My story

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As I alluded to in the About section of Project Bare, this experiment is one that is near and dear to my heart. I’ve traveled a long, hard road to get to where I am today and, even now, I know I’ve still got more ground to cover. So here is my story. It’s a hard one to relive, but I’m happy to do it if only to help someone else out there realize that they aren’t the only one feeling the way I did. I would love to hear your stories too and I deeply believe in the power of our voices to affect change.

Growing up, I was always a fun-loving kid who felt comfortable in her own skin and hardly worried what others thought. Of course, I wasn’t exempt from the growing pains  that many teenage girls experience—(what I thought to be) terrible, debilitating acne, a boy who broke my heart time and again, girls who were friends to your face and enemies when you turned your back. It sounds terrible when it’s all on paper, but it really is a part of growing up and growing into yourself. To be honest, I had a great childhood and growing up wasn’t nearly as hard for me as it could’ve been. I wasn’t the most popular girl at school by any means, but I had an amazing group of friends who were wholesome, no-drama and incredibly supportive. I’m still close with many of them to this day and four of them will be standing by my side when Adam and I get married next September. We didn’t drink, we didn’t do drugs and our idea of fun was getting together to play a boardgame or start a bonfire down at the beach. We all ran together on the same track and XC team and we never got tired of being together all day, every day.

My senior year, I decided on Northeastern University as my home for the next four years. I remember being so excited to have my mind made up and to be a full fledged “city girl” the following year.  My first two years of college were pretty typical: meeting new people, living in a shoebox, drinking far too often and (amazingly) never getting hangovers. Northeastern was the kind of place where friends come and go and groups change easily—going to school there was more of a means to an end (specifically getting a good job) than it was a great social scene. Of course, we had a lot of fun, but we also worried too much about getting good jobs someday and my friends during freshman year were people I didn’t hang out with at all by the end of sophomore year.  It was at the end of sophomore year that image suddenly became way more important to me than it ever had been—I went to school a girl who had never spent more than $50 on a pair of jeans and suddenly I was wearing Sevens and 575s just because everyone else was. I also starting losing a lot of my baby fat during my sophomore year and had slimmed down considerably by the middle of that year. Suddenly, sizes were important to me and I began to do something that my friend from freshman year always did and I vowed I never would: “body checking .” She’d eat a few bites of food and then, probably subconsciously, she would pinch the sides of her stomach to see if she was getting fatter with every bite. It made me cringe when I saw her do it and then suddenly one day I was doing it too. As you would imagine, this behavior snowballed until my bones were popping out and I was down to a double zero in pants. I gave up eating bread and pasta entirely and, because I had been a vegetarian since high school, my food choices were very limited. I only indulged when I thought it was acceptable—eating other people’s food literally right off their plate or sneaking things from my roommates’ stash in the fridge—but I could never bring myself to just buy a gallon of ice cream, even though I’d slowly eat nearly that much of my roommates’ at home. Peanut butter and nuts were my weakness—I loved how they tasted, but I refused to buy it because I knew I didn’t have the self control to just eat a few bites. Sometimes, I would buy a jar in extreme starvation at the grocery store and then get home and throw it away so I wouldn’t be able to eat any. Then I would eat my roommates’ peanut butter, somehow believing it was less of a crime if it wasn’t my own. The only carbs I let myself have were heaping bowls of cereal, which I ate every night for dinner for pretty much my entire junior year. I would starve myself all day long—sometimes only eating a banana for breakfast with “appetite-killing” tea and a salad with no protein for lunch—and try to make it until 8 or 9 PM so I couldn’t possibly eat more than that one bowl of cereal before going to bed. I was so embarrassed by my habits that I used to wait in my room until everyone had left the kitchen and then I would sneak in and make myself a huge bowl of cereal to take back to my room and eat in tiny bites to make it last. Sometimes, I would just go to bed super early to avoid a binge and other times I would succumb to it and eat everything in sight while my roommates weren’t there to see me. This kind of behavior went on for the beginning of junior year (and parts of the end of sophomore year, too) but it got incredibly out of  control after the events of my junior year.

