At thirteen years old, I dreamed of the day that I could go to college, because I wanted the freedom of having no one there to watch me eat. I figured that I would no longer have to suffer the pain of purging if I could simply restrict to the point of no return. So […]
It’s no secret that I’ve spent a good chunk of my life battling an eating disorder. In fact, mental health advocacy and writing have become the thing that I’m most well known for nowadays.
So many times over the past year, I’ve sort of taken a step back and looked at my life. And when I do, I think to myself, “Wow, I’ve really let myself go.” I’m so glad that I did.
I was viciously inhaling toilet water through a feeding tube when I realized, hey, maybe this whole “recovery thing” is going to be a lot harder than I thought. Let me backtrack. I had been in quasi-recovery many a time before. I did most of my work entirely outpatient, bouncing from therapist to therapist, being […]
A People Pleaser’s Guide to Being Disliked For the majority of my primary school career, I was a rather neutral figure. People knew who I was; I was involved, I held leadership positions, I spent time flitting between a pretty wide variety of social circles. But I was never a person who other people talked […]
When my father was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, an incurable terminal illness, this past October, my entire life was ripped apart at the seams.
{***Trigger Warning- mild descriptions of disordered eating habits and exercise addiction***} I loved running. Just running.
I submitted this as a scholarship essay in response to the prompt: “If you could tell your school board anything that could be done to improve your education, what would it be?” I thought I might as well share the unfiltered opinion of a public school’s overachieving senior while I still hold that title.