Revathi Raghavan
Trigger Warning: Anorexia, Body image issues
It was life-changing for me when someone said that all coping mechanisms were necessary and came from a place of survival.
Behaviors that hurt you now at some point probably saved your life, because they helped you get through unimaginable trauma or symptoms, or because they helped you survive in an environment that wasn’t safe, or simply because they enabled you to protect yourself against someone.
Self-harm, disordered eating, and other trauma responses aren’t stupid or selfish; they’re your body’s way of protecting you with love, the best way it knows how. In doing so, you chose pain over the end, you decided to feel rather than numbness, and you chose to live rather than die.
That’s why it’s tough to break those habits and patterns; you can’t hate your way out of them. It’s been beneficial for me to reframe triggers and urges that way, instead of saying, “you’re an adult, you shouldn’t still be feeling like this, you’re stupid and immature for still wanting to self-harm.”
Before you assume that I’m promoting unsafe coping mechanisms, please understand that I’m just telling you that choices sometimes lead to mistakes; we are all living and learning.
I now choose to say things like “I appreciate the strength it took to learn this tool, I know it helped for a long time, and it came from a place of love, but now it’s not helpful, and we’re going to do something else because now I’m in a new situation and I have new and better tools.”
As an athlete, choosing to be skinny rather than strong was one of the worst mistakes I’ve made. Choosing looks over stamina, choosing fragility over strength, and choosing hunger over myself was a tragedy I can’t even begin to explain.
But it’s a choice I made. A decision I went through with and more than anything, the havoc that I wrecked upon this body of mine, has been catastrophic.
I did not always think along these lines, but I remember the first time it happened was when I was less concerned about the uniform I wore while playing and more concerned about how I looked in it.
There was a time when I could run without resting, as my eating disorder got progressively worse, I couldn’t run half a lap without grabbing my knees and kneeling over, spots clouding my vision. And the worst part of it? The worse it got, the better it felt.
My eating disorder played a murderer to my speed, stamina, and skill.
How do you go from someone who can sprint 100 Mts in under 12.2 seconds to someone who can’t finish the race in the first place? I think I realized I needed to change my habits during the finals of a tournament where I was captain. By halftime, I could feel my head reeling, my coach’s words going above my head, vision blurring at the edges, and my body feeling a weakness like never before. I couldn’t even sit up.
I couldn’t play in the second half of the match.
For someone who had not missed a day of practice, I didn’t only let myself down, but I let my team and my school down. And all for what? So I can watch my jeans be slightly loose on my hips?so I can see my collar bones act as a coat hanger for my t-shirts?
It was when I realized that what I was doing to myself and my body wasn’t just affecting me, but people and things I cared about, that I decided to make a difference.
It was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. I started small, forcing myself to eat breakfast after practice, teaching myself not to relish in the emptiness of my stomach. Teaching myself to understand that the emptiness I felt is not a sign of success, was not a sign of beauty.
Choosing to be strong over being skinny empowered me in a way that my eating disorder never did. Choosing muscle over bone let me reach heights that I hadn’t been able to before.
My stamina, skill, and speed came back to me. Ambition had taken over vanity. I conquered my eating disorder - one morsel of food at a time.
The hardest thing about the recovery journey was understanding that setbacks and days when you can’t bring yourself to eat don’t define you. It’s about the CHOICE you make: either let your eating disorder win the war against self-love or to grab your illness by the horns and force it into submission.
You are not your illness. You are not defined by your setbacks. You are not unworthy of self-love and confidence.
And so I’d like to conclude by saying, CHOOSE to take care of your body rather than letting it fade away, CHOOSE to build yourself up instead of breaking your body one starved calorie at a time. CHOOSE to become a warrior and a fighter rather than being the weakest version of yourself.
I promise you’ll be just as beautiful, if not more so.
Finally, choose yourself over your illness.