In October of 2007, I was sexually assaulted by a person I considered a good friend. He was someone I trusted, someone who rode the T with me every day on the way to work, someone whose circle of friends I had quickly become part of. During the World Series that year in which the Red Sox were eventual champions, my friends and I would often go to a bar where my roommate worked to get drinks under the table (we weren’t 21 yet), watch the games on TV and wait for the players to come to the bar afterward, if it was a home game. One night, I was invited by this guy to go to his apartment to watch one of the games—under the impression that he had invited a bunch of other people. When I got there, it was just him and I. He mixed me a drink out of my sight and I drank it while we watched the game. I don’t remember much of the events because I’m positive that he spiked my drink (though I was too late in getting the test done to prove it for sure) and it all spiraled very quickly out of control later in the night. We went to a second bar where they served minors and had a couple drinks and then stumbled back to my apartment on campus. My roommate was home at the time and she remembers him being hardly drunk, but me being completely out of it. She didn’t trust him really to begin with and she tried to step in when she thought things were getting out of hand since he was touching me and acting possessive. She says I was completely not myself and I yelled and swore at her for trying to intrude and, after a while, she gave up trying.  After that, he took me into the bathroom at our apartment and tried to rape me. I don’t remember much at all, though it has come back to me in flashes during dreams or when I would see him on the streets in passing over the next couple years.  I specifically remember him asking me “do you want to do this?” and me telling him that no, I loved my boyfriend. He proceeded to take my pants off and we got into some kind of struggle, which left me with a huge bump on the back of my head.  I woke up the next morning in my bed with no pants on (my roommate helped me into bed) and I felt the worst feeling I had ever felt. I was violently sick and had to leave my job that afternoon to go home.  It was like no hangover I’ve had before or since and, from my research on roofies, I figured out quickly what I knew must’ve happened. I tried to piece together the night with my roommate, but I remembered very little and she wasn’t privy to what happened in the bathroom, just the aftermath. She convinced me to make the hardest call of my life: to tell my loving boyfriend of 5 years that another man had tried to hurt me, to defile the sacred act that only he and I had ever shared.  I was hysterical, believing that it was my fault for allowing someone like him to receive my trust, and I remember feeling guilty as I told Adam what happened.  He responded by driving to see me immediately (he lived in New Hampshire then) and spent the night holding me while I cried. The next day, he called out of work and took me to the hospital, where we waited for almost 8 hours for me to see a rape specialist. When it came down to it, I had waited too long for the roofies to pass through my system and there was no way they could prove it so I could press charges. I refused the rape kit because they told me that I could only get the results if I agreed to press charges and to me, all I could picture was being in a courtroom having to relive that nightmare, especially when so many women are victimized for telling the truth.  All I wanted was to go home and get on with my life.

I spent the next two days holed up in my room with the shades down. I barely ate, I didn’t go to work and I only saw my roommates if they forced themselves in.  I felt so used, violated and ugly. I also felt guilty, so I didn’t dare share my story with anyone else because I felt like it was my fault. About a week later, having to go back to work and get my life together, I finally realized that I couldn’t keep it from my mother, whom my roommates encouraged me to reach out to. While I said that telling Adam was the hardest phone call I’ve ever made, I have to take that back; telling my mother that I had been sexually assaulted was the worst thing I’ve ever had to do and I don’t want to relive it now because it’s too painful.

I’ve always been conscious enough to realize when I had a problem and now, I realized, I had two big ones. I had an eating disorder and I also had a terrible trauma hanging over my head. I tried to address the trauma with therapy, but I hated reliving it and talking about my feelings every time I went to therapy, so I stopped going after a few visits. I suddenly found myself timid and afraid to be myself: I couldn’t stand up for what I wanted, I feared everything around me and I was afraid to ever go out and drink again. I stopped drinking altogether for a few months until Adam encouraged me to keep living my life and not change everything because of him. I slowly started to go out more—and then it became a lot more. I drank heavily every chance I got because the temporary high helped me forget who I was and what my life had become. I was only happy when I was drinking and, when I wasn’t, I could barely function. On the outside, I might have seemed like I had it together—great boyfriend, great job, great grades—but inside I felt like I was wasting away. I began bingeing more than ever and my weight started going up. I would try to eat barely anything, believing that I had somehow won if I looked and acted healthy and happy on the outside, but it would always lead to bingeing on both alcohol and food. I began to get even more down on myself as my clothes started to get tighter, and then, not fit at all. I developed a “too far gone” mentality: I would look at myself in the mirror and think “I can’t do much worse, so I might as well keep eating.”

