It seems so strange to be afraid of something that is necessary for survival: food. Everyone has to eat food to exist, for it is a normal component of so many people’s daily lives. Oddly enough, eating is one of my biggest hang-ups. For years I have struggled with an eating disorder, and so many of my family members, friends and peers have become accustomed to me ordering a glass of water when we go out to a restaurant, or just seeing me starve myself throughout the day all due to my insecurities. It is such a dangerous disease, and I am aware of that. I completely understand the detriments this has done to my body. I recognize how much I have hurt people by hurting myself; but somehow, I still cannot seem to shake this addiction of not eating, or perhaps, it could be classified as the fear of eating. Having an eating disorder has been shaped by my childhood, my social life, and my own mental and emotional well-being. My fear of eating, especially in front of those who know about my issues, has intensified due to the pressure I have put on myself, the stress that my friends and peers have put on me, and because of the anxieties that could very much just allbe in my head.

When I was younger, I was not heavy, but I was born at the weight of nine pounds, nine ounces - which is a very large baby. My mom always told me that I was nine pounds of head, and nine ounces of body. She said she knew the disproportion was because I had a huge brain and would grow up to be very smart, but I actually just had enormous cheeks. Everyone thought it was adorable when I was younger, but as I got older, I got tired of having such a round face. I never found myself pretty, and I truly believed that no one around me did either. I know I was not overweight, for I was an active athlete all my life, and still am to this day. I was definitely thin, but just not skinny enough to achieve a top tier ranking on the hierarchy of body image. I did not live in a household that influenced me to make poor dietary choices. I grew up surrounded by a variety of food. My family had a well-balanced diet with treats here and there, but our meals consisted of ordinary food seen on most plates around America. I would eat anything I wanted, whenever I wanted, and I desperately wish that I could go back to those days of eating without getting upset. I was a much happier person when I was not influenced by the comments and negativity of those around me when food came into factor.

My childhood was atypical from most families. I am one of five girls, and my dad grew up with six sisters - yes that is a lot of estrogen for one man to handle; I give him kudos. Somehow, he was able to handle all of us. My oldest sister Sydney, who was ten years older than I am, was diagnosed with Rett Syndrome at a young age, which left her severely disabled. It still inspires me that my parents decided to have four more children after hearing that their first child was diagnosed with a debilitating disorder. They had faith that they could handle whatever God threw at them, but were lucky enough to be blessed with an additional four daughters who were much healthier than their first born. They fought to have her life, and our life, as normal as possible; but we did not mind that our whole world revolved around her. Nurses, therapists, and doctors- they were always coming into our home. There was not a day that went by without the phone constantly ringing off the hook, and our door being knocked on. I enjoyed the company. I adapted to having visitors in my home for a majority of the time, and I started to love meeting, and interacting with, the new people that would take such great care of my sister. She was my best friend in the entire world. I loved to read to her, to sing to her, and to watch television with her. You name it, and she would be the first person I wanted to share an experience with. Although she was never able to talk or walk, her emotions were always real. If someone she disliked came to see her, she would pretend to be asleep. This always humored my family and me. If one of us was seemingly upset or hurt, you could see that she sympathized toward our pain. Sydney was extremely aware of her surroundings, and we certainly made her knowledgeable of the fact that she had a family that loved her indefinitely. Most families see having a child with special needs as a burden or a disappointment. My family was obviously saddened that she was sick and could not experience the life of a normal child, but my family always saw Sydney as a precious gift from God, rather than an inconvenience. She smiled the biggest smile in the world, laughed the greatest laugh I have ever heard, and rolled those big, beautiful, dark blue eyes to the back of her head when someone was annoying her. She was sassy and tough, which made her such a fighter.

She had a feeding tube that provided the necessary nutrients for her to survive, but her life was not always like that. When I was about three years old, my younger sister was born. While my mom was having Molly, the new addition to our family, Sydney aspirated during a seizure which forced a medical crew to perform a tracheostomy and permanently put her on a ventilator. She used to have the strength to breathe on her own, but now she relied on a machine to do so for her. Before that incident, she loved food. It was so fun to watch her taste new things, and have her explore the abilities of her taste-buds. My parents had a lot of patience with her eating, as it took three to four hours to feed her a regular meal. They knew how much she enjoyed eating, and wanted to let her have that experience. When she aspirated, she could no longer eat solid foods since she could not swallow. It was devastating to see something she adored so much disappear from her daily schedule. This was something that all of us could do together- just appreciate a meal; but then things changed. It was one less thing she had in common with us, which was extremely hard for my family to accept. It sounds silly; but my mom once told me that she refused to buy Life cereal for years after Sydney was ventilated. Sydney’s favorite cereal was Life, and she felt as though she was betraying her daughter by feeding the cereal to her other children right in front of her. Just because she could not speak for herself, does not mean that she did not have feelings. We always kept her best interest at heart. We made a conscious effort to keep her in good spirits, despite the battles she was facing. Hurting her was the last thing my family wanted, so we were extra careful with our words and actions.

