I heard about her long before she ever turned her toxic attention to me. I thought I knew who she was before I met her. I thought she could never hurt me. I thought I would never let her distort my thinking until all I was left with was a twisted sense of reality. I was wrong. 

I was taught about anorexia and other eating disorders in my health classes every year in middle school and high school. I was told that it was an eating disorder where a person stopped eating in an attempt to lose weight. I knew that many people (especially teenagers) cared what other people thought of how they looked, but I didn’t understand. It wasn’t me. I was lucky enough to grow up without body image issues. Eating disorders may have been a threat to other people, but a young me tossed aside any warnings, foolishly assuming they wouldn’t ever pose a threat to me. 

It took meeting her to understand how wrong my impression of her—and most other mental disorders—was. She wasn’t just a disorder that a few short sentences in a health textbook could describe.  Clinical terms like “anorexia nervosa” couldn’t capture what she was. She was Ana, my constant companion and my personal demon. She was my best friend and my worst enemy all wrapped into one.

She started out like the quiet kid in the back of a classroom. She didn’t talk much, but when she did it seemed like she was the smartest person in the room. She seemed so docile and benign, and I couldn’t see the harm that might come from listening to her. I was still the one that was in control, and I assumed that I always would be. My relationship with food was never healthy, and Ana took advantage of that and told me what I wanted to hear. When I was depressed and couldn’t gather up the motivation to decide on what to eat, she asked me why I bothered eating at all. 

Ana hadn’t developed into a full eating disorder yet, but she held enough sway over me to pose a serious threat. I was losing weight and couldn’t gain it back because eating felt like it was too much effort. I cannot count the number of times I heard the words “just eat.” I heard it from my family, from my friends, from my boyfriend. While their hearts were in the right place, the people saying these words didn’t see how much stress they were putting on me. They made it sound so easy, but how could I “just eat” when Ana was at my side telling me it was better not to? She was right so many times before, and I trusted her more than the people that just cared about me.

Looking back, I know how wrong I was, but I also know that I wasn’t the only one in the wrong. It wasn’t entirely my fault that eating was one of the most stressful challenges in my life at the time. Everyone around me insisted I needed to focus all of my attention on “recovering” from a disorder I  didn’t even have yet. I became afraid of the subject of food altogether and isolated myself from a lot of the people that cared the most about me because I didn’t want to talk about it. 

When I got to college, I was on my own, and Ana became my lifeline. I was in a new place where I didn’t know many people, and it was easier to focus on not eating than to consider what else was going on in my life at the time. I convinced myself that by restricting my eating, I was controlling one of the most vital parts of my life. I didn’t know that I was actually handing the reins over to Ana. 

Under Ana’s guidance, life got worse than I ever imagined it could. I began counting my calories, which only served to highlight every slip up. No matter how much I restricted, it wasn’t enough. When I went through periods of binging because I’d gone so long without eating enough, Ana would lash out, and I’d feel guilty for claiming I believed in her but failing to actually follow through on what she demanded of me. 

Suddenly, I could see how what I ate was reflected in my body, and I hated the image I saw in the mirror. The only solution I could come up with was to get rid of that weight somehow. I would go to the gym and run on the treadmill for hours at a time, and people were proud of me because they thought I was being active and healthy. I should have been happy with myself, but I wasn’t. I felt guilty. I felt like I was lying to everyone by pretending I was a happy, healthy person like them.

When I finally started focusing on recovery, it was a difficult process. I shifted between hating Ana and feeling like I depended on her to live. When she was by my side I felt happier, but when I tried to leave her behind I was left with more time to get wrapped up in other problems like my depression. I’d come crawling back to her, begging her to help me block out my other problems again even though I knew it was only hurting me.

I remember lying in bed one day after a binge and feeling nauseous. Although I ate too much, my stomach growled, hopelessly begging me to feed myself. I closed my eyes and hoped for sleep to come and quiet my spinning mind, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how any choices I made felt wrong. When I didn’t eat I struggled with hunger and irritability, but when I did eat I struggled with nausea and self-hatred. 

Eventually I got out of bed and turned on my light before taking a seat at my desk. I pulled out the blue notebook I kept track of my calories in and wrote a letter to my future self. In that letter I wrote: “I know that in the moment what you’re doing to yourself seems harmless, but it’s not. I know you won’t care because you are future me and you’ve gotten past this momentary pain, but please try? It only gets worse if it’s not fixed and right now I’d really like it to be fixed.” 

So why didn’t I get help? It’s the same reason I hesitate to reach out for help with any of my problems, from ones as severe as depression to ones as minor as not being able to figure out a homework assignment. No matter how much I may struggle with a problem, I never believe that I need help badly enough to bother asking for it. I’ve had the same conversation with several people. It starts out with me reaching a breaking point and venting about how “This is stressing me out so much and I’m not sure how to handle it.” 

“You know, if you need help I’m here for you,” they’ll reply. 

“I know,” I’ll smile, trying to reassure myself as much as them. “I can deal with it. It’s not actually that bad.”

Different people interpret the words “not that bad” in different ways, but in my experience they are just an excuse. When it comes to starting eating disorder recovery, many people need to overcome a common hurdle: their belief that they’re not sick enough to start recovering. I felt it, and I know other people who felt it too. I came up with a thousand different reasons that I might not deserve help. I was deep enough into excuses that one of my recurring concerns was wasting a therapist’s time, even though I knew it was their job to help people struggling like I was. 

In internet culture, people joke about mental illness, making it seem like depression and other serious problems are issues that everyone deals with at some point in their lives. They are so normalized that Gen Z has text slang for wanting to kill themselves (eg kys for ‘kill yourself’ or kmn for ‘kill me now’). While accepting mental illnesses is helpful for people struggling with them, giving people the illusion that mental illness is just a part of life may make them hesitate to get help when they need it.

The thought of facing a problem is daunting, especially when that problem seems like a common experience. It is easy to turn to denial instead because recovering from a mental illness isn’t an easy task. I may not give Ana any sway over me anymore, but when she returns to whisper in my ear she is hard to ignore because I listened to her for so long. No matter how scary seeking help may seem, it’s better than giving problems room to grow and get worse by pushing them away.