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Stuck in Antarctica

 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 through for that long of a day. I was only happy under my electric blanket. Before you ask, yes, I was wearing warm clothing and not just shorts. I remember it was May and my classmates began wearing shorts to school. I would wear two layers of leggings and I had an undershirt, a regular shirt, a sweatshirt, and then my winter jacket. Even with all those layers I was still miserable. After school I would beg my dad to turn the heat on in the car when he picked me up. The temperature in the car was so high he would be sweating and I would just now start to get a little warmer. 


As I began to recover slowly, very slowly, I lost the feeling of always being cold. Today, I still have a long way to go in my recovery but I am not in discomfort everyday. I do not like being cold now. I can’t be outside to this day that long because I get PTSD and flashbacks. I can’t stand being cold any longer because I was tortured by it for months of my life. To anyone who might be in recovery, it can be hard to find motivation to want to get better. One of my main motivations was not being cold anymore. Find your own motivations. I know it can be scary to recover because you do not know what is in store for you or what will happen. But I promise you, you won’t regret it. I would never go back now. 

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