Suddenly in the spring of junior year, I had this epiphany that enough was enough. My life was completely turned upside down and my eating disorder had spiraled out of control after the assault. I agonized over it for days, but finally I made the decision to call the Boston Children’s Outpatient Eating Disorders program. My appointment wasn’t for almost two months, but I held on, seeing that light at the end of the tunnel up ahead.  At BCH, I was assigned a team of doctors to help me get better: a nutritionist, a therapist and a physician. They monitored my weight, helped me plan my meals with foods I actually liked and gave me the kind of support that I could never get from someone too close to the problem. My therapist was a life saver, literally: she was so supportive and nonjudgmental, and she recommended a book that completely changed my whole outlook. Intuitive Eating was exactly what I needed to wake up. It taught me that deprivation is counterproductive and it only sets you up for failure. With the help of this book, which I kept with me at all times like a Bible, Iearned how to start eating foods again that I loved and to pay less attention to the numbers on the scale than how I felt physically and mentally. I began to feel alive again for the first time—I was fitting in my clothes slowly and I was actually enjoying eating for the first time in so long.  I felt better, but nowhere near healed.

It wasn’t until the summer before my senior year that I realized why this had all happened to me. Wanting badly to no longer be defined and confined by my worst life experiences, I applied to a month-long study abroad program in South Africa. A world away from my comforts and support group, the experience was everything I feared and everything I needed to start putting the pieces of my life back together. I traveled more than 8,000 miles to start over, but the person who truly changed my life was right in my backyard the whole time.

I met Meg, another Northeastern student who also grew up in my tiny home state of Rhode Island, on the nearly 24-hour trip to South Africa. In cramped side-by-side seats, we bonded over the in-flight movies and the endless snacks she let me share when the vegetarian meals ran out on the plane. I found her to be so open and honest from the start—while I had always carefully hidden my journal from others, she would unapologetically pour her soul into hers whenever the need arose, no matter what prying eyes could see. Both being runners (and me having a hard time adjusting to life without a gym) we would often run a few miles together to the top of a mountain overlooking the city where we stayed. It was there that she divulged her own secrets to me: a long bout with depression and self-harm, an abusive boyfriend and an eating disorder of her own. Her admissions opened me to the realization that everyone has their own personal hardships and that, despite appearances, no one is perfect and admitting you have these problems is not a weakness, but a profound strength. I soon found myself telling her my story—a soul-cleansing therapy truly like none I had experienced before or since. Though this was the first step in my long recovery, I didn’t realize my own strength until I received a letter from Meg a couple weeks after I had returned home.

In the note Meg said, “Meeting you changed my life. You are one of the bravest people I have ever met and you are beautiful inside and out. Never forget what you have to offer to the world.”

These words changed my life. I felt better than I had in years when I came back from that trip and Meg’s words had made me realize that the real me, the person that I used to love, was still there somewhere. I can’t say that it was an easy transition back to the real world by any means—in South Africa I was free to be whoever I wanted to be, in the US, I felt confined—and I began to relapse in a big way. I turned 21 a few weeks after my return home and I got so worried about seeing people again for the first time and returning to my old self that I drowned myself in alcohol and found myself in a hospital bed the morning after my party. I was so ashamed. So many people that I loved had witnessed this meltdown. But more than anything, I was so ashamed in front of wonderful boyfriend, who had spent so much time and money putting my party together, only to have me ruin everything. My confidence then was at an all-time low and, while I tried several times, to quit drinking and get my life together, it never worked. No longer were the days of being a happy drunk; now I would get hysterically upset after I drank and pick fights with Adam, telling him he should leave me for someone better. It is a testament to the kind of patient, loving husband that Adam will be that he stayed with me through all my ups and downs and always assured me that, one day, we’d have everything we’d always dreamed of.

For me, “one day” is finally here: I live in a beautiful house with my incredible fiancé, I’ve made friends in New Hampshire that like me for who I am and I’m finally getting comfortable in my own skin. This will always be somewhat of a struggle for me, but I’m finally able to eat what I want, do what I want and say how I feel without analyzing it to death. I’m still working on things like standing up for myself and apologizing less, but I’m getting there and for me, it’s worlds away from where I was. I love all of my friends and family dearly for sticking with me through everything I’ve gone through these past few years and I want you all to know that I never would have made it to the other side without you.

That’s my story. Long, I know, but I hope worth it. Please feel free to send me a message or leave me a comment or, even better, tell me your own story. We can all help each other and I hope this post has helped you in some small way.

Until tomorrow,

GutsyGirl

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Tags: eating disorder, anorexia, confidence, anxiety, not myself, Northeastern, rape, binge eating, alcoholism, city, Intuitive Eating, Boston Children's Hospital, South Africa, date rape, starvation