Clandestine Confessions

Three weeks passed before I would be discharged.
The only reason being we were going on a family vacation – my parents convinced them to let me leave early.
It was 21 days that forever changed the trajectory of my life.
And now only hitting me that the only other time I was away for exactly that same time frame was almost 18 years later.
For my cross-country road trip.
Another set of 21 days that would completely alter the path I was walking…
One led to hurt.
One led to healing.
But both reliant on the other – one could not have happened if the other never occurred.
–
The nurse sat with me on a bench in the hallway.
A paper in hand – the contents of it my nightmare.
Gosh, how I wished this was all just a matter of me needing to open my eyes…
She read each word to me – my admission weight, my discharge weight, my goal weight, my expected weight gain each week.
All logic lacking in how these numbers were ironclad for the past two years and then all of a sudden I could know them.
All of them.
On the day of being released back into the world to fend for myself.
She handed me the pen.
“Sign at the x.”
With trembling hands and suppressed tears, I wrote my name in perfect cursive.
It was the only thing the same about me as the day I walked through the doors of the ward.
–
I would return “home”.
But nothing felt familiar.
Or safe.
Everything in my room exactly as I left it yet all feeling so different.
I could no longer relate to the version of myself that occupied the space.
The stuffed animals sitting on the bed a symbol of innocence I lost the ability to claim.
My siblings trying to connect with their sissy of early July.
But me now incapable of responding as her.
My dad looking for all the signs his “Pudge” was back.
But none of them having survived the battle.
–
Everyone was looking for normalcy again.
But nothing was normal…
It wasn’t normal to be weighed at the kitchen counter by your mom – standing backwards on the scale pulled out from its hiding place.
And then having that number dictate the quantity of chicken fingers she would put on your plate at lunch.
It wasn’t normal to log every single morsel of food you consumed every day to show your nutritionist.
It wasn’t normal to have people sit at a table and watch you eat.
It wasn’t normal to be experiencing suicidal thoughts as a child.
Fighting to keep yourself alive just as much as you were your Tamagotchi.
It wasn’t normal to be so closely acquainted with depression.
To watch the world out your window…literally…and have lost all passion to participate in the art of being alive.
–
It was during our vacation that year when I realized the anorexia was not the only invader of my mind.
While sitting outside on the balcony of our condo on the last night.
My siblings and parents inside watching “Meet the Parents” – spread out on the couch and chairs in the living room.
I observed them – laughing, talking, snacking on fudge, being present.
And I became so overcome with the awareness it was not only that sliding glass door separating our two worlds.
There was now an indescribable emotional agony serving as a barricade to our connection.
A deeply rooted sadness shielding me from engaging in their reality.
Feeling too tainted by pain, too traumatized by what I had seen within the walls of the ward to ever be able to join them in the joy of living.
And that rippled out into every other relationship in my life.
–
I walked the halls of my junior high on the night of orientation just a couple weeks later a shell of myself.
Masquerading externally as who I once was while living internally as who trauma shaped me into becoming.
The incongruency only perpetuating the pain and shame.
Both of those the designers of the mask I donned whenever in public every day moving forward.
I listened to my friends talk about their summer, asking me about mine…
I shared the bare minimum – only what would make me still look “normal”, feel “acceptable”.
Never disclosing the truth of how I spent a third of my summer.
And not something I would share publicly until now.
–
The psych ward was designed to be the ending of the disorder.
But unfortunately, it marked the beginning of years of deep descents into a darkness I never fathomed could exist.
And after much healing and consideration, I have decided it is time to let those stories, that version of me, be exposed to the light.
She is worthy to be seen.
And I am the only one who can do it for her…