Learning to Disappear

I don’t remember making a decision to stop eating.

There wasn’t one moment where I woke up and decided I wanted an eating disorder.

It happened so quietly that I barely noticed it.

By middle school, skipping breakfast had become normal. Then lunch disappeared too. I convinced myself I just wasn’t hungry. Looking back, I think it felt easier not to eat than it did to face everything I was carrying inside.

At the same time, I was struggling in other ways.

Middle school and high school were some of the hardest years of my life. I was hurting in ways I didn’t know how to explain, and I didn’t have the words to tell anyone what was happening inside my head. The pain I felt emotionally started showing up physically too.

Around that time, I also began believing that changing my body would change how I felt about myself.

I started exercising because I thought I needed to lose weight, not because I enjoyed moving my body. I found diet pills at the dollar store that I could buy without anyone noticing. They felt like another step toward becoming the version of myself I thought I was supposed to be.

None of it felt extreme.

It felt responsible.

Disciplined.

Even admirable.

That’s one of the things I wish more people understood about eating disorders. They rarely announce themselves. They often disguise themselves as “healthy choices,” “self-control,” or “motivation.”

No one looked at me and said, “I’m worried about you.”

Instead, I learned that the less I ate and the more I tried to change my body, the more normal it seemed.

Looking back now, I don’t think I was trying to disappear because I hated food.

I think I was trying to disappear because I didn’t know how to exist comfortably in my own skin.

I believed that if I could just become smaller, quieter, easier, maybe life would finally feel lighter.

But no matter how much space I tried to take away from my body, the pain I was carrying never got any smaller.