7 Years Ago Today

April 25, 2002: I am being admitted to inpatient treatment for the first time for anorexia nervosa. I am 17.

I am absurdly naïve.

I am beyond emaciated.

But mostly I’m just pissed my parents are forcing me somewhere before I turn 18 and become an “adult.”

I’m convinced I’m going to be the fattest person there. I also think, and I quote from a journal I kept at the time, that I will be “strapped to a bed being force-fed calories to get fat like I’m in some damn nazi concentration camp.”
I had no anger issues, obviously.

It happened so fast. I come home from school one day, at lunch, because of course I’m not going to eat, and I’m exhausted, so tired; always so tired. My mom is sitting at the dining room table, crying. “What’s wrong,” I ask her? “Dad and I have decided to put you in rehab,” she says.

And it’s done, simple as that. Less than a week later I leave school, leave my friends, my classes, my A.P. tests. I miss graduation, I miss everything. I disappear. Finally, like I had always wanted to. Poof, I’m gone.

The first day there, I am a freaking deer caught in the headlights. Well, a starving and half-dead one, anyway. I am asked the same questions by about six different people. I am terrified, but pretend like I am okay. I smile a lot. I don’t eat a thing.

First group I go to is music therapy. We bang instruments like children and talk about our emotions. I don’t get it. But I thump enthusiastically at my tambourine anyway, and don’t forget to smile, oh and also suck in your fat stomach it’s showing through your shirt, but keep smiling, keep playing.

I’m in therapy now, meeting my therapist for the first time. She asks me why I think I have an eating disorder, and I tell her I don’t have one. I bitterly think that my control is taken away, and that not eating for days and abusing laxatives and ipecac is normal. I do not have a problem. There are a lot of things I am unsure of in this life, but that is one thing I am not unsure of. There is nothing wrong with me.

Twenty weeks later I leave. I think I’m supposed to be better. My parents think I should be better. (Especially for that high rehab cost!) I know now, as I leave for the first time, that I have a problem.
One that still hasn’t gone away.

Treatment saved my life, quite literally. But in so many ways, it ruined it, too.

Seven years I’ve been in and out of treatment, hospitals, outpatient therapy and dietary sessions. I’ve endured EKG’s and blood withdrawals, interventions, tear-filled fights with loved ones, feeding tubes, PEG tubes, re-feeding, pain. I’ve loved the scale; I’ve hated it. For seven years I’ve been The Anorexic One, or Briethatonegirlwiththeeatingdisorder, or Hey guys did you hear that Brie B______ went into treatment again? Yeah, I totally called it, I knew she would! Seven years wasted, while wasting away.

But finally, I’m doing something right. Slowly, but yeah, I’m getting there. Eight’s always been my lucky number, my favorite. I know why, now.

I have high hopes for year eight. It’s going to be The One.