Clandestine Confessions

I was 11 years old when I received my first official diagnosis.
After silently suffering three years prior with a mental and emotional turmoil I had no idea even had a name.
I sat in the chair of my pediatrician’s office, the same one I claimed since I was a toddler, as she would speak the words one could never prepare to hear.
“Combining your low weight, your drastic weight loss, and your eating patterns, you fit the criteria for anorexia nervosa. You are anorexic. Do you know what that means?”
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With my eyes to the ground, confused as to what she was saying, scared by what was happening, I shook my head no.
Those words were another language to my eleven-year-old self.
Those words were foreign to my mind that up to this point had done so well at preserving innocence. There I was thinking I was just here for a normal doctor’s appointment.
But nothing about that moment ended up being normal.
And nothing after those words were spoken would be again.
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There was this part of me that knew it didn’t stop here.
I could not walk out of that room with a band aid and a sticker and life magically return back to how it was.
The diagnosis did not give an end.
It brought a beginning.
It marked the start of a painful journey I somehow stumbled upon in the midst of singing Britney Spears in my bedroom and having sleepovers with friends and having dance classes in the basement with my sister.
At some point amid the normalcy of childhood, I took a random turn and ended up in a very different world.
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I would spend the next 13 years of my life repeatedly in and out of psychiatric wards, treatment centers, and hospitals all centered around that diagnosis.
I would see “specialists” weekly – psychiatrists, dieticians, therapists, doctors.
Along the way I would be handed more labels.
Acquire more unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Struggle more intensely to stay in this world.
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At age 12 I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression.
At 13 it was obsessive compulsive disorder.
At 14 it was body dysmorphic disorder.
At 15 it was bulimia, and I began self-harming.
At 16 I attempted suicide for the first time. Five more attempts would follow.
At 17 I began abusing laxatives.
At 20 I would stand on death’s doorstep – and with an intense ferocity beg God to open it.
He never did.
At 22 I would do it again.
And He would say no once more.
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Those labels have been a crutch.
And a curse.
A shield.
And a sword.
I battled for them.
And I battled against them.
I wore them as badges of honor.
And I wore them as wounds of disgrace.
They became the only parts of myself I recognized.
And they made me unrecognizable.
I have hid behind them.
And I have hid from them.
I used them for control.
And they took all control away from me…
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The more the years passed and the diagnoses accumulated, the grimmer people painted my future.
“Chronic” was the word most used.
Heavy emphasis put on the “nevers” I would live in.
The repercussions I would endure for the rest of my lifetime.
Offering me the “optimism” of the very minimum I would get to experience.
Grouping me into a statistic to provide numerical “hope” of my potential outcome.
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There was talk of committing me after repeatedly signing myself out AMA.
There were threats to call the police to then force court ordered treatment.
There was conversation of my parents taking back full medical guardianship over me.
There was discussion of hospice…even goodbyes spoken to me by family members.
Day by day you watch people slowly give up while they are simultaneously begging you to hold on, to choose life.
They speak of the darkness that lies ahead for you while concurrently expecting you to fight through hell for only a life half lived.
People saw this resistant, stubborn, helpless woman but kept overlooking the reality: that every no I kept speaking to life was a shout for someone, anyone to offer true guidance…to see me…to understand what was happening…to provide relief from pain too deep to comprehend…
I was given no peace.
I was given no voice.
I was given no truth.
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It left me with two choices: rebel against life and accept the fate the diagnoses made for me or…
Rebel for life…
Radically defy the narrative spoken over me.
Resist the path of cyclical “healing” paved for me and design my own.
Discover how to rewrite how those labels defined my identity – pursuing what is true about myself and my existence, working it all together for my purpose.
Erase from my mind the restrictive shoulds and coulds those labels placed over my life – refusing to settle for anything but living alive, fully and abundantly.
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Can we tell which choice I made…?