Years later, when I was in seventh grade, my parents sat my sisters and me down for a family meeting. We instantly knew that something was up. They told us that Sydney was increasingly becoming sicker and sicker. They did not think she would live much longer. Hearing those words as a thirteen year old girl was very difficult. It destroyed me. I was so hurt, and I could not imagine living without her. If that was not enough to handle already, two months later, my dad was unexpectedly diagnosed with Leukemia. It seemed like this was a nightmare that I could not wake up from. Here I am, having my sister slowly slip away from me, and now it looked like my dad was about to as well. I was heartbroken, distraught, and did not know how to properly function. Later in the year, right when I was taking my finals and about to graduate middle school, Sydney passed away. It had been months since my parents sat us down for our family meeting. I was a naïve child who thought that those additional months of survival meant her health was improving. Unfortunately, it just meant she was suffering longer than any of us wanted her to. It seems selfish to say that I wish she never left, but I still cannot stand existing without her by my side, for she was my right hand man. I stood in front of a crowd of people at her funeral, and expressed my love for her through a eulogy. Looking back, it is all a blur. I do not know how I had the capability to do that when I was hurting the most, for I have a lot of trouble talking about her to people even now. The wound has never fully healed. It is hard to explain how much she meant to me, and how much her presence taught me, when people are unaware of who she was or what she was like. The best people can do is be apologetic, but they cannot even begin to fathom the loss I experienced as a young girl. My sisters and I will have to explain to our potential children that we had a sister who they will never get to meet. We will have to explain to our future spouses that we experienced such a great loss that changed our world forever. When people ask me how many siblings I have, I will always hesitate. Sometimes, I just sit there in awkward silence when I am asked this dreaded question. Despite the difficulty and devastation of having her gone, she has been so for five years now.

You might be wondering, why is this even relevant? This, the background of my past hardships, is what made my feelings toward eating so indecisive. I had a sister who enjoyed the luxury of eating, but had that ripped away from her due to her disability. I have a dad who is luckily labeled as a cancer survivor, but I know that he will never forget those awful days of not being able to hold food down due to chemotherapy. In fact, that almost killed him. I have a large family that sees each meal as a way to discuss our highs and lows of the day, but the meal itself was what stressed me out the most. That was my low of the day, but how could I confess that to them? It was a tradition for us to unite for dinner each night, and enjoy a meal together. Here I was, convincing myself that I was an insensitive and disrespectful child, forcing myself not to eat. When I did actually eat, I made myself throw up, just so I could hopefully be the thin girl that boys and society would accept as beautiful. It killed me that I did that to them. It still hurts me that I have done these things voluntarily, when those were things they wished had never been a part of their life.

I might not have had an easy childhood, but that does not give me any right or excuse to have an eating disorder. I saw this as a way to alleviate pain, an outlet, but I just caused more harm to myself and my family. I wanted to stop. I wanted to never have to kneel in front of a toilet with my fingers in my mouth. I wanted to eat without feeling guilty or fat. I just wanted to be normal. Others in my family were able to enjoy food, and I could not. It got so obsessive to the point where I was prohibiting my family from going to restaurants, for someone from my school could see us there and think about how Mallory’s family is so fat; they are eating food, how unbelievably awful.

While I had my sister’s death and my father’s illness to cope with, I was also dealing with the common middle school drama, which seemed to be life threatening at the time. I was moving onto high school the next year, and I did not feel prepared. I was struggling emotionally, and it appeared that people around me, especially my friends, were too immature to realize that. My friends, as offensive as they could be, were my closest confidantes. Each of them were stick skinny with not a care in the world about what they ate, made pointless judgements just to hurt people, and those two characteristics did not mix well. I was never skin and bones, but I was not obese. I had muscle and I was a normal, healthy size; but with my perfectionist mentality, along with cruel comments from others stuck in the back of my mind, I was unable to see past that reflection in the mirror.

