Lupita Hull: I am still learning to talk

I've read so many eating disorder histories over the last few years, and so many of them seem to include therapy, weigh-ins at clinics, and being rushed to the hospital. That never happened to me. In fact, I only saw the inside of a doctor's office once while sick. My neurologist listened suspiciously for about five minutes while I made up an unrealistic backstory for my weight-loss, which had been extreme, before she wrote a letter to the hospital while I sat there.

I cried for the rest of my appointment while she sent a mail to a nutritionist she knew. "I can't help you with your eating disorder," she said. "This isn't my special field."

The hospital turned me down, because, based on the letter, I wasn't mentally ill enough by their standards for them to take me in. I didn't get that appointment with the nutritionist before one and a half year later. At my sickest, I slipped through the system. The odd thing about eating disorders, is that being helped seems like the worst thing that can happen while you're in it. At the time I was sick, being rejected from the hospital was fantastic news.

I could always deny everything about how bad it really was to my parents, and to myself. Doctors were harder to trick, they knew what they were looking for. What I didn't understand at the time, was that being so terrified of admitting my problems and talking about them where symotoms of my illness. In my head I had to prove to everyone it wasn't really that bad, and the way to go was to recover on my own, without ever letting the mask fall.

So, I went through a year and a half of fighting my eating disorder alone, believing that it was the best solution. I recovered alone, and except for my one neurologist who saw straight through my lies, I was never diagnosed with anorexia. "It's my medicine, it makes me sick, I don't have an appetite, I'm working on gaining weight," those were the excuses I told everyone. It was the truth, I was in fact ill at the time, and my medicine made me sick, but it was not the whole truth.

My parents knew there was more to it, but they let me have my version of the story. As long as I was getting healthy again, they weren't going to argue.

 I'm recovered now, I suppose, but my appetite has not returned. Food is work to me, I only eat it for the sole purpose of getting the energy I need. Is that a good recovery? Maybe, maybe not. I never shared my feelings with anyone, pretended the whole time that I didn't need to, that there wasn't anything wrong, and now I'm stuck in a mindset where I have an extremely unnatural relationship with food. All because I kept denying how bad it was. Two years ago, this was my idea of the best outcome.

 I should be happy, shouldn't I? I made it through, no hospitals, no doctors, no one telling me to do this or that. But there's something missing. Maybe I'm missing a diagnose, the diagnose I was so terrified of while I was sick. Because it's now, after getting better, that I realize how sick I have been. And how much I still need to talk about it.

There are so many eating disordered out there who never share their struggles, and never get the help they need. I keep thinking that if I, at the critical stage I was at sixteen, could be turned down by the health care system, who else are being rejected? Anyone could be. What I'm trying to say is, please ask for help. Talk with your friends about it, tell your parents. It doesn't make you less brave, and you don't have to recover alone.

An eating disorder is a mental illness, and your brain is playing games with you. You're not supposed to go through that on your own.

Thats why we have each other.

Thank you Warrior Talk. Lupita x