I never know how to begin the story of how I began this fight. I like to think that a weight loss challenge with my friends in high school was how everything began but that would be a lie. To completely encompass my story, I have to go a few years back in my world.

For context, I am the youngest girl out of seven. We have a blended family so I have siblings that did not grow up in the house with me. In my home, was my parents and my two younger brothers who are twins. Being the youngest girl yet the oldest of the three in the household was interesting because depending who was home, I was either the baby girl or the oldest of us all. I grew up exceptionally close to my parents and was a definite Daddy’s girl. I never saw my world as anything less than perfect until I encountered the latter end of elementary school. By the end of sixth grade, I had reached puberty much faster than my peers and the other girls liked to remind me of it.

I was a cheerleader for 6 years before I gave it up the season after one of my coaches made a disparaging remark about my body. I loved cheer but quickly learned to hate my body. As puberty changed me, I realized that my body no longer looked like the coaches’ favorites on the team. I was no longer a favorite and I assumed it had everything to do with my changing body. I quit cheer at 12 because I didn’t look like the other girls and it killed me inside. My mom was okay with me quitting cheer but she was adamant that I still needed to play a sport and I decided to pick up field hockey.

I adored field hockey and I fell in love with the sport. How could I not? My strength was valued and everyone looked different in our funny-looking kilts. We were all different and it was okay. My first season was great and it ended on a great note. I played with my two best friends and some how we got even closer than we already were. I loved my team and I loved the fact that field hockey was able to drown out the people who used to yell “Go Home Sydni!” down the hallways daily. On the field, with a stick in my hand, I was able to cope. I was able to deal with all the negativity that surrounded me. This all came to a screeching halt when my dad fell ill a few days after my last game of my first season.

Within days, my dad had went from trying to pick me up and play with me to sitting in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at the University of Pennsylvania. There my father stayed for over a week after being rushed into open heart surgery in the middle of the night. My father, in his 40s, was the youngest person on that floor by decades and it broke my heart to see my daddy with tubes and machines littered across him and his room. It made me feel so helpless and devastated. My mom stayed at the hospital for days at a time sleeping in the most uncomfortable chairs in his room. She almost never left his side and we were being cared for by just about everyone at this point. Someone walked us to the bus and made sure we got home alright. Someone else made sure that we had our nutritional needs being met.

If you grew up in any community, the reaction to any event good or bad is food. This was no different. For weeks, people from church and family friends bought over way more food than 3 kids could eat alone. So for weeks, without field hockey, I found other ways to console myself about my dad who was home but not himself by eating EVERYTHING. If it wasn’t nailed down, I probably consumed it. I ate away every feeling of sadness surrounding my dad, shame surrounding my body, and anger surrounding the bullying that I endured. This went on for about 2 months and I gained weight (not surprisingly). I might not have noticed as much if a school nurse had not told me that I was gaining weight too fast and that it might be wise for me to go on a diet. Looking back, I wish I had the knowledge that 21 year old me has. Instead, 13 year old me decided that since it was December, I could start in January as a New Years’ Resolution.

I allowed the opinions of others to affect me greatly. A fun fact about me is that I refused to wear yellow until I was well into college because a girl told me when I was in sixth grade that I looked like Big Bird when I wore the brand new matching set that my mom had purchased from Target. I was crushed and I never wore it again. I refused to wear yellow for the next 7 years.

For weeks, my New Years Resolution was successful. I was ‘in control’ and not eating the ‘bad foods’ that made me gain weight. I was ‘successful’ until Pi Day (March 14) came. My teacher brought actual pie to class that day and I ate it. I felt immense guilt because I had more pie than I thought that I should have. Looking back, I don’t even remember how much I had. All I remember was typing into the search bar “what to do if you have too much food”. I remember that I was reading a thread that ‘answered’ that question. There were plenty of answers and some of them were mild and some were not. The most outrageous being “you could always just throw it up lol”. That joke planted the idea in my head. Before that, I might have just cried and vowed to not do that again. Now, there seemed like an action plan that was a backup to under-eating. I used the back-up plan successfully a few weeks later.

I only used the back up plan intermittently for the next year. Maybe once every few months. It wasn’t until my freshman year of high school that I had decided to use the back up plan more and restrict a bit less. This ‘brilliant idea’ came after a few of my friends and I decided to do a weight loss challenge. I thought that what I was doing was cheating, so I didn’t tell my friends or my teachers. I kept it nice and secret until I lost consciousness at winter track practice a few months later. By then, I had lost a substantial amount of weight – enough to win our competition. Once the loss of consciousness happened. Everyone knew that something was up but they weren’t sure what it was. I was at a healthy BMI even though my clothes no longer fit my usually healthy body. I confided in my friends and they stopped the competition.

Although the competition was over, I had become addicted to the behaviors that had hurt me in the first place. By the end of the school year, I had another episode of ‘just dropping’. I thought it was just weird. I had no clue that my barely existent breakfast and the lunch that I had purged could contribute to my physical body feeling so incredibly weak. This time, coaches caught on, especially my field hockey coach. I fessed up to the restriction when she first asked and I was going to mention purging when I got the courage. My courage left when I was sitting in an unfamiliar office with an unfamiliar woman who knew all the details of what I told my coach. I denied everything because I felt so betrayed. There was no action that took place at home and at school, I learned to hide more. My freshman year came to a close and my sophomore year ushered in.

My fall sport was field hockey and I was never nourished for it. No one knew but my eating disorder blossomed and went underground. My behaviors increased and I stopped sharing with friends because of their reactions. It wasn’t until I went to Paris that the load of crap hit the collective fan. I could not keep almost anything down our entire trip. I barely remember the trip even now. My memories of it include small bathrooms, monuments, and family dinners. During that trip I sent an email to that same coach. Basically an SOS. Once I sent it, I knew that the jig was up. I came home and I was not ready to face the music. My coach pulled me from my first period class and we talked. A little while later I got a pass to go to guidance – which I dodged. Eventually, it was made clear that I needed to go immediately. This time, my coach was there with the same unfamiliar woman and a school nurse (not the same one from middle school). I come clean, finally. I cry. They tell my parents.