The summer going into my eighth grade year was when I was the most sensitive I had ever been in my life. After the end of an annual trip with my friends to Splish Splash, a famous water-park on Long Island, the parents who brought us there decided to treat us to dinner. There were 15 of us and we had to have multiple cars for the 40 minute drive home. The car I was in, driven by one of my friends’ dad, had arrived to the restaurant much later than the others, but they had already ordered without us. My two other friends and I were starving. We had just spent an entire day exerting our energy in the heat, and needed to refuel. When we got there, we noticed that they had ordered appetizers. There were two wings left, a couple of fries, and some celery sticks to feed three hungry girls. I think it is quite ironic now; for that seemed like such little food to me at the time, but in recent years, that would be more than the amount of food that would satisfy my appetite for a week at a time. When the three of us asked to order dinner for ourselves, while offering to pay for our own meals, we were ridiculed. Hearing my closest friends make fun of us, and call us fat, still echoes in the back of my mind; for this was the beginning to my terrible cycle of an eating disorder.

Over the years, my friends have expressed to that they were kidding, meant nothing by it, and claimed they would die for the body I have. Mhmm yeah, right. Who wants thunder thighs and love handles? No one. I took their insults to heart. I was tortured by those words, and constantly worried about what they were saying about me, what they were thinking, and thought that it would be impossible to ever eat in front of them again. My other two friends, who were also called names that night, did not take this insult to the same extent as I did, for they are healthy. They give off the impression that they are content with the bodies they were born with.

Since that moment, I stopped eating with them. I would either completely exclude myself from social situations, or I would go to the event and not eat anything, making me a noticeable outlier. My friends got used to this. They thought it was funny that I did not eat. They were not too concerned about the amount of weight I had lost, or the lack in consumption of nutrients. At least, that is how I thought they perceived my problem. My best friend Mackenzie, who was also insulted that night of our trip, knew the extent of my issue. She saw the obstacle augment, and was extremely worried about me. I did not listen to her, for I was too caught up with my fear of not having a model body. One day, I was at a diner with my friends, the same group of people who had made fun of me, but I was encouraged by Mackenzie to order something small. “You need to eat Mal. It is not healthy to keep doing this.” She tried to reassure me that they would not say anything. She thought that they would not even notice. Unfortunately, she was wrong. I decided to order a healthy meal consisting of a Chicken Caesar salad in a whole wheat wrap, with no dressing nor croutons. I made the meal the healthiest it could possibly be. As soon as I took a bite, they started taking pictures of me. It was posted on the internet. It was posted in group chats. It soon became a trending topic on how Mal had finally eaten something.

Many thought that they were promoting positivity, but for me, it was hard to see it in such a way. They had gotten used to me not eating, so it became abnormal for me to be seen actually eating. In some ways, I brought this on myself. I made it so obvious to people that I was never eating. I verbalized to others that I hated eating, and told them I was never hungry. This served as a way to convince them that I was trying to become thinner to meet their standards, but also as a way to force myself into thinking that I do not like food. It would be totally unnecessary for me to do something that I do not enjoy. Every time I went out to eat with someone, their first question was not “What are you going to eat?”, but it was “Are you really not going to order anything?” Oftentimes, this was without me saying a word. I did not articulate to anyone that I was not going to order anything, but they had just assumed. This made me feel like I should not eat, and further increased this horrible condition. From then on, it felt impossible to reverse my reputation. I would always be known as the girl that never ate.

As a member of a travel softball team, it was mandatory that I eat. I spent hours out on the field at travel tournaments, often in 90 degree and beyond weather, and it was, and still is, dangerous for me to not be supplying my body with a substantial source of energy. My coach found out that I had a problem with eating, throwing up, and discovered that I started to take dangerous diet pills that I ordered off the internet. Passing out became common for me. I even had an ulcer during my senior year of high school brought on by my actions. This caused me to have extreme pains in my side, and even made me throw up blood without attempting to purge. Years prior, I lost what every girl absolutely loves, her period. It started to become real to me that this was a huge issue and was affecting the people around me, my ability to socialize, and my well-being. My mom wanted me to go to therapy forever. She knew I had anger and negative feelings suppressed that I needed to address. When she found out that eating was becoming a huge problem for me, she said, and I will never ever forget it, “Mal, I already buried one child, and I’m sure as hell not ready to bury another.” She told me about how my habits were starting to really affect long term health situations. Without menstruating, I could lose the ability to have children. Without food, I could pass out and hit my head. With being an athlete, I could put myself in a liable situation in which my coaches and teammates are negatively affected by my poor eating choices. All of these factors could lead to my downfall if I do not decide to take action.

I am still not okay with eating. These actions of mine have caused permanent damage that will probably never fully be repaired; but I am trying. That is the best I can do for right now. I have to remind myself to eat. When I came to college, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity for me to start fresh. No one knew about my eating issues, so I could start eating again with no one suspecting anything to be peculiar. Once again, I expected the best case scenario, which did not turn out as I had planned. Ignoring issues does not mean that they will automatically be repaired. Subjects that are disregarded will often resurface and escalate in severity, especially if they are left alone with no intