I don’t really know where to start. I guess I should start with how to stop. I’m learning. 

     My entire youth has been tainted with the sick voice of an entity that doesn’t even have a name. Looking back I hate myself for allowing that. But I’ve spent too much time. Too much time self loathing and wasting away. In a sobering sense, I hate who I am. Not in the same ways I have been hating myself for years but to clarify, I hate the fact that this still has control over me. That I have allowed it, that I have fueled it. That that voice I have lived with for the past 6 years is my own.

     My therapist told me once that not a lot of teenagers have had to make an actual life decision I do so young; to recover, or to let it win. I have spent so long believing that I didn’t have a chance in hell at recovery. They say that only one third of anorexics recover to live a fully healthy life. I don’t want that. No, I won’t settle for that.

     They say when you love something so much it becomes a part of you. Until now I have identified myself as the same thing a doctor did on an inpatient chart a few years ago. “Anorexic, with bulimic tendencies. To be watched carefully. Has no sense of there being an actual ‘reality’ and lacks a belief she can play a role in this life. Suicidal. Discharge: not yet up for discussion.” I remember reading that and deciding then that, there was no such thing as hope. No light at the end of the tunnel. Not for me. I have had therapists refuse treatment because I wasn’t making notable progress. I have attempted suicide. I have starved myself into oblivion.

     Today I decided that I won’t settle for this. I am not my eating disorder. I am not a patient number. I am not a name on another bottle of pills at the pharmacy. I won’t accept my self destructive thoughts as truth. I won’t ever break a mirror again. I will never let another social relationship dissolve to nurture this bitch of a disease that has placed a black tint over every memory I have and almost killed me, almost.

     I want to be a better person than who I am. I want to spread positivity and make this life mean something. I want to help people. I want to teach. I want to inspire. I want to learn to live, again. I want to change that statistic. Before I die, I want to have made a difference through my struggles. Before I die it will no longer be true that ONLY one third of anorexics recover. Everyone deserves a shot at recovery. It is a scary battle, but anything that is brave enough to begin it will me, I want to see finish it with me. I will recover. This is sink or swim. And I refuse to sink.