small. My Uncle met us in the room and as we walked back to our cars he said, “She’s looking so thin,” my Mom, thinking he meant my Grandma agreed. But he grabbed my upper arm, to which he could ring his entire hand around effortlessly and looked at me with a stare I’ll never forget.

I’ve been caught, and I didn’t even know I was hiding.

I was 19 years old, 5’9” and weighing 89 pounds.

Even though I knew I had a problem, stopping was the furthest from my mind. I often wished I could just wave a wand that would make me have normal-looking upper arms again, or (and this is a little gruesome) a normal or existing backside again. That’s right, my ass had completely sunken in on itself.

One day my Mom set up a meeting at a facility that could provide some support for me. I had met with nutritionists before, so I thought this was something similar to that – they tell me I need to eat more protein, fat and carbs and I pretend to listen and never implement their guidelines.

She slapped a pamphlet on the table in front of me. Smiling women glared at me from the cover, and as I opened it and scanned the contents inside she began to tell me about “what they do there”. I learned it was an eating disorder treatment facility – kind of like rehab for Anorexics, Bulimics, and Over-eaters. They had two kinds of programs – and I was being enrolled in the out-patient program, which meant I would be spending an undetermined amount of time within their ivy-lined walls.

I burst into tears. I felt like I was being deported to boarding school. My emotional scale was a rollercoaster of rage, to self-pity, to helplessness. I put in my notice to leave my job for the rest of the summer, and spent one last evening as a free woman before starting my open-ended sentence.

 I spent the months of July to December in the facility. Each day I would get weighed by the nurse, eat breakfast, eat lunch, eat dinner, and snack under the strict supervision of the staff. If I would cook anything in their kitchens, I would have to show every ingredient I put in while they monitored my process. No morsel of food was to be left on the plate.

I endured a lot of, for lack of a better term “crazy shit” while I was in the facility. Like never going to the bathroom with the door closed, or alone; being told by the Nutritionist that I had early signs of osteoporosis (something I later discovered was incorrect); finding out I was enemic; learning what “water loading” was (guzzling as much liquid as humanly possible before being weighed so that I appear heavier than I actually am).

My time within the facility provided me with the support I needed. I went from complete denial, telling the other patients that I had, “Just gone too far with dieting” to admitting I was a full-fledged anorexic. Since our mutual addictions were literally worn on the outside, there was no way to hide what we were going through to the world. So we only had each other, bonding over our lowest points like what I imagine an AA meeting would go.

 I’m happy to say that it’s been 4 years since I was released from Eating Disorder Rehab. And even more happy to say that I’ve been at a healthy weight for most of those 4 years, though I still struggle on a daily basis with my disorder, I’m happy to say its in increasingly smaller ways.

Though I am not fully recovered, I desperately wish I was and am working on it constantly. I’ve learned that having a secret of this magnitude is not just something you blurt out to your significant other in a moment of emotional vulnerability, much in the same way you disclose a troubled childhood. This disorder is pushed daily, often straining much more than just myself.

I wrote this all out partially as a form of therapy, of finally letting my secret out to the world and filling in the void for everyone’s mandatory, “Here’s How I’m Fucked Up…” answer. If my story in any way relates to someone struggling with a similar situation, or someone in the midst of their disease could potentially change their mind, even just a little bit from taking the plunge from bad to worse, then this lengthy post has served its purpose.

Thank You.