Why I Celebrate Valentine’s Day: A Love Story

Everyone hates Valentine’s Day. I used to hate it too. I hate red roses. I hate teddy bears holding hearts. I find chocolate in heart shaped boxes less appealing than chocolate presented in any other form. That being said, for the past few years I have celebrated Valentine’s Day and loved every minute of it. And I’m going to tell you why.

Valentine’s Day is the day I celebrate my anniversary. It’s an anniversary that I share with no one else. An anniversary that doesn’t even correctly reflect the date I honor. But I call it my anniversary because it is the day each year that I take the time to reflect, honor, and renew the promise I made three years ago- that I would not only stop destroying my body but actively learn to love it and myself. Since then I have slowly expanded what that means to me, gradually pushing myself into new paths of healing that are often uncomfortable and terrifying and, in the end, reaffirming. My next goal is admitting to the people in my life that this is part of who I am and that this is what I celebrate on Valentine’s Day. I can count on both hands how many people know about my eating disorder and only twice did I actually tell the full story, speak honestly, and express myself fully. With the exception of those two conversations, I never really tried and I never felt comfortable afterwards. But in all honesty, they were half hearted confessions that I gave so little too and then had the nerve to be disappointed when I got even less in return. So I am going to do it for real this time. On this anniversary, I am going to get it right.

My first memory of making myself throw up was when I was nine. My first memory of making myself throw up in order to lose weight was one year after. I hated my body. Hated it more than I had ever hated anything. Looking back, it was as if over night I had absorbed a new reality in which my body was currency. I held that idea of my body for so long, that my worth rested solely in my body and the worth of my body was for others to decide, that I can’t remember what it was like to not see myself and the world around me within those terms.  In the beginning, I wasn’t able to see it within that context. All I knew was that my body was disgusting so I was disgusting and I was worthless so my body was worthless. As the years went on, my body was the explanation for every problem, every conflict, every disappointment, every failure. Everything that ever went wrong was because my body was so ugly. Everything that didn’t end up perfectly was because my body was imperfect. The only voice I ever heard in my head, the voice that rose above all others because it screamed day and night, was that any pain or disappointment was no surprise because if you wanted any proof that I was a useless, hideous human being all you had to do was look at my body and it would be clear.

So I waged war against my body. I can see now how badly I wanted to punish myself. I didn’t want it to experience joy or satisfaction or comfort of any kind. I wanted my body to suffer because its endless list of imperfections was causing me to suffer. If it ceased to exist, the screaming voice in my head would be silent. I starved myself, I made myself throw up, I binged,  and I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop when my doctor told me of how my body was breaking down. I didn’t stop when my parents were spending money they didn’t have to purchase whatever the doctor said I needed in order to make my body function normally. I didn’t stop even when I was so tired and wanted so desperately to find a way to be happy. I didn’t know how to stop and I didn’t want to stop because by the time I was twenty I didn’t know how else to relate to myself, my body, or process the world around me.

The whole time this was going on I believed two very simple things: That I was only making myself throw up because I was dieting and that if I wasn’t so fat, I could stop at any time. It has taken me many years to be able to realize how blind I was to what I was really doing. I wasn’t just dieting. I was actively trying to destroy myself and what I craved was destruction. Sometimes when I was about to get in the shower, I would take a marker and draw lines across my body so I could visualize how beautiful I would be if all the fat and impurities were removed. I thought I looked beautiful in the end, a maze of colors, and how I hated to see myself afterwards, just the same and just as disappointing. But with those lines in place, those lines that I thought were so beautiful, there was nothing left of me. I was really fantasizing about my body disappearing.  I fantasized about cutting myself a lot. The only reason I never did was because of a quiet, yet persistent sense of self-preservation that knew if I started cutting I might not be able to stop and those lines would become real. It was always about more than dieting. It was about how lonely I felt, how disconnected and misunderstood I felt, and how I was suffering from depression, although it wouldn’t be diagnosed until I was in college. It was about the fact that I have never felt a part of the world around me and how the years of bullying I experienced made me feel even more disconnected. It was about how badly I wanted to make sense of the fact that no matter where we moved I was always bullied and the only answer I could come up with as a ten year old was that I was the problem since I was the only constant so I must be as bad as everyone said I was. It was about so much more than dieting and it was my coping mechanism for so long that I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know how to handle my life without purging and I didn’t know how live without an overwhelming sense of self-hatred coloring my every thought and action. I tried to stop a few times and it never worked because I was never able to be honest with myself about what I was actually doing when I was forcing myself to throw up and I could never face the question of what comes next: what comes after you stop an addictive behavior?

I went into therapy when I was in college. I had become severely depressed and more suicidal than I had ever been. I told my parents about the depression and a brief mention of the suicidal thoughts and they agreed to bring me home from college. I told them a lot of things during that time but I never told them about the purging, the starving, none of it. It was still my little secret. It was during therapy that I was actually able to stop for a brief amount of time but I still wasn’t being honest with myself. I thought that simply because I had stopped that I was fine. What happened was that everything inside of me that compelled me to destroy my own body no longer had an outlet. I started drinking and smoking. A lot. I thought my lack of care for my body was a sign of my recovery but it was the same issues in a new form. I got drunk a lot and I became a hostile drunk. It got to a point where I couldn’t drink without hitting someone, threatening to hit someone, cursing someone out, ripping someone to shreds with my words. I actually hit other people and thought I was justified because they made me mad. I convinced myself that I was indestructible, an alpha female, that no one would fuck with me. In my eyes, I had made myself the anti-victim. I would never be bullied, never be weak. I felt my anger and aggression made me indestructible and impenetrable.