I get home and holy hell erupts. Fighting took place for days and weeks when it came to mealtimes. I was adamant about what I was okay with having and nothing more. If something was forced on me, I would yell about my magic powers of bowing down to the porcelain throne. Everyone at home drops the whole eating disorder thing pretty quickly. I convince myself that if they think I can get better automatically, then I should convince them – which I did.

For the next two years, my restrictive habits with a few drops of purging becomes a purging habit with some restriction. I had only a few people at school who knew that I hadn’t stopped. I didn’t want to tell my coach because I was afraid that I would get benched during field hockey or lacrosse seasons. I had these ultra depressing journals that I would write ultra depressing song lyrics into as I became more obsessed with ‘perfection’ within my illness.

I coasted through my last two years of high school without anymore incidents of my “eating issues” being exposed. I graduated and ended up going to the school that was closest – across state lines but still close. No one knew it at the time, but I chose it because I knew that I wanted to try and get help at my new school. At college, I found a nutritionist who then referred me to the counseling center who then referred me to my psychologist. All of these people and these things were in place when I had the worst months of my illness. Six years strong in an eating disorder and I had never experienced symptom use the way I did at school. I guess having a large meal plan and living across the street from the dining hall wasn’t exactly the best thing for the raging bulimic. In those halls and stalls, I broke. I finally broke.

After years of numbing out, I heard God on the beach one day. I only heard one word – Surrender. That word surrender got me through the voicemail that I left on Lauren’s * voicemail. I told her that I was willing to try something more. It had been her recommendation for weeks but I was finally ready. Within a few weeks of that voicemail, I had the worst day of my eating disorder. That day, I had binged and purged 7 times. Much more than my once or twice daily up to that point. My stress and overwhelm was finally bubbling over and it was bad. I came in for an appointment with Lauren a few days after that eventful day. Immediately she reminded me of what I had heard on the beach. I cried because I knew that she was right. I agreed to call a treatment center that day and we scheduled an intake for the following afternoon.

I was driven to the intake by my mom because I had complained the night before that I did not feel like paying for an Uber to get there. She decided to take me – not knowing where I was going. Unfortunately, I was so malnourished that I did not even bother to think that she would be alerted to where we were somehow. Stupidly, we drove. I went upstairs for my intake and tole the clinician all the answers to her seemingly unending questions. When she said that she had the recommendation, she told me she was going to get my mom and tell us together. She left and my heart began to race. I don’t remember much from those next minutes except for the word ‘residential’ and my mother’s blinding rage. Rage at the clinician who gave the recommendation and rage at me that I never told her. I never told her that I hadn’t stopped.

That ride home was the longest 20 minutes of my life. I cried and Lauren called to see what the recommendation was. She asked but I am sure she already knew exactly how everything had gone down. My idea of a carefree summer with my prestigious internship went down like the Titanic. In the next week or so, I tried to bargain my way out of going. When I realized that you can’t put the cat back in the bag, I tried to push the admission for as long as possible. I got the recommendation the last week of March and it was mid April by time I had a date that I could agree on. Cinco de Mayo. Because I refused to go immediately, I was still ‘at-risk’ and a liability to Lauren. She decided that it was unethical to see me unless I went immediately – which I refused. That month between my concrete date being set and my admission was the most wild month of my life. I was either in the library, in a frat basement, or head in a toilet. I didn’t do much else.

This seems to be a similar strand of a recovery story for meany. Once I knew that I was going away to treatment, I used those last days before my admission as a last hoorah. I got worse in every single way. My labs were worse, my symptom use increased, and my dependency on purging even stronger. When I got to the residential treatment center, I was what you would call a volatile patient. It did not take much for something to piss me off and I would leave the building and go into the woods. I went into the woods for anything and everything. I was so scared to cry in front of people that I did 95% of my crying on a fallen tree about 75 feet from the opening into the woods. Every counselor who had worked there had probably followed me out to the woods or coaxed me out of them at least once during my stays. My defiance only got worse as I faced some of the demons that landed me there in the first place.

My parents called it summer camp, and I called it hell. I spent three stays, three months in that residential treatment center that year and 2 months in their outpatient subsidiary. In one year, I had spent about as much time in a facility than I had outside of one. Those walls gave me friends that I still have two years later. Those walls also gave me recurring nightmares with the line that always repeats. “Honestly Sydni, I don’t think you will ever get better.” The nightmare is based off of an appointment that I had with their psychiatrist. He was an ass and the motivator for me to leave every time. Those walls medically stabilized me enough to do the work on an outpatient level with Lauren.

Now it is more than two years later and I have not had to return to Hell on 475 since 2017. Stability and a team that believed in me always allowed me to pick myself back up instead of throwing me back to the wolves. Lauren and Kelly*, my nutritionist from the hellhole, are now my team. Kelly is literally my only team member who I felt trust in. I hated when she had to do her job, but she never lied to me. Lauren has stayed with my dumb ass for 2 and a half years now (not sure why) and Kelly for a year and a half outpatient.

I have had more ups and downs than a broken roller coaster, but I have never hit rock bottom again. Honestly, I don’t think that the people around me would ever let me get to rock bottom again. Especially because rock bottom has consequences.

In the future posts, I will write about specific things that have hurt my recovery or have encouraged me to really keep fighting (ie. Body Image, Medical Issues, Education, Exercise, Intuitive Eating, Trauma, etc.)

*Names have been changed