A Dancer's Struggle

  It was Christmas Eve and I was begging my parents to go to the gym. Last year, I had an unhealthy obsession with running. I would run to earn food and to be skinner. The night before Christmas day I was asking my parents over and over again if I could go on Christmas, even though it is a holiday, I wanted to go to the gym and run. After pleading all night they eventually agreed. Christmas morning at 7:00am before eating breakfast or opening presents, they took me to the gym. I proceeded to run three miles. The reason I had wanted to work out so badly was so I could then enjoy my Christmas day and not feel guilty for eating food.  In reality, I wasn’t close to eating enough food to fuel my body in the first place. When we were done at the gym I went home and had a piece of toast. There was no butter or any spread on it. It was simply just a piece of toasted bread. Running and the thoughts in my mind to be the ideal image of “skinny” were controlling my life. Did I actually want to wak

  I was trapped in an invisible ice cube everyday. I couldn’t escape the feeling of being frozen. When I was heavily using behaviors in my eating disorder, I was malnourished as you know. This came with consequences that I couldn’t flee even if I tried. There was zero fat on my body at this point. I was a walking skeleton. My body had no warmth to protect me or generate heat. I felt extremely cold 24/7. This wasn’t your ordinary feeling of cold. It’s not like standing outside in the snow with no clothes, it is dreadful. My bones would constantly hurt from the pain. The coldness I felt would never go away unless I was sitting under my electric blanket that could produce its own heat for me. This point in my life I wasn’t happy. I was suffering all day everyday. No one around me could relate to the immense amount of pain my body would feel from freezing. It got to the point where I would have panic attacks before going to school because I just could not endure the agony my body was going