Can I ever really trust myself again after an eating disorder?
In August 2023, I booked a flight 48-hours in advance to go to Montreal, Canada from Kansas City, Kansas to win back a man whom I’d broken up with the month prior.
On the day of, with nothing more than a half-packed suitcase and a displeased cat, I bid my grandmother adieu as she shook her head from her independent living lobby and I buzzed my way to and through the Kansas City airport. I’d never been to Montreal. Had not a clue how long I’d be there. And was unsure whether my ex would even take me back.
As the adrenaline of my RomCom adventure coursed through my veins, I glided off the first flight and found the nearest terminal bar to slam a glass of wine during my 8PM layover in NYC’s La Guardia. I knew what I was doing was relatively insane-sounding and therefore had told no one in my family about it except for my grandmother and mother, whom I had texted but did not call in order to avoid the loud ‘tsk’ I was sure to receive.
No sooner had I ordered the wine, I ran into a former co-worker/friend, sitting opposite the bar. As often happens with me, I’m never one to pass up a trip down memory lane so as we traded old stories of our early 20s office life in NYC, it consequently caused me to lose track of time and nearly miss the climactic Montreal flight at the center of this story.
Sprinting half a mile down the narrow terminal B passageway, I arrived at the corner gate soaked in sweat and with a cat who was making it quite known how displeased she was by this sudden turn of events. As the airline employee scanned me, with a dour expression, she asserted I was the last to board and quipped I was lucky to have made it.
Skimming my way down the airplane aisle, sweat beads still cinched to my temples, I apologized profusely as the cat carrier knocked shamefully against the temples of passengers in their seats.
As I took my window seat near the back, once again apologizing to seat mates who had to stand and rearrange in order to herd my cat and I into our seat, I plopped down and proceeded to fish through my purse to check my phone which, upon unlocking, informed me that I’d missed a Los Angeles TV producer’s call in the mayhem of my Home Alone-inspired sprint to the gate. My client had not shown up on time for a segment airing that evening, and as a Publicist, I was the one to receive the ire.
“CALL ME.” The text read. Only, I had 1 bar of service in the back of the plane and the flight attendants were well into their safety briefing, meaning attempting a call back would either done me death glares or bear a fruitless, static-filled back and forth.
As I texted that I could not make calls, but would figure out what happened to my client, the man I was chasing in Montreal also sent a text:
“Surely you’re on the second flight by now?????”
“Fuck,” I mumbled. In the haze of running into an old friend, I’d forgotten to inform him that I’d even landed in NYC.
“Yes, all good,” I implored - negating the marathon sprint to board - and instead scrambling to write back before takeoff. “Here are my flight details for when I arrive. Can’t wait to see you.”
10 minutes later, with an irate producer subdued, and an ex-soon-to-be-not-ex pacified, I leaned my head back and took a long, wholesome, meditative breath:
Surely, I thought, slipping my AirPods into my eardrums and pushing play on my summer playlist:
Surely, this would mark the end of decades of chaotic living.
This will be the end of my adrenaline-fueled lifestyle.
I’ll have a family. I’ll marry this man I’m about to win back. We’ll live in Canada, and partly in Medellin. Maybe Texas too one day.
We’ll be happy. I’ll be calm. I’ll work less and he’ll eventually make more money. We’ll have an international, but fruitful and calmer life.
... How wrong I was.
To spare unnecessary details, let’s just say this Notebook-esque love story unraveled in spectacular fashion. Instead of a fairy tale ending, it drained me— both financially and emotionally.
Our relationship never stable or calm (shocker, given the airport escapade). which, had I taken a step back—had I not impulsively boarded a flight and 24 hours after signed a lease in Montreal—I probably could’ve been able to conclude calmly without the financial and emotional toll that followed.
Left in the wake of last year’s RomCom gone wrong, it’s taken me all year to regain my footing since I packed up my van to set sail into the next unknown chapter of my existence.
Which leads me to today, back in Medellin, and the point of this essay.
Why share this tale of chaotic blow ups? And running through a NYC airport with a cat?
Well, if only because it’s the perfect metaphor to demonstrate exactly how so much of my life has been over the last two decades.
Chaotic, relatively humorous, dramatic, adventurous, high and low, impulsive, passionate, and fueled by adrenaline and emotion.
And aside from the confidence it brings that I’m a pretty good dinner guest with plenty of tales to share:
The chaos has also, consequently, made it harder to trust myself over the years: a type of self-skepticism which originated long ago, in the throes of an eating disorder, which I’ll circle back to in a moment.
A year and a half after that ill-fated Montreal plight — and I’m currently experiencing another period where I have a lot of what feels like fairly consequential decisions to make in the near future.
Or maybe — because I’m an emotionally-driven and anxious person — I tend to put that emphasis on every fork in the road and maybe it won’t be as big of an outcome as I think it will be.
But, for arguments sake, and as I near 36 wanting to be a mother but with no kid in sight, I can’t help but suspect that both my past and now looming future choices will have a direct impact on whether I achieve the last big dream in my life: motherhood.
