I had this secret inside me that I felt was my one and only friend and companion that took me away from all the pain and anxiety that I had moving through my life and inside of me.

Welcome to the Premiere Corporation. A presentation of the audio podcast. This is actually happening Episode 153. What if you wanted to disappear? My parents always seem to have a very solid and supportive relationship. I remember they kept a bit of playfulness together. They seemed like friends and lovers. They had been together for, I don't know, about 13 years before they even had kids. I have really good memories of a lot of playfulness and lightheartedness, a lot of family support, and then things started kind of happening snowballing quickly.

I have a very vivid memory of going on a drive and my dad having to stop the car and step out and he just passed out. None of us understood why my mother didn't we couldn't conceptualize it as kids, what was going on.

That kind of started our journey into discovering that he had non Hodgkin's lymphoma, stage three, by the time he found out he was only thirty eight years old at the time, just kind of starting out life, their marriage, their family life.

I was four and my sister was seven, my sister and I, you know, our entire world somewhat shattered at that point. So a lot of my first memories are in a hospital. My dad lived there basically just trying to desperately save his life as a young man with children. I remember being very confused, just it seemed like my life was chaos at that point.

When they were like 19 years old, they were living together and, you know, in a committed relationship and she said that my dad would have these really intense, like, premonition type dreams. And she said that one day they woke up and my dad looked to her and said, like, I might die young. I really feel a strong pull to that being my reality. And I just thought I wanted to share that with you, you know, as our relationship is continuing to blossom and stuff.

And she said that he felt that he had seen that before.

He fought for nine months before he passed, and a lot of that time I was kind of pushed around between staying with my mom down in Salt Lake or up with my aunt up in northern Utah, just trying to keep us safe and supported to shield us, I think, from the pain and suffering that was going on. His death was somewhat of a kind of an ugly one, like my mom said that she was in the room when he passed and it was just this look in this feeling of devastation.

And so I understand why they wanted to shield me from that. When my mom finally arrived back home from the hospital in the afternoon, I remember she got down on her knee to her eye level, put her hands on our shoulder like each of our shoulders, and just let us know that dad wasn't coming home.

The day he died, it was October 14th of nineteen ninety nine, that was the day we had signed on our home, our future home up in northern Utah. He made sure that that was all in place and he actually died on the day we finalized it. When my dad knew he was dying, he wrote us all these letters, my dad was a very prolific, articulate writer.

I mean, his journals and journals full, and he wrote us each letters, like proclaiming his love for us and kind of saying what he wanted our lives to be together as a family unit and saying goodbye. And I still I mean, I have mine right by my bed now and my mom and sister have theirs as well. A lot of it is somewhat of a whirlwind, it's just. I almost feel like I've probably tried to block a lot of that out.

I do remember my mom kind of checking out and being absent after my dad passed. I think that she wanted more than anything to be there for us and comfort us in our grief. But she was going through her own grief. I remember feeling very lonely at that time. Loneliness and loss, not only of my father, but of the semblance of family that I had grown accustomed to, as well as the connection to my mom, her being physically absent made me feel extremely afraid because I had learned at such a young age that nobody's in your life forever.

When my mom was dealing with her own grief and separating herself maybe from reality responsibilities, and I do remember feeling extremely desperate for her to be around, but she wasn't much and I had to really lean on my sister.

So my sister and I have always had a pretty sacred bond, I think from that extreme chaotic period where my mom couldn't exactly be the mom that we needed. I seem to kind of pick up, memory wise, two and a half years or so after my dad had passed, that would have put me at about six or seven years old when my mom met her second husband. He was a police officer. I was the first one to see him, and I know that memories are somewhat interesting and how they fabricate and everything, but I remember seeing him and feeling an immediate discomfort, like he wasn't a comforting force, just very disconcerting for some reason.

And they kind of quickly fell into this romance where my mom was extremely vulnerable and he was getting off of a divorce and going through his own stuff. So they ended up moving in together three weeks after meeting.

All I could think was there is this strange man who I'm supposed to welcome into my home that really hasn't felt like a home since the loss of my father. And now he's just living with us. And we're supposed to let that be our new normal.

