My first official, diagnosable eating disorder was bulimia. This old friend accompanied me through my last year of high school and all four years of college. I say old friend, but she often felt like an enemy.
During those years I ping ponged between a desperate need for the safety the bulimia brought me and shame that I didn’t have a different way of caring for my pain.
I felt so much vulnerability around my bulimia in college that I spoke of it in the past tense: I used to be bulimic. When I was bulimic…. I used to have an eating disorder.
I didn’t know how to say: I wake up every morning, determined not to binge, and despite my good intentions, it takes over.
I knew I wanted help. But I also felt the stigma around eating disorders and mental health on campus. I heard the cruel ways that some students talked about struggling students, especially women, and I wanted to belong.
And so I hid, and tried to pretend everything was okay, when everything was not okay. I hid so well that some of my college roommates didn’t know about my bulimia until after we graduated.
There are many threads we can follow in this story:
- the importance of healing the shame around trauma, mental health, and addiction
- the pressures our young people face
- the challenges of being highly sensitive
- and the creative but distressing ways we adapt to cope with the difficulties in our lives
Today I share this story to let you know that whatever vulnerability lives underneath your wounded places, you’re not alone. This is the human journey we all share.
Some of us are really good at hiding it. Some of our ways of hiding it look so good, and so much like success that nothing looks wrong.
And perhaps some of us are dealt a little bit of an easier hand. And perhaps some of us are born less sensitive, and so life’s wounds impact us in a different way.
One of the most helpful steps we can take is finding trustworthy spaces where we can gently, bit by bit, breath by breath, step by step expose our vulnerability, share our shame, and show the soft bruise of our wounds. You may find these spaces in a yoga class, on retreat, with a therapist, mentor, coach or healer, or with a listening partner or friend.
When our wounds are received by gentle, trustworthy hands they come into the light, and can shed their burdens. As our pain is met by what it didn’t receive in the moment, something inside us shifts, and our nervous system begins to rewire.
Afterwards, we often feel lighter and more free.
We also feel more connected to others. When our wounded places are met with kinship – other people’s stories of yes, I know that place, too – my pain becomes our pain.
Something in us grows larger than the pain, and this largeness of being – what we may call compassion, tenderness, forgiveness, strength, gentleness, or love – grows to surround our wound, like rings around a tree.
We take our place in the forest, in the biosphere. And we become more deeply rooted, and watch for new leaves to unfurl upon our overstory.