As a little girl, I believed that being perfect was the key to being loved. It’s probably not surprising, then, that I spent a lot of my childhood being hard on myself.
In elementary school, my behavior and academic performance were impeccable, and my first grade teacher loved me. The same was true, for the most part, throughout my grade school years. But adolescence, when it came, was a complicated time. All at once I had to negotiate my perfection because its meaning wasn’t black and white.
Was I supposed to be perfect for my teachers? My peers? My parents?
Turns out, hands down, I wanted to be perfect for my peers. I wanted to dress and behave to their liking, and I wanted to be included in their popular circles. Most of all, I wanted a boyfriend.
I had absolutely no idea how to be this person, and I failed miserably. The girl who, her whole life, had known how to make everybody love her, was at a complete loss.
So she decided, even though her body weight was within a healthy range, that the reason the popular kids ignored her was because she was fat. Here is something I can control, she thought.
Easier said than done. Hunger has a mind of its own, and depression is fertile ground for binge eating and rebellion against oneself.
Should I stay in third-person point of view, telling this story? Yeah, let’s do it.
So this girl binged and purged in a nightmarish cycle that she didn’t recognize as an eating disorder but rather saw as a failure of self-control. In the meantime, she tried out (unsuccessfully) for cheerleading, attended school dances, and let popular girls copy her homework, but all were futile in winning the admiration or attention of her peers.
She would later learn that she had bulimia. She would learn it from her hairdresser, who had no idea that her client was bulimic, and casually dropped horrific details about what happens to people who throw up their food. Heart problems, a mangled throat, rotten teeth. She never made herself vomit after that.
And if you look ahead three years later, you will see that she survived, that she had come into herself, found her own style, her own friends.
I am puzzled as I look back at that girl. What happened within her? How did she rise up from the depths of self-hatred and find someone inside whom she liked?
Not a question that can be answered in one simple blog post. Stay tuned, though. Because the mosaic comes together, one piece at a time. And yours will, too.