And I remember feeling so distraught and unsafe with this extra force somewhat trying to act in the way of my father, I, of course had a very strong distrust and discomfort around that. As a young child, I didn't realize this, but apparently he also began his pattern of infidelity right away with my mother that would perpetuate itself throughout their relationship, infidelity and extreme lying and like compulsive lying, he would be caught doing something bad and they would have these volatile screaming matches.

And I remember many times hiding in the basement and just listening to my stepdad throwing things, breaking pots. He would put holes in the walls all over our home.

I remember at such a young age being terrified that he was going to kill my mom. I remember thinking that and just desperately knowing I couldn't do anything as a child, but intense fear that I would come upstairs and she wouldn't be there anymore. As I got older, I was actually subjected to it a lot, mentally talking down to you, degrading you. But he would also I have vivid memories of him, like slapping me, throwing things at me.

Like the biggest thing he threw at me was a vacuum.

And a lot of times it seemed as though he would want to throw the item near but not fully come into contact with you just to experience what he could do to you or what he will do to you.

If you didn't fall into line with him, he would do these things to my mom. She would confront him. There would be a huge explosion. And then it was almost as if the next day everything was perfectly fine and I was supposed to be fine and everybody was supposed to just fall back in line as if nothing had happened. And then it became this domineering, controlling, terrifying force that was always around the corner in my home. I dumped so much energy into being somewhat of a caretaker for my mom because I was often afraid that she would be hurt by him in a profound way that I would not be able to save.

And so I felt like there was a light in me that was continually dimming and being snuffed out.

I remember isolating more feeling more uncomfortable and somewhat desperate for any means of control that I could cling on to.

And it could be my own and nobody could take that from me.

All through elementary school into junior high. I had extreme separation anxiety from my mom, I couldn't be away from her for any extended period of time. School was always extremely trying. I had to have my mom come and sit with me during lunches. I had this crippling fear that if my mother was out of my sight, she would also pass or leave, like with my father. And so I suffered with full blown panic attacks when I was I mean, not even 10, I would think that I was having a heart attack when I was a child because I would have these intense physical symptoms where I would get weak, lightheaded, and I couldn't breathe.

I've always had a very hard time sleeping, I've had insomnia my whole life from all of these things. There were quite a few triggers, I think, that I suffered as my anxiety got worse as a kid, but most of it revolved around my mother and my sister and their well-being, me not being able to control that or do anything about it or save them or be the foundation of what kept everything together. There wasn't really any time that I felt completely safe or like I really belonged in any situation, whether it be school or home or anywhere.

I always just felt like I was the wrong fit. And that perpetuated the anxiety, the panic attacks and the depression. I began to become more of a perfectionist in the way that I could, so like in school, I was extremely diligent. I was somewhat of a teacher's pet all the time. I was quiet, very well behaved, just wanted to make people happy where I knew I could. Simultaneously, I was going through some bullying in school, all about my weight.

I began to become hyper aware of how I felt in my skin and how uncomfortable I was. So it was such a relief to find this one thing that I could control.

At age 10, I began to refuse food from my mom at home.

I began to almost like overexercise even at that young age, just all these things where I could control how I felt and what I put in my body and what I could put out of it.

I began competitive dancing when I was like 10 or so, and that's a culture as well of thinness, of a certain body type, a certain look what perfection is. And it actually was something that at first it felt like a very good outlet for me. I enjoyed the art of dancing, the technique, but I was put into this world where I had coaches who would like chastise me in front of everybody for being too slow, that I needed to lose weight and workout harder and just get there, or else I could not dance.

I could not be part of the team that I so desperately wanted to be part of. Once again, feeding into that perfect storm, the eating disorder that had been somewhat blossoming and morphing over the years. So dance as much as I love the world of dancing, I appreciate it. I think it's an amazing art form in my life. It was just toxicity, truly. There's this foundation that begins and then it's just it's built upon and built upon with what I call rules.

So as I grew and was experiencing more things, I would add more rules to what my eating disorder looked like. So starting at 10, I began overexercising watching my caloric intake and then into junior high school. I had an adult tell me that she was cutting sugar and that was helping her lose weight. And so I completely eradicated sugar in most forms from my diet at that young age. As I got older, I had heard to stop doing carbs.

When I implemented that rule, I was about 17 and I was really struggling through high school. Throughout that whole time, I had this eating disorder that was building upon itself, flourishing inside, becoming more and more parasitic, and within high school, I reached the pinnacle of my eating disorder. I dropped very quickly a lot of weight. It was a pivotal moment in my life where I saw that I can really control what my body looks like and feels like if I just do all these things, like I can be happy and I can feel fulfilled.

The eating disorder developing alongside with me, growing with me, and changing in a way that it almost felt like something that I had perfected and that I could use to combat these uncomfortable things, that I truly couldn't control any external thing that I found to be uncomfortable or made me feel displaced.

I had this secret inside me that I felt was my one and only friend and companion for a lot of my life that took me away from all the pain and anxiety that I had moving through my life and inside of me. I would comply with the rules that I had set up for myself in my eating disorder, and I would feel just an immediate relief washing over me and just this overwhelming sensation of being powerful and being impressive in a way to myself, like I could do something that only I knew about, only I could control.

For me, that looked like starving myself for certain periods of time or compulsively exercising or only eating a certain amount of calories in a day like those were the things that got me on the other side of horrific depression and anxiety and suffering that I had become very well acquainted with.

My senior year of high school, it was at its extreme worst, I felt like I was walking around like a complete robot because all that mattered to me at that point was this eating disorder, this companion that I had built up over the years and my senior year when I truly felt like my life was falling apart. In many ways, my eating disorder was that one thing that I would cling on to, and it was almost the only thing I cared about.

I had a whole range of rules that I would subscribe to, so if I didn't run every single day, I would have panic attacks and I would just feel so physically sick, especially in high school, when I began limiting my caloric intake to about 500 calories a day, only eating at certain times and obsessively exercising. I remember feeling quite frustrated because people began to say things, but in a negative way. And I remember feeling so frustrated that I had coaches telling me to lose weight and then when I finally did, it was too much and it was now concerning.

I had reached a weight that within my frame of mind, my perception, it was a good number. It was thin enough. And around that time, I actually had people tell me that I looked disgusting, that I looked sick, that I was wasting away. I remember there was a time where my mom expressed concern, I don't think the eating disorders have been very well understood in prior generations. And so I don't know that my mom even knew what to look for.

And so she talked to me about it.

But it wasn't really a serious thing where we moved forward in any direction. Now, over the years, I know that my sister, being someone who I was constantly with growing up, she would express concern to my mom and my sister is frustrated nowadays in hindsight, just saying that she felt like she wished she could have done more. But, you know, it just it wasn't taken that seriously. I don't think it was on anybody's conscious. To this day, I don't know that I know what I look like and I don't know that that's a part of the eating disorder that will ever be completely eradicated.

And I've accepted that now.

But at the time when my eating disorder was at its worst, it was a whole layer of confusion with feeling like I would look in the mirror and I would look disgusting to myself. My skin would crawl when I would get those sites of myself in the mirror. And if I perceived myself looking that way, then that must be reality.

Dysmorphia is it's like a grand illusion. There are days where you will look in the mirror and you'll wake up and maybe you will feel like like a success story, like you've lost the weight that you want to and you look thin. But the next day, the next hour, you can look in the mirror and, you know, everything's undone. You look huge. You look uncomfortable. You look like you take up too much space. Nothing seems to make sense.

And you can't capture the essence of what you want.

I think it can be used as means of punishment.

What you see of yourself is all that matters, and if it isn't lining up with all the work you've been putting in, all of the rules you've been following, then you have failed and you don't deserve good things like a kind of jumps to such an extreme just with the dysmorphia portion.

I was very, very thin and you could see it in my face, I was pallid, I was gaunt. I began to try to obscure that I would wear baggy clothes when I had to perform with my dance team, I would wear the costume that I had to wear. And then once we got off the stage, I would quickly cover up to conceal what was now a problem for people. So it seemed like no matter what I looked like, no matter how I presented myself, I was never pleasing.