And right now I’m struggling to trust that I’ll figure it out in a way that will best serve both me and a child. And while me having a kid and with whom and where and how is not the point of my post today - what is however is the familiar feeling of self-skepticism, which begs louder lately:
Am I able to make thoughtful decisions with my life? And the potential life of another? A child?
Am I capable of making decisions not firstly rooted in my emotional whims?
Can I be trusted to weigh the consequences in tandem of my choices, or am I impulsively enslaved forever?
Can I even lead a calm life … and be happy?
Self-skepticism, the term itself, reads like such a therapy buzzword. And if there bore a more interesting word to describe my reality, I’d use it. But, alas.
To clarify: it’s not that I don’t think I’m intelligent enough to make beneficial choices about my path forward. I am. I’m of perfectly sound and normal IQ level, and I’d venture EQ as well.
It’s more that I’m acutely aware that while I can and have made solid decisions throughout life, I’ve also at times invited in a questionable amount of impulsive chaos as well.
And I’d be remiss to not point directly to the eating disorder years as the premiere and easy evidence to support this self-agonizing belief.
I wonder sometimes: did I become more accustomed to impulsive behavior because of the eating disorder cycle that began so young, or was that behavior already sewn into me at birth and thus it became a cause for the disorder itself?
Either way, since I seem to repeat a pattern of fairly reckless behavior, I’ve never fully trusted myself in the aftermath of those years and I’m noticing it again at present.
And as I offhanded to my therapist this week: “Should I though? I’ve clearly demonstrated a pattern of behavior that, at times, begs questionable.”
A healthy amount of self-skepticism seems relatively appropriate when you were once someone who chose to run 13 miles on a stress fracture. Or when a few bites of a cookie incited hysteria.
I lived for years of my formative youth on a certain type of impulse.
An impulse to purge when full, an impulse to skip birthday dinners and parties because I felt the urge to run. An impulse to binge brownies and bland cereal, an impulse to control my intake.
I lied, manipulated, went to various and dangerous extremes, and none of it really shook me enough to stop what I was doing while in the eating disorder cycle. I existed, feening for the highs of purging, starvation and long runs. Ignoring risks of stress fractures, esophageal tears, heart damage, and potential death.
For years, I didn’t care. I weighed the risks and decided that the highs of the cycle were worth the ends they may meet.
So, despite the impulse of those years later turning into more romantic or adventure chaos, it does force one to later consider what kind of person they are, relative to others. And how much one can trust ones self.
“You had an illness, don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“It was the eating disorder, not you.”
“You were young, you didn’t know better.”
Sure. But can one really ignore ALL the behaviors of one’s past, chalk it all up to an ambiguous timeline of “youth” and blanket it all under the eating disorder umbrella when one is still seemingly quite prone to impulsive decision-making?
Isn’t there an argument to be made that perhaps I am just simply more wired on impulse and generally far more risk taking than the average person?
I guess I’ll never know, as it remains unclear how much control I even really had over how anorexia and the cycle developed. We know genetics play a role, certainly. Environment too (hello 00s diet culture). And had I known at 16 the way my brain would end up shaped by this eating stuff, would I have allowed myself to go down the rabbit hole so hard? Would I have tried to stop myself rewiring into an anorexia reward center?
I like to think I wouldn’t have. That I would’ve tried to mitigate it so it didn’t become so entrenched.
But, again, who knows? At 16 I very well may have valued being thin and fit over “future” me who is still climbing out of the muddy aftermath of that thinking and at times impulsive need to “run it off” or “control the portion”.
I can’t ever know, but I have a hunch: my patterns driven by emotion far more than logic. And even more-so as a teen. I don’t think I had it in me to really think about one day being 35 and still dealing with this. I certainly didn’t have the foresight to understand what a burden eating would be in my adult life.
But again, how much of this is about predisposed genetics, and how much my own natural state of being?
I’ll never know. And besides, who wants to really dive too deep into the oceans of self-responsibility? Might hurt the eardrums.
A friend said to me once, many years back:
“You’re an interesting person to love — high risk, high reward.”
We were walking down Madison Avenue in NYC after work. I’m not sure what I was bitching about when she worked that phrase into our conversation, probably some love affair gone wrong.
Regardless, that phrase has lived with me rent-free.
High risk. High reward.
There’s a compliment in there, but also a bit of a slight innit?
Caring about me not an easy bet. High risk inferring that there’s a very real possibility that loving me will burn you, but high reward that if it doesn’t, well then I suppose I hold the possibility to benefit or give back to your life in some meaningful, reward-filled ways.
I see how my pendulum can swing aggressively both ways.
But, for the sake of this musing, to some varying degree doesn’t everyones? Isn’t every human a multitude of beings inside of them? Each capable of screwing themselves or someone else over? Of respecting and disrespecting their bodies or their loved ones? Of doing good with the same hand they do bad.
Perhaps those of us with eating disorders, or other addictions, are simply more acutely aware of how true that is. How far the pendulum of self can swing. And how inexplicable it feels to want to do good by others, to be a reliable person for those you love, but be struggling with impulse control, and self-defeating habits which can then fan out and affect those closest to you.
