Please believe me

An hour after I arrived at the residential treatment facility in Carlsbad, I asked a staff member where the restroom was. “I have to go with you,” she said.

As I started to enter the daisy yellow restroom and shut the door, she stuck a foot in: “oh no, sorry - you have to keep the door wide open.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling my 22-year old self become unusually flustered. “But I don’t purge…”
“Doesn’t matter,” she rolled her eyes, indicating she had heard it million times, “I have to sit here and watch you to make sure you don’t do something.”

So I sat on the toilet, with her staring directly at me, door wide open. And we’d repeat that multiple times a day for the next 6 weeks while I was at the facility.¹

It’s not that I was modest - I’d lost all sense of modesty when I had to use a bedpan for a month hospitalized at age 16. When you are on total bedrest for fear your heart would give out, you get used to a lot of things that would be humiliating for any teenager. But what would get me about the bathroom door being open was this: it was the treatment facility saying “I don’t trust you.”

And with good reason. I will be the first to admit that you shouldn’t trust a person in the throes of an active eating disorder, because I know the things I did to lie, cheat and steal my way to protect it.

*CW: eating disorder behaviors*

It wasn’t just the bathroom. It was the dietitians who had to check to make sure we had filled our plates correctly before sitting down to eat. It was the staff who inspected each one of our plates after mealtime to make sure we had eaten it all. It was the rule that said we couldn’t wear clothes with pockets or hoods or zippers. It was the staff checking in on us in the middle of the night to make sure we weren’t exercising in our room. It was the “no hands below the table” rule. It was the “only allowed to shower before breakfast in the morning so we make sure you aren’t purging in the shower” rule.

It was the fact that as a teenager post-hospitalization, my parents were responsible for portioning my food, serving me, and enforcing the fact I ate. It was me having to show them clean plates and not being able to eat alone (or it didn’t “count”) or even bus my plate to the sink.

Understandably, I needed accountability in the depths of my disorder and while starting on the road to recovery. As I got further along in my recovery, the level of trust increased, the “privileges” increased.

Understandably, as soon as I started relapsing, I broke that trust. Because once again, I was lying my face off. And with each relapse, I chipped away at whatever was left of any trust. When I finally confronted the 20 years of relapse and recovery and hiding and lying and protecting, I told myself that going to Opal Food & Body in 2019 was going to be different.

And it was.

And it still is.

4.5 years in recovery going strong. And I trust myself, and that’s all that should matter, right?

Right?!

THAT is the question I struggle with, and one that I’ve struggled with for the past several decades: the feeling that, no matter what I do, people in my life are always going to question or have a hard time believing that I’m *actually* in recovery. And I don’t blame anyone for questioning that - I’ve had enough relapses to warrant skepticism.

(Note: I want to make it clear that I don’t believe people struggling with eating disorders are lying intentionally: as much as I blame myself, I’ve been in enough therapy to know how powerful these diseases are. When I say “people don’t trust me,” what I really mean is “people don’t trust the disorder.” When a person is deep in the throes of an eating disorder, protecting it is the number one priority. None of us are proud of what we have done in those moments, but those moments are all too familiar for anyone who has ever suffered. It is not the person, it is the disorder.)

Early in my recovery after leaving Opal, the need to be the poster-child for recovery consumed me. There are many examples of this, but going out to eat with others who know you are in recovery is the trickiest one. It’s perhaps the worst scenario to maneuver for someone fresh in recovery, and it goes a little something like this in my brain:

“Well shit, what should I order? It has to be substantial and what a “normal” person would eat, even if that’s not what I want today. Dear God, no salad. And you MUST finish your plate, Amelia - even if you are incredibly full, you have to show to other people that you DON’T have an issue with food. If you leave anything on your plate people will instantly assume you are restricting.”

I’ve engaged in these mental gymnastics for years - it’s almost an automatic thought process that starts to kick in whenever I’m around people and food. Because, for better or worse, there are essentially two easy ways that people gauge how “recovered” you are: (1) how you behave around food (e.g., what you eat, what you don’t eat, how much, etc); and (2) what you look like (meaning, unfortunately, the shape of your body and what you weigh). For anyone who has struggled with an eating disorder for a long period of time, we know this all too well. It frankly sucks to feel like everyone is watching what you eat and what you look like - just looking for signs of relapse.

The good news is the further along I get in the recovery process, the more I’m able to let go of the incessant need to prove. I’ve said this before, and I stand by it: I tend to think that the more a person tries to prove to you they don’t have issues around food, the more likely it is that they actually do. It’s the reason, for example, one of the warning signs of an eating disorder is posting too much about food as almost a compensatory behavior. I’ve definitely been there - the case of “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” But it’s the “look at me with this food showing you that I eat!” version.

I’ve moved past that phase because I’m in a stronger place in recovery. But when I sustained a stress fracture that might as well be the poster child for RED-S and an eating disorder, I feared that the need to prove and to overexplain might come flying back with a vengeance. Instead, I found myself asking myself a simple question:

“What if I trust myself?”

It’s a novel concept, I know. But for someone who has spent most of her life being questioned by others and questioning myself, it seems like a radical concept to even consider. I’ve spent my entire life seeking the approval and trust of others. And sitting with the fact that others may never trust me or believe me and I can’t do a damn to change that…well that is SUPER uncomfortable.

But despite the questioning from doctors, questioning from the peanut gallery, and a good healthy dose of my own self-assessment, for the first time in my life I’m recognizing that I have to start trusting myself if I’m going to thrive in this world. Despite the inherent mistrust I’ve had from a young age. Despite all the (well-intentioned) treatment that instilled into me that I wasn’t to be trusted.

Perhaps my work now is to lean into this. Yeah, it sucks to break a femur and then know that everyone probably thinks you broke the femur because you relapsed. Yeah, there’s a strong voice inside me that screams “you must prove that you are ok.” Yeah, I’m fighting the urge to write out that over-explanation right now.

Instead, I actually have somewhat of a deep peace: I know what happened, and I trust myself and take ownership for every questionable decision that led me here while giving myself grace for a shitstorm of dumb luck as well.

But when I take a step back, maybe that’s the difference now as compared to the last several decades: for the first time, I’m not questioning whether it’s a disorder that’s running my thoughts and behaviors. Don’t get me wrong - it’s still there, the little monkey on my back that taps on me every now and then. But I’m able to identify it, and separate it from myself. The key is this:

I trust myself now.

I don’t feel the need to make others believe me anymore because I believe myself.

I don’t have to convince myself that I am in recovery because I know I am.

I don’t have to convince others as a way of convincing myself.

That’s not to say that trust is completely blind - I’m always going to need to maintain vigilance and a healthy curiosity when it comes to the eating disorder.² But I’m 40 years old and I can’t keep living life paralyzed by the the perceptions of others (and as I like to remind myself - we all are so wrapped up in our own shit that no one really cares). I won’t be perfect at this, and I’m sure my automatic over-explanation responses will be tough to quiet.

But I’m not that college kid in treatment in California. No one is asking me to pee with the door open anymore (thank God!). I believe and trust myself, and that will have to be enough.

1. Many treatment facilities these days give you the right to earn these privileges. This was in 2006, and a different era of treatment model, at a facility that was very militant in its approach. In contrast, when I was at Opal in 2019, I earned “bathroom privileges” (as we call it) within the first few days of me being there.

2. I personally don’t believe in being “recovered.” I believe that recovery is a lifelong process - the moment I start to think I’m “recovered” is the moment that I will be primed for relapse. Full recovery is possible, but it’s always an active process.