It was never what somebody wanted. So I it really set me into this secretive isolative space. It begins as a means of control, but then it turns into something that ultimately controls you, all things that I did were constructed and fabricated around these this eating disorder. When you're starving yourself, you begin to experience a lot of physical discomfort, so of course, fatigue was heavily laced in this, but I began to have a lot of digestive issues.

My body could not tolerate many foods. The chemistry of myself was changing. And I've always had issues with sleeping due to the anxiety and panic attacks. But at this time, when my eating disorder was really at its peak, I would wake up in the middle of the night because I was starving and I could not go back to bed. That would cause a lot of anxiety because I didn't want to eat, but I couldn't sleep. I felt so trapped and caged in with what to do in my own mind.

A lot of times when I would be up at night, you know, due to the insomnia, I would lay in bed and like every part of my skin, I didn't want it to touch each other. It felt gross and uncomfortable even when I was up and walking in a wake I didn't want, like my inner thighs to touch.

I didn't want to feel my skin. I didn't feel comfortable in it. It always it felt like it didn't fit right. My skin. I would lay in bed and just try to lay perfectly still in this way where my skin wouldn't touch each other like no parts of myself would touch each other, I wouldn't feel the discomfort I would be able to, in my own capacity, try to leave my body and disconnect from it. You almost wish that you could just be out of your body, like you could just be your head and you didn't have to experience this physical form.

Also in that time, having a somewhat plan formulated in my mind for starving myself to death and for that being a quiet way to in my life.

I had blood tests where my liver began to somewhat fail, my blood cell counts were off like nothing was functioning normally.

That portion where it was at its worst, its worst kind of lasted from end of high school into 19 or 20, so I had this couple year period where I maintained the rules, the the steady know downturn of everything. At the end of my senior year of high school, I began dating this girl, who she was my first real serious relationship, and I fell into it really quickly.

You know, I was 18. She is borderline personality disorder and she has a lot of trust issues and all these things, and so our relationship really formed into a toxic co-dependency between each other to the point where she actually faked that she had an eating disorder just so she could be closer to me. She kind of congratulated me on my eating disorder. We were just going down this really awful path together.

There were a lot of abusive traits in her that I had seen in my ex stepfather, so she was degrading. She was domineering, she was controlling. She wanted to decide how I acted and how I conducted myself.

For a period there, I was apathetic and let her because I didn't have the energy or the wherewithal to stop it. Some physical abuse began. That relationship, really, in conjunction with my eating disorder, was so detrimental and it really led to this this crashing and burning feeling. I felt like my body was shutting down and with the Depression, I remember feeling like it would be so easy to just starve myself to death and that was actually a goal of mine at this point.

I was going towards that. I kind of had my ideal set on that and it seemed like a quiet way to disappear.

The worst part of my eating disorder for me was it's almost like it was an ultimate betrayal. Something that seemed so innocent and something that helped me feel in control of my life really turned toxic on me, and I think it felt like a betrayal, especially towards the end. I had spent so much time involved with it, congratulating myself for it, feeling like it was my ultimate companion.

And and then once my health began to fail, it felt like I can't be sure if I need to be mad at my eating disorder or my body for not being able to do what I wanted to do.

Like life cannot be maintained in a comfortable way with this thing that I thought could get me there, but it actually could not. My eating disorder could not bring me the joy and comfort that I thought it could. And I had never experienced anything else bringing that to me either. And it couldn't help me disappear fully because that's ultimately what I wanted was to not exist and it didn't do that for me. I think also because death was one of my first real experiences, it was one of my first real memories, I knew how fragile life is and how easily it can end this eating disorder that I had spent so long using to comfort myself.

I knew that that could be my key to leaving this life as well. My mother and my sister both really began to experience despair and desperation and concern around my downward spiral. I started having bad test results come back, my liver was failing, I could feel it like my heart was really struggling. They couldn't read my heart on an EKG machine. My mom found this place in Orem, Utah. It's called the Center for Change, and it is only for eating disorders.

