The Girl Who Lived, pt. 1

This is the story of my mental illness. I have to share it with you before we go any further.

(Trigger warnings for self-harm, disordered eating, family deaths, suicidal ideation.)

Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.

-Albus Dumbledore

It started during the fall of 2014.

I had just started my first semester at Patrick Henry College, a tiny college in Purcellville, Virginia, that boasted only 300 students. PHC was my dream school, and I could not have been more excited to attend there. It was a crazy school—its entire curriculum was centered around teaching Constitutional law, history, and political theory. Its pristine campus had seven buildings: Five dorms with a student center and library separated by a perfectly-mowed stretch of grass. And its tiny population was made up of a bunch of homeschoolers like me who pursued religion as hard as they supported their political conspiracies. PHC was a strange little cross-section of human life, and I absolutely loved it. Every time I visited the campus, I encountered friendly people who shared my beliefs and carried a passion for learning that I yearned to have. I knew it would be hard to move ten hours away from my home, but my mom and dad supported me, as they always have, and they gave me their blessing to pursue higher learning in Virginia. So, I had my whole life planned out ahead of me—I was going to attend PHC, graduate with honors, find a spouse, have kids, get a white picket fence and fifty dogs, and then die a happy, fulfilled death. Sounds realistic, right?

But maybe everything was not so perfect. In August, before I began classes at PHC, my grandfather was dying. My dad’s mom had died several years earlier, and now his dad had contracted cancer and declined treatment. We watched him slowly shrivel up, his personality changing from the quirky, sarcastic man we knew to an unpleasant, angry man who snapped at people out of pain. I loved my grandpa dearly. We bonded over singing opera loudly together and joking around about school and life, so seeing him suffer tremendously was terrible.

Finally, his pain ended in August, and he died. I had been through this funeral shtick before… the old friends offering condolences, the buttery homemade rolls baked by the Catholic ladies of his church, the half-hearted attempts at humor amidst the grieving. It was awful and I hated it. I was angry that another person had been taken from me, and mad at the world for being unfair. However, I was scheduled to move to Virginia soon, so I pushed all my feelings aside and resumed my happy plans to attend PHC.

After deciding on the remarkably healthy path of denying my feelings, I threw myself into my new classes with vigor. PHC is known for its high-caliber classes, so I felt the stress begin immediately. Papers and projects started flooding in, filling my small wooden desk with stacks of to-do assignments. However, I was learning about subjects from the rise of Western Civilizations to the impact of Beowulf on literature, so I was absolutely fascinated! I met my three wonderful roommates (who introduced me to the wonders of sketch comedy videos and fruit-flavored Tootsie Rolls) and began an immediate friendship with all of them; we were together almost twenty-four hours a day. I attended chapel three times a week and hall groups two times a week. I felt like I was atop a raft, trying to stay afloat on a frothy sea of assignments and social activities.

Also, I had decided during the summer that I was going to lose weight and finally be the size that I longed to be, so I began trying to control my eating with a vise-like grip. My attempts rapidly grew from eating one less cookie a day to eating one cookie a day. I controlled my eating as much as I could, skipping breakfast and having only a cup of hot chocolate with a spoonful of peanut butter for lunch. One day, I went to the dining hall for lunch and ate a single bun-less hot dog, desperately chopped into tiny pieces that I dipped in tangy ketchup. As soon as I ate the hot dog, I felt blinding regret and forced myself to run extra laps at the gym.

Oh, and that was the other thing—I woke up at 6:00am every morning and arrived at the gymnasium right when it opened. I would force myself to run a mile on the track encircling the top of the gym—the harsh yellow gym lights and rubbery track smell flooded my senses as I pounded along. My body seemed to curl in on itself—I gave it no fuel to run with, but I would keep running, forcing myself to fight through the pain so that I could lose weight. Right after running, I would head downstairs to the weight room and weigh myself. I was never happy with the numbers that I saw. Each time, I would think, just a little bit more weight…a little less food perhaps…maybe a little more running. And I would go to the showers and strip off my clothes, looking down at my hollowed-out stomach in disgust—too fat. Tiny hairs grew all over my body and I started smelling a weird odor on all my clothes. As my body shrank, I bought new clothes to fit my skeletal form. I could never get warm and shivered constantly. My body was self-destructing. The last time I weighed myself before my parents forced me to see a nutritionist, I was 92 pounds. I remember seeing those numbers and feeling a small tendril of triumph before I tamped it down with an obsessing need to lower that number to 90.

This nightmarish obsession slowly ate away at me as I struggled through my classes. Simultaneously, the health of my grandparents on my mom’s side started failing, and my mom began driving to their house daily to help them out. My mom and I have always been close, and not being able to physically be there for my mom gave me a sense of failure and helplessness that I couldn’t bear.

That’s when it finally crept in: crippling depression. It wasn’t something that just hit me out of nowhere—no, depression was a slow-growing fog, creeping around the edges of my life until everything was covered up. I began to feel sad every minute of the day. I felt a rock wall in front of me; I couldn’t write papers, I couldn’t feel joy in the simple things I used to. Whenever I heard a joke, I would laugh, but it wouldn’t be me laughing; instead, it was like I was looking at myself from the outside my body. I would call my parents daily, sobbing. But there was nothing they could do to help—nothing anyone could do to free me from this darkness surrounding me.

I flailed around wildly, searching for a way out. One day, I picked up a plastic knife and grated it against my lip until cherry-red blood started leaking from the crevice I created. I felt so alone and wanted someone to reach out to. I could hear the concern in my mom’s voice when I talked to her every day, and finally she urged me to seek help with the campus doctor. However, when I went to see the doctor, I wanted to tell her nothing. She asked me questions and prodded me with her cold fingers, but I felt like my problems were my own—I was safe in the shadow of my misery, and I couldn’t let anyone else in.

As the fall stretched on, I grew worse and worse. I participated in my school musical and orchestra concert, but each event felt like another monumental trial to get through. While I enjoyed the rigor of my classes and the company of my roommates, I felt weak and tired—like Bilbo says in The Fellowship: “butter scraped over too much bread.” It hurt just to breathe. I remember one day where I crumpled to the ground in one of the music practice rooms and sobbed after receiving a failing grade on a history paper. The rough sandpaper feel of the wall bit into my cheek as my body shook with sobs. I knew at that moment that I couldn’t do it anymore; I could no longer keep up this charade, pretending I was all right and succeeding in school, when inside I was burning alive.

(continued in the next post)