My Enemy Origin Story
Dear twenty-something,
I suppose now is as good a time as ever to share the origin story of my greatest enemy—my relationship with my body.
I have been painfully aware of my body for as long as I can remember. I was an early bloomer, towering over the other girls (and most of the boys). I carried some baby fat and loved food with all the innocent passion of a child. I still remember standing at the sink in second grade, washing my hands, when a girl turned to me and said, “I just thought you should know—someone called you fat.”That single comment might as well have been my personal Archduke Franz Ferdinand moment, the catalyst, the start of my own war.
There is a before and an after. The before was blissful—blissfully unaware, blissfully full. I never once questioned how I looked. I devoured my mom’s homemade cookies with joy, not guilt.
And then there was the after. The after is where I’ve lived for the last fifteen years. The painful self-awareness. The body-checking. The skipping meals. The calorie counting. The makeup every morning. The endless, shapeshifting rules. The disordered behavior that became a quiet backdrop to my coming-of-age. In this post, I want to share more of what the after has looked like for me.
It’s terrifying what a single comment can do. My heart aches for anyone who received not just one, but a thousand of those comments. I have endless admiration for those who could brush them off. I wasn’t built with that kind of armor.
Not long after that moment in the bathroom, I decided I would lose weight. I was tired of being the “big” friend. My childhood friends were impossibly tiny—at least a foot shorter and half my weight. I was eleven the first time I restricted my eating. That summer, I ate only half of every dinner and pushed food around to make it seem like I had eaten more. I lost 18 pounds. My family wrote it off as a phase, which in some ways, it was. But like the phases of the moon, it cycled back around – again and again.
When I returned to school, the compliments poured in. “Looks like you finally stretched out!” I heard it again and again. And for a while, that final year of elementary school passed in a peaceful blur. I’d gotten a taste of what it felt like to win at the body game and I let myself relax for a minute.
But middle school sharpened my awareness like a knife. I started wearing shorts over my bikini bottoms at the pool because I hated how my legs looked. I never took them off—not in the water, not in photos. I began struggling with other mental health issues too. I started purging after big meals. It didn’t feel serious at the time. It wasn’t constant, and in a strange way, it felt like a choice I had control over.
By then, though, I had also started to see my early-blooming body as an asset. It earned me male attention—sometimes the kind that felt good, validating even. For a little while, I genuinely loved my body. I felt confident, even powerful. But that didn’t last. Eventually, that same body brought attention I didn’t want. The kind that made me feel unsafe, exposed. I saw how differently people treated me—how I was looked at, spoken to. My body stopped feeling like mine and started feeling like a threat.
Freshman year of high school, during what I lovingly refer to as my stoner era, I gained back all the weight I’d once lost—and then some. Late-night taquito trays and Domino’s brookies will do that to a girl. Sophomore year, I dropped fifteen pounds in a matter of weeks during a short-lived but intense Adderall binge. When that phase passed, things returned to their usual chaotic rhythm. My disordered behaviors were present but sporadic. I was relatively okay. Like I said – phases of the moon, waxing then waining.
The real unraveling didn’t start until my final year of college.
I don’t know exactly what flipped the switch. Maybe it was the uncertainty about the future, loneliness, or the resurfacing of depression. Whatever it was, it felt like a cry for help. If my mind was breaking and nobody could see it, maybe my body could tell the story. So I started losing weight—aggressively. I cut calories. I worked out for hours. I tracked every ounce, every step, every detail. And it worked. The weight came off fast. Ten pounds gone in two months.
Then I moved to a new town for grad school, and everything escalated. I was isolated—my boyfriend was the only person I really had. School was intense. My roommate was triggering. My home felt hostile. So I retreated. I started eating strange “diet” foods, bought a walking pad to ensure I never sat still, and began waking up at 4:30 AM just to run before work and class. I declined every dinner invite. I lived off caffeine and control.
By the time the scale showed a 26-pound loss, I had long since stopped caring about numbers. No number was low enough. My clothes no longer fit. My personality dulled. My boyfriend told me, in a more subtle loving way, that I had lost my soul.
Then came the missing period. At first, I shrugged it off—negative pregnancy tests, no big deal. But then came month ten. Then came the hair loss.
And that… that was the breaking point.
My hair had always been my safety blanket. It made me feel pretty when nothing else did. Watching it fall out broke something in me. That’s when I knew I had to stop.
I started adding food back. Slowly. Clumsily. I relapsed more than once. It was painful watching the number on the scale creep back up. But with each meal, each bite, something came back to me. My energy. My joy. My soul.
Recovery has not been linear. Just last week, I briefly convinced myself to reenter a deficit because of a two-pound post-vacation weight gain. I still count calories—but now I aim for maintenance. For nourishment. For enough.
I’m not recovered. But I’m healing. And I have so much more to say.
For now, I hope you understand me a bit better.
With love,
23