She found this place and she actually ended up talking me into going, she actually took out retirement money to get me there. She was rightfully terrified and she was incredibly persistent in the fact that life could be something beautiful and something that I want it to be if I just work through this huge integral part of me. And so in my mind, a lot of it, a huge percent of it was for my mother and my sister. The Center for Change is it's a residential treatment center, and when I got there, they immediately put me into inpatient treatment.

So it's as close as you can get to being in a hospital.

My mother and my sister and my girlfriend at the time drop me off. And I remember when they left, I felt this huge wave of extreme fear and uncertainty and regret because I didn't really go to the center for myself. Immediately that day, I get thrown into this cafeteria where you sit at these tables with other women suffering with eating disorders and nurses, and you're not allowed to talk about the food. You're not allowed to express any of the panic and pain that you're going through.

You just have to sit there and figure out how to eat it. And I lost it. I sobbed and I couldn't eat it. I refused and it was very embarrassing because I was hyper aware of the women around me, but I couldn't help it.

This was entirely devastating to me.

It was devastating to be in that circumstance because like I was turning my back on the eating disorder and I was failing and I was breaking the rules. I was actually going to feed myself, which I understand is so entirely fucked up. But it was it felt devastating.

There was kind of this back and forth where it had done so much for me for so long and I felt betrayal from the eating disorder, getting me to that point. And then as I was sitting there during my first meal of many being monitored and forced to eat, I felt like I was betraying my companion. I felt like I was the one now turning my back on it, which felt so fundamentally wrong. I felt complete panic and despair and it felt like a world ending, world changing.

It felt like I was losing myself just by partaking in this thing. I didn't realize the gravity of like entering the normal world in a way, because I think eating disorders make you feel special, like I have this thing that I do that no one else does.

And, yeah, it made me feel special. I had many meals that somewhat went in the same way, you know, I would have to face the food and I would have the hardest time working through it and I would panic. And it was all very foreign to me. Oddly enough, when you've starved yourself and ate in such a way for so many years, your actual flora, your your gut bacteria changes and refeeding was actually more painful than starving myself.

It hurts so bad. My stomach was in constant aching and my body felt heavy and and the fear of weight gain, it was treacherous waters. Absolutely. At that time. And so I spent one week in inpatient having very intensive frequent therapy, it was like a paradigm shift once I allowed it to be, we were getting down to what had caused it.

And to that point, I didn't really understand that my eating disorder was what I use to control things. I didn't really realize how dependent I was on it, how co-dependent I was. And I just really began to peel back layers of shit that had piled up.

And the wounds still felt so raw because it was things that I hadn't ever dealt with the death of my father. I don't think I had dealt with all the pain that my stepdad had caused me. I remember feeling like I didn't know that I would have needed my eating disorder so much if my sister and my mom had been there for me in a more substantial way. But I realized that they were dealing with their own grief and we were just on our own paths trying to heal and we did not always support each other.

I was petrified that letting go of the eating disorder, I would be an empty void and I I truly I didn't know who I was. I didn't know what I liked. I didn't have any hobbies. My time was all spent in this eating disorder, and that was terrifying.

I know that people struggle with identity any way around that age, but I had no concept of who I was. It was wonderful in the way the the realizations were coming in, but I didn't have any tools to deal with any of the emotions and they tried to give me some. I began writing a lot. I began, I don't know, just kind of riding the wave of anxiety, but, oh, nothing worked the same way the eating disorder worked.

And so that was so hard. And I wanted to leave. Although all of our disorders looked different, we all had very similar roots of how they began and what they meant to us.

And so just being surrounded by this small community of people who completely understood what I was suffering with and how hard it was to let go of, it was a game changer just to see their strength and a lot of perseverance within the people surrounding me.

There were points in time where I began to feel excited about the prospect of a life without an eating disorder. It took me a really long time to feel like that could ever happen for me. But if I could live a life without my eating disorder, I'm in the place and the space to try.