A past therapist, a brilliant lady in her 70s or 80s in upper west side NYC, who I attribute as the one that helped get me into treatment in the first place, used to advise that I must alter the ways in which I label myself by my eating disorder:
I am not a perfectionist, I am driven.
I am not obsessive, I am persistent.
I am not broken, I am self-aware enough to recognize blind spots.
I don’t always learn the hard way, I learn through experience.
I am not reckless, I am fueled by curiosity.
I am not impulsive, I move with intensity.
I am not risky, I embrace risk.
You get the picture.
On the up n’ up days, when I’m not flinging myself down the self-skepticism road, I see her logic.
It is ultimately all in how you look at your own characteristics, and through which lens you view your history.
My eating disorder was destructive, absolutely. But it also showed how tenacious I can be when directed toward more fruitful goals.
My Montreal plight was a crash-n-burn, yes. But, it also reminded me that life with no passion (in my book) is no life at all.
I’d rather filet myself on a grill to feel something than glide half-zombied, going through the motions in life. Repeating the same day over and over.
I love living, and I want to soak up every bit I can. I love people in general, I view them all curiously, and wish I could talk to each of you every day.
Maybe it’s simply astute to have a balanced awareness of self, a skepticism of one’s capabilities as well as an understanding of their strengths. We deem it relatively healthy to hold some skepticism toward others, so why not ourselves? All of us at times blindly blundering our way through the finite time we have here.
On days where my emotions swing high, I also think about how this questioning of whether to trust myself is somewhat moot. Most we really can do is try to trust ourselves blindly, with feigned confidence. And hope for the best. Take the info we have in front of us and ascertain whether we have enough of it to make a beneficial choice. And I suppose we make all decisions in life understanding we have not a clue how they’ll ultimately pan out.
I have made millions of choices over 35 years, and when I look at everything that got me here, to this moment on a balcony in Medellin, I’ve turned out relatively fine, if only with a higher tendency than most to either crash and burn or fly and soar.
Oh, and I have a nuisance eating disorder that seems to forever need some management.
But if I look at my life objectively, I have indeed figured out how to pull myself together after eating disorder treatment.
I’m better with eating now than 10 years ago. I’ve noted certain behaviors fade into the oblivion.
It took 5 years from the first day I proclaimed that “I dream of owning a van,” but I did manage to pull that off too in 2021. And still have my van today.
Where I used to moan about how much I hated working in an office, I finagled a way to work remote permanently by creating my own LLC and going freelance. A risk most certainly, but one that 5 years later still works.
My romantic relationships haven’t worked out thus far, but I would only call a couple of them abysmal flops. Or, if you’re a affirmative person — “lesson learning.” I think I’m proud that I didn’t stay in something that was not right for either party for endless years simply out of attachment or fear of what next, though it does always seem to be me that had to be the one to say “it’s over.”
That, in turn, has subjected me to countless hours questioning whether I made the right choice or if I’m just so romantically screwed up that I let workable relationships ship out to sea.
But I digress. An essay for another time.
At the end of the day, I think we are a culture of people addicted to answers.
We demand quick answers to everything that we don’t understand.
We intellectualize healing, dissect it, organize it into steps and milestones, hoping that if we just understand why we’re fucked up well enough, we will finally feel whole.
I grew tried of trying to intellectualize why I developed an eating disorder. I spent a lot of my first few years in recovery trying to trace the steps that led me astray.
And while I have a pretty good sense of the bigger prongs, I also have to learn to accept a certain amount of unknowns.
About the eating disorder. About my future. About whether or not I should be able to trust myself.
I do believe it’s possible to have a life that’s both calm and still fulfilling to my nature. One that doesn’t require sprinting through airports, chasing love, or riding the highs and lows of a never-ending adrenaline rush, but still fills me with a zest for the unknown.
Maybe I don’t have to choose between passion and stability. Maybe I just am still trying to figure out how to integrate the two. Or maybe I never will, and my life will be a series of high highs and the occasional destructive low.
And perhaps I’ll find that my life doesn’t have to be about trying to eradicate my impulsive nature. Maybe it’s about refining it. Leaning on when to listen to that inner pull and when to pause. When to leap and when to let go.
I’ve made it this far as such. S’pose history would suggest I’ll carry on anyhow.
The only certainty, or so I hear, about life:
Everything changes, whether you want it to or not.
You ultimately have very little control in so many outcomes.
And the beat, the pulse of life, goes on anyway.
My mother arrives to Colombia today. And with approximately one hour before her arrival, and 10 things left on my to do list, including two client blogs, a much-needed shower, and time to re-wrap my foot from the colony of warts I had removed this week (don’t ask) I end this essay in a rush of words —
In a flurry of emotions.
A predictable, chaotic mix of thoughts and sentiments jumbled together:
It’s just the way I like it.
So thankful for your writing. It helps to not feel so alone.
LOVE WHEN YOU WRITE ABOUT EATING DISORDERS. PLEASE MORE OF THIS.