Then I relapsed. And I hated myself for it which made it even worse. I was filled with an overwhelming fear that I would never be able to stop. That I would never be strong enough to conquer the constant need I felt to purge. It took me a really long time to be able to stop again. When I finally did, it was awful. I remember nights where I wouldn’t leave my room because I didn’t trust myself to be able to walk past the bathroom without running in and vomiting. I got rid of my waste basket in my room. Some nights I wouldn’t sleep because all I could think about was how good I would feel if I could just vomit; how it would make whatever was troubling me disappear and that I would like myself more because of it. I can still remember the feeling of control and cleanliness that I would feel after purging. I would feel it only for a moment but it felt so good. For a long time afterwards I couldn’t go anywhere near anything associated with the human body. I didn’t attempt any diets, I didn’t focus on what I ate, I didn’t exercise, I didn’t go clothes shopping. I went on auto-pilot. I had such an extreme fear of never being able to stop that I had to ignore everything. I completely disconnected myself from my body. Before it was my entire focus and it was the symbol of everything I did and was. Now, it didn’t exist. It couldn’t. It was like being a pyromaniac and my body was paper soaked in lighter fluid. I had to forget it was there or I would use it. There was no other option. I didn’t know how to be aware of my body, not destroy it, or even take care of it and treat it in a healthy way. I was so far from that place. First I just had to stop purging.

The turning point for me was when I went to western Africa. It had always been my dream to travel and work abroad and being there made me feel really good about what I was doing with my life. It was my senior year and it was the first time in my whole college career that I felt proud of myself. My life there was totally different and it required me to be a lot more physically active than I had in the past. I started to love the feeling of being physically active. I became more and more aware of what my body was capable of and that it could be a vessel for joy. I was eating better, which made my body feel better. It was the first time I was making eating choices not as an attempt to lose weight or to force myself so that any slip up filled me with overwhelming guilt and self hatred that fueled my need to purge. I lived like that for months- walking everywhere, playing soccer with kids, living off of rice and beans and vegetables, doing what I wanted with my life. It was where I was able to realize how I had stopped my recovery as soon as I had started it because I ended it when the purging ended. I became awakened to the fact that in order to really make solid changes I needed to keep working, go further, and, above all, be honest about what I had experienced.

It became a slow, uncomfortable process. I had to acknowledge the roots of why I had started purging and what helped make purging such a controlling force in my life. I had to find ways to eat healthy without it being about caloric intake and to process any deviation I might make from eating healthy food in a healthy way and not punish myself. I had to find ways to exercise without punishing myself for missing a day or two or a week at the gym. The best part was discovering my body as something that could bring pleasure, not pain. Prior, I had been so disconnected from my body that the idea of it being anything other than a space of destruction was unreal. I became awakened to how much I had closed myself off from. Being able to experience pleasure from my body was an incredibly significant part of the healing process. One of the hardest parts was accepting and forgiving myself for the physical damage I had done over the past eleven years and to do the best I could to repair the damage and take care of the irreversible damage in a responsible and healthy manner from now on. The other was accepting that I will be in recovery for the rest of my life. That a day will not go by where these issues will not be triggered. Some days will have stronger triggers than others and some days I will handle them better than others but they will always be there. I can’t make them go away but I can control how I respond to them.

In the midst of all the healing and the struggle for peace I have always left out one piece. Telling people. I have avoided it like the plague. Just the other night a good friend was telling me her concerns about another friend, who she thought might have an eating disorder, and I said nothing. I talked about eating disorders and people who have them and what they experience as if they were something I had read about in a book. I thought about it for the rest of the night and the next day and why I hadn’t said, “Well when I had an eating disorder…” What it comes back to for me is that, while it was so real for me, what I experienced did not fit the classic image of eating disorders. In the eleven years that I purged and starved myself, I was never hospitalized. I never stop menstruating. I never dropped to a shocking weight. I never had a dramatic intervention. While I was purging, I often saw these facts as signs that I had failed; just another example of how ineffective I was as a human being. I didn’t feel I had earned the term “eating disorder” but at the same time it was more than just a girl who got carried away with dieting. I have never been one for labels but when I saw the Eating Disorders Not Otherwise Specified definition I breathed a sigh of relief. The idea of having to explain to people what those eleven years of my life were like and the four years of recovery after without any sort of frame of reference made me feel misunderstood before I even opened my mouth.

I am just now at the point where I can see the problem in needing someone else to create, define, and give significance to a term in order for my experience to feel validated. I am hoping that in starting to be honest about my experience and how it changed me I can move further away from a reality in which I submitted complete power to everyone around me in determining my worth, my beauty, and my happiness. We live in a world where happiness is defined for us in marketing strategies and the media. If you want to know what joy or success or love looks like you are surrounded by examples. We are socialized to understand the ingredients necessary to create a life of value and worthy of envy. If you aren’t equipped to fulfill the formula or, god forbid, you envision something else for yourself then every day feels like a fight to justify your happiness and your right to it. I have been able to experience moments in my life over the past few years where I have felt the power of being able to define and assert who I am, where I am aware of the fact that I have not submitted to another person’s idea of who I am, what I am capable of, or what my value is in the world. And it has felt really fucking good. It is a feeling worth fighting for. And it is a feeling overflowing with such precious value that I am finished with justifying it.

So on Valentine’s Day, the day that media and marketing strategies show as being a time for cisgendered, heterosexual, monogamous couples, I celebrate myself. I celebrate my life, my survival, my endurance. I am going to celebrate my anniversary by taking care of myself as best I can. I am going to be honest with myself. I’m going to be kind to myself. I’m going to challenge myself and I’m going to forgive myself. I’m going to determine my own value and not cede that power to anyone. I’m going to care for the people I love as best I can. Be kind to them. Challenge them. Forgive them. Allow them to determine and assert their value. Be honest with them.

Starting now.

Happy Valentine’s Day.