And so I think that I really took charge at that point. I was at the Center for Change for four months in its entirety. The Center for Change saved my life, I will always be so incredibly thankful for that, but it was also the absolute hardest time of my life as well, I mean, outside of losing my father. But it started me on this slow journey to what my health is now, which is worlds better. It was terrifying when I had to go back home, I didn't have people making me eat, people cheering me on.

I'm extremely fortunate that I found a therapist in my area who helped me maintain recovery, although I did relapse again in twenty sixteen. And that was pretty heartbreaking. But she helped me through that. Or else I don't know that I would have had the strength at the time to maintain recovery. Taking away the eating disorder, as powerful and wonderful as it has been, it has been equally painful and just extremely terrifying and I still struggle to know who I am fully with recovery.

I think that I have truly found some pieces of myself that I didn't even know existed or that I had starved away.

And I still struggle to find healthy coping mechanisms because I know how easy it can be to just give your power and your focus to something like a substance or an eating disorder or a relationship. And I struggle time and time again to not allow myself to fall into that pattern.

I think in this day and age, we all want that instantaneous relief because it's so easily obtainable, but yeah, those healthy coping mechanisms are just so more slow going.

The healthy ways to me don't always they don't feel as intensely gratifying and they don't feel as instantaneous and they are so much harder to come by.

And so I have to constantly try to maintain this path.

It was extremely powerful to be able to empty myself out in a sense like physically being empty felt good, and it was almost like a reflection of my emotional state. I was able to feel numb and empty physically and emotionally. If I use something in that same way, at least relatively, it's it's very dangerous for me.

I know that a coping mechanism is detrimental if the percentage of my thoughts during a day are way too geared toward this one thing, if I compulsively think about it, if I obsess about it, and if I try to dampen emotions using it, or if I try to completely avoid painful situations and feelings using something. I have a really hard time still dealing with hard emotions and not trying to be secretive and not trying to isolate and hide from people, vulnerability does not come easy for me.

And I don't feel safe with, you know, a lot of people with a lot of people knowing me, because I think that I was late to know me truly and I still don't feel comfortable. And so it's really hard to want to allow someone else to take that position. I truly don't know who I am still, and I don't know how to be authentic and organic and genuine in my life and in relationships, and it has been detrimental to relationships that I have tried to enter.

I just hope that the fact that I could overcome the one thing that comforted me and the one thing that I knew, I feel like I do have some power to create waves and be meaningful to myself or to someone or to the world in a way. I feel like life is really just becoming interconnected with people and forming strong connections that are authentic and are vulnerable and just tie us together as humans.

And I think that I starved myself of that for a very long time. And so going forward, I want to get to a place where I can let people really know me. I can find that light that I think got stifled in myself when I was very young. And one of the biggest things that I face nowadays is I am definitely left with profound depression.

Still, I haven't been able to medicate that away or meditate that away. My life is just going to include a lot of pain and I'm going to suffer a lot with depression.

And I think that's OK, because I think that depression is meaningful and it has its place. I think depression kind of can be like an umbrella and underneath that umbrella there's, you know, the sadness, the loneliness, the lack of belonging, the displacement, all of these things encompassed. It's something that I I don't think I will ever be without.

And I think that I can find a lot of meaning in it.

It's really a lot of uprooting and excavating what needs to be brought to the forefront of my life. At this point, a lot of times when I'm dealing with fear, I go straight to dishonesty and hiding, and I think that that is one of the biggest things that I'll have to try to work towards, work through. I want to get to a point where I don't try to please people so much and I don't try to just be pleasing and be what they want instead, just be OK to be whatever I am and whatever that looks like.

Actually learning to take the grief that I have suffered in many different facets and use it as a constant reminder of what is meaningful in life and the relationships that I still do have, like two my my mom and my sister and my mom is remarried now to an absolutely wonderful man.

I have an incredible stepdad.

And so just taking my grief and reframing it to where I don't take as many things for granted. And I remember how fragile it is to be human and to be here in this space and time.

And that what really matters are those very deep, intense, profound connections that can be made between two humans, and after dealing with a lot of hurt in my life and a lot of grief, I want to be open to joy and wonder and learning and maybe going forward with excitement instead of fear.

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