Turning Points III

Part 3 starts at 15 years old. I was a newly single sophomore who was, unbeknownst to me, developing crippling depression and anxiety disorders. I started hanging out with seniors who could drive and going out to local shows where my friends' bands would be performing.

RIP Toy World.

Because I was out with people all the time, I was eating more fast food than I had ever really eaten before. We were grabbing cheap giant sodas from the gas station by the high school, meeting up at Taco Bell, and spending our last dollars on McChickens.

It played right into the hands of the eating disorder I was developing in the dark, unconscious corners of my brain.

It started with hot chocolate.

I decided that in order to keep my calories in check and not get 'hangry' throughout the day, I would drink a giant mug of hot chocolate for breakfast and then not eat until lunchtime. I felt like it worked. Then I decided that I would drink another one when I got home instead of eating a snack, so I could hold out until dinner. That worked too. I felt skinnier. If drinking instead of eating made me skinnier, that’s what I would do.

It ended up looking like this, and I know this because I had a spreadsheet on my old computer that detailed the calories of all the things I would ingest throughout the day. Including gum. It was called “Your Fatassery.”

I would post it if 1) It wasn’t so fucked up and 2) I deleted it when I got through this. SPOILER ALERT I GET THROUGH THIS.

In the morning I would drink a mug of hot chocolate. I would head to school with my books, notebooks, etc in my backpack. I also had a lunchbox. My lunchbox had an apple juice box, a small bottle of light blue Gatorade, a can of V8, and packets of Crystal Light. I carried a huge water bottle with me, along with a bag of cough drops and a pack of gum. I was a choir kid – lots of water and cough drops were part of my MO.

One cherry menthol cough drop has 15 calories in it. I ate them when I needed to crunch on something.

If I wasn’t going to eat real food with my friends after school, I would eat instant oatmeal when I got home because I was so dizzy and weak from lack of food I knew I wouldn’t last until my parents got home. I would eat real dinner if my mom cooked, or I wouldn’t if she didn’t.

At lunchtime during this year I sat with three senior guys. These guys were some of the best people I ever knew. They had no idea why I didn’t eat at lunch. They knew by this point I was chugging my V8 and sometimes scrimping together coins to buy something from the vending machine. They were usually trying to give me things off their plate. They knew something was up, even if they didn’t know what. I had been doing this for probably six months before one of them said, as they gave me the last of their curly fries: “How come you don’t ever eat?”

My face caught on fire. I was so embarrassed that people noticed. I ate when I went out with friends. I ingested something during lunch time. I came up with some stupid excuse that I ate in third period because I couldn’t last until our lunch period. They took my word for it.

I wish I could say the concern of those friends, the validation from a male, magically fixed my issues. I wish I could say I started eating normally that very day. I wish I could say hot chocolate wasn’t a trigger food for me from 15-19 years old. I can’t say any of that because it’s not true.

My eating disorder was a result of years of unhealthy relationships with food, and just a sliver of a symptom of brewing, underlying depression and anxiety.