I vividly remember when I started restricting. It was early August, and I was about to start my sophomore year of high school. I had just gotten home after spending three weeks in heaven at my incredibly wonderful overnight camp in northern New Hampshire. Months before, probably around May, my doctor had told me that I needed an invasive surgery to remove tens of lesions from my abdominal and lower chest cavities which were causing inflammation and unbearable pain. This wasn't a surprise to me, as I'd already had one surgery to remove them. The operation had failed, and the pain had gotten worse. During the previous school year I'd missed upwards of 80 full days of school from pain, so we were desperately hoping that this surgery would be successful. The procedure was scheduled for August 10th - two days after I was going to return home from camp. Truthfully, I wasn't scared or disappointed that I would be missing out on the rest of the summer; I was just looking forward to being out of pain and on the road to recovery. On August 9th I had my pre-op appointment, where they took my vitals to make sure that I was healthy enough to be put under anesthesia. Everything was fine - until they weighed me. I was 143 pounds. 13 pounds more than I had weighed when I left for camp. I had never worried about my weight - my childhood nicknames were things like "string bean" and "skinny mini". I had always been athletic and I had an extremely fast metabolism; which was why I was so confused. It felt like there was something wrong with me. I was disgusted and scolded myself for eating so much at camp. On the way out of the doctor's office I stopped in the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror, lifted my shirt up and grabbed at my stomach, pinching and pulling at my flesh, trying to make it disappear. I sucked in until I could see my ribs, shifting slightly from side to side, hoping that looking at it from a different angle would make the extra weight go away. After a couple of minutes, I pulled my shirt down and walked out of the bathroom, smiling, as if I wasn't questioning every decision I'd ever made about food.

The commotion of the next day, combined with the heavy sedation that I was under kept me from thinking about the previous day - until I was home and the anesthesia had worn off. My entire abdomen was swollen, and combined with the five incisions that were left around my belly button, I felt even worse about myself than I had the day before. The first time I looked at myself in the mirror after surgery was when I decided that I just needed to stop eating - and I had the perfect plan. I told my parents that I was just nauseous because of the painkillers which kept them from forcing me to eat. When this charade started, I probably went about three days without eating anything other than a few handfuls of oyster crackers. Slowly the swelling went down, but in my mind, my stomach was getting flatter because I wasn't eating, not because I was healing. My plan was working! I would drop the weight and everything would be fine. It was easy for me to explain the obvious side effects of food deprivation, because I just played them off as being a "normal part of recovery". When my mom started pointing out that I, a varsity athlete, was out of breath after walking up the stairs, I knew that she was catching on. I managed to force myself to nibble enough to convince her that I was eating, but being home under her supervision all day didn't make it easy to hide minimizing my caloric intake. Over the course of the next few weeks, I started finding ways to make it seem like I was eating, like hiding food in the drawers next to my bed until she left the house, when I would throw it out or feed it to the dog. When we sat down to eat dinner, I would push my food around with my fork for a while and then find a moment when she was distracted enough not to notice me me swooping my plate up and taking it into the kitchen, where I would scrape it into the trash. Admittedly, I got pretty good at it. Hiding my restricting just became part of my daily routine.

When school started, it got even easier. My mom packed me lunch every day, so all I needed to do was throw my sandwich and snacks away at school when no one was looking. Towards the end of the day I knew I had to eat the bare caloric minimum to make it through crew practice; usually a couple of spoonfuls of peanut butter could keep the hunger pains at bay during the three hour workout. I was barely drinking any water and I was constantly exhausted. Most of my free time was spent sleeping and it became harder and harder for me to get up in the morning. I remember being in the launch at practice one day towards the end of October - it was in the low 40's, cloudy and windy - and I fell asleep. I fell asleep on the floor of a cold, metal boat, cruising along at full speed, for two hours. I truly don't know how I made it through the fall season alive. My body was screaming at me to eat something but I kept blocking it out. Having a flat stomach was more important than anything else.

