I said I'd be done with this by 40

What do you mean you don't just age out of eating disorders?

I sat cross-legged in the corner of the large sectional couch, eyes darting around to the six other women who sat in a circle in the living room with me. “I mean, that’s why I’m here before I go to law school: there’s no way I’m going to let myself be dealing with an eating disorder when I’m like, 40 or something. That’s just embarrassing.” I picked at the chipped blue polish on my fingernails.

“Yeah,” Taryn¹ piped up next to me, “I mean, when I’m 40, I just won’t even care what I look like or what I eat, right? That’s, like, OLD.” Taryn had just finished high school, and was heading to an Ivy League college next year.

The other women nodded in agreement. At 22, I was the eldest of the group living at the residential treatment facility in Southern California. Six weeks earlier, I graduated summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis, and packed up my car and drove cross-country with my mom directly to the treatment facility, which was my last-ditch attempt to convince my parents and treatment team that I was well enough to attend law school in the fall. While WashU had attempted to kick me out multiple times, it was pretty hard to do when I was “so high functioning” in school. But my parents weren’t going to stand for three more years of the same song and dance during law school.

22 year old me

“I’ll have, like, kids and shit,” I continued, with the therapist shooting me a stern glance intoning “language” under her breath. “Kids and stuff”, I corrected with a slight eye roll. “It’ll be so nice to not be constantly thinking about food.”

When I went to PHP treatment at Opal Food and Body at age 35, I thought a lot about this conversation. Whether or not I admitted it to myself, “be done with this by 40” weighed on me subconsciously, as if I could still feel the judgment of 22-year-old Amelia.

And at 41, I hate to disappoint my overly plucked eyebrows and white eyelinered younger self, but I’m still not done with this shit. Is it orders of magnitude better than it was 25 years ago, 20 years ago, even 5 years ago? Absolutely. Is it completely gone? I wish.

(Oh gosh how do I wish)

I’ve been very vocal about the fact that I don’t believe in recoverED², but that I am in an ever-constant state of recovery throughout my life, with ups and downs and flares and quiet times. And I’ve also realized lately that while I won’t admit it, a part of me is still waiting for the day when I “stop caring.”

I wish someone had told 22 year-old me that age doesn’t fix eating disorders.³ That the longer I let the eating disorder fester and ingrain itself into my life and my identity, the harder it would be to live without it, to reverse those habits that etched themselves into every facet of my life.

You don’t just magically “stop caring”.

I watched my aunt slowly succumb to Alzheimers over the course of a decade after a lifetime of untreated anorexia. The irony of the disease is that as the Alzheimers took hold, her fear of food disappeared. For the first time in her life, she ate without fear and disorder. In her 70s.

I attended a support group with a woman in her 60s who, after decades of being in and out of treatment, screamed in frustration that she still can’t eat a piece of cake without turning into a human calorie calculator.

You don’t just outgrow an eating disorder.

Maybe my 22 year-old self assumed that eventually the external pressures of beauty and youthfulness and physical appearance would lessen, and that taking away those external pressures would make the internal pressures that much easier.

Of course, we know that (1) eating disorders aren’t about external societal pressures and (2) if the anti-aging culture we live in nowadays shows us anything, it’s that these pressures don’t disappear in midlife. In fact, I might actually argue that they intensify with headlines praising celebrities who are “aging in reverse!” and we are bombarded with products and procedures to fight wrinkles and sagging skin. Fuck man, it’s rough out there. The 40s ain’t looking good, and based on what I hear from those in their 50s, 60s and beyond…most of us aren’t wired to “stop caring.”⁴

Aging isn’t the magic bullet to fixing an eating disorder.

Only one thing is: putting in the work.

The end of February is always Eating Disorders Awareness Week. And this year, I’m deep in the feels of approaching mid-life and still having to stay ever vigilant, still having dumpster fire days at war with my brain and still, yes, caring about what the mirror reflects back at me. I carry with me a lot of shame around how I’ve been able to do some incredibly hard things in my life, but this thing has stuck around long past its welcome despite thousands of hours of treatment and therapy.

But, I’m getting there. Instead of being frustrated that I’m still not 100% eating-disorder free as I pictured I’d be twenty years ago, I’m instead trying to focus on how far I’ve come, especially in these past six years since Opal. Because when habits and fears are ingrained into your brain for as long as they have been in mine, it’s going to take a long time to reverse that patterning. Maybe recovery is just a very prolonged letting go that has to happen over and over again and then a day comes when you look around and go “huh…wait…I think I’m ok.”

For anyone else out there still waging a war in your head in midlife and beyond, I see you. And I’m utterly exhausted too sometimes. For those of you younger, the one thing I will scream from the mountaintops is to get help sooner rather than later. The longer you let an eating disorder entrench itself into your life, the harder it is to disentangle it. As tiring as it is, I continue the work with the hopes that one day I’ll look around and tell 22 year-old me “you know what…you never stopped caring, but you got there anyway.”

1. Names and details changed

2. This tends to rile people whenever I talk about this and I understand that opinions can differ on it. I know many people who feel they are entirely recovered, and I respect that and honestly envy it. For me, personally, I’m not sure the thoughts and obsessions will ever entirely disappear, but recovery is choosing to not act on those until they get quieter and quieter and quieter.

3. I imagine they teach that now, but in the late ‘90s, it was the Wild West in eating disorder treatment and recovery

4. I’m sure I’ll get a lot of feedback of “oh I absolutely stopped giving any fucks,” to which I say hell yes, happy for you! Also, I’m jealous.