The season ended in November, and winter training started immediately. This meant long pieces on the erg and at least an hour or so of cycling every day. By some miracle I pulled within the top 10 on the team for max watts in the first week of winter training, which just gave me more reason to convince myself that what I was doing was fine. I still have no idea where I got the strength for that, and it depleted quickly. About four days into the winter season, reality hit me. Hard. We'd gotten through about five minutes of steady state on the erg when I started to feel like all of the blood was rushing out of my body. I was seeing bright spots and my split began rising as I became more and more distracted by what was happening to me. My coach stopped me and told me to get off the erg, which I complied with reluctantly. I unstrapped my feet and stood up. I think my coach was starting to ask me if I was feeling okay when everything went blurry and I felt myself hit the ground. I sat down, had a couple of sips of gatorade and called my mom, chalking it up to dehydration. Amazingly, everyone believed it. She picked me up and I sat the rest of that day of training out. Any reasonable person would've realized what was going on and changed their behavior, but I refused to believe that what had happened was a result of my restricting. I went right back to training the next day but struggled to make it through the rest of the week's workouts.

On Saturday morning of the weekend after the fainting episode, I woke up and looked at my fitbit to check the time. Underneath 11:24 am, it said that my heart rate was 38. I checked my pulse manually, thinking that it was just a glitch in the device, but panicked when I realized that it was, in fact, puttering along at around 40 bpm. For a professional athlete, this wouldn't be cause for concern, but I was not a professional athlete. My resting heart rate had always been around 62, even when my training volume was at its highest. I sat in bed for a while and stared at the ceiling, ruminating about my future and my rowing career. I had dreamed of rowing in college since my first novice season, and it was becoming clear that if I didn't get a grip, that would never happen. Admitting to myself that I had a problem was one of the most painful things I've ever had to do, but I needed help.

On Monday, I sat my mom down and told her what was going on. Through a lot of tears, I explained that I hadn't been eating and told her about my heart rate and my struggling at practice. It was a mix of relief that I was finally getting it off my chest and panic that I was going to have to deal with the consequences.

That afternoon, she called Children's Hospital in Boston and got referred to a facility that specializes in eating disorders in adolescents. She spoke to them and got me an appointment for an evaluation the following day. After school on Tuesday, she picked me up and drove me to the intake office, where the recovery process would start. I was confused and scared. How had I let it get to this point? Six months ago I had been a healthy, happy 15-year-old, and I was now being weighed behind a curtain so that I couldn't see the value on the scale.

The next day I started rehab. This meant that as soon as I left school, my mom drove me to the facility and I stayed there until 7. When I arrived every day I had a weigh-in where I had to strip down completely and change into a paper gown so that I couldn't hide any weights in my clothes. They told me I could choose to see the scale or have it covered up, and on the first day I told them I wanted them to show it to me. I weighed 118 pounds. My breath caught in my throat. I got dressed and walked to the bathroom in shock. Just like I had months before, I stood in front of the mirror and lifted my shirt up. But this time there was nothing to grab. I was just skin and bones. My rib cage was poking out from under my bluish skin. I dropped my shirt and the tears started pouring out. I hated what I had become. I hated where I was and I hated that I was completely out of control. I had starved my body to the point that it was eating away at itself. The muscles that I had so carefully crafted over the past two years were wasting away, along with my fiery spirit. I'm not sure how long I sat on the bathroom floor before I eventually composed myself and walked back into the group therapy room, where I decided that I was going to beat Anorexia. I had never called it that before.

I spent three months in therapy, slowly learning to take care of my body again while repairing my headspace. I was taken out of winter training and lost many of the freedoms which had allowed me to hurt myself, like eating lunch (or any meal) without supervision. My mom brought me lunch at school every day and sat with me in the car while I ate it, constantly reminding me that she was my biggest supporter.

I spent my 16th birthday in therapy. It wasn't ideal, but everyone signed a card for me and tried to get me into the spirit. Birthdays in therapy are different. They're celebrated for a different reason. They're a sign that you've made it through another year alive. They're about reflecting.

This whole ordeal was four years ago, and I'm still hesitant to use the word "recovered". I'll always be in recovery. I'll always be learning how to love myself, and I'll probably always be silently fighting the demon on my shoulder that's telling me I'm not good enough. But I'm proud to have made it this far. I'm proud of the person that I've become and I'm proud to say that I'm recovering from Anorexia, the disorder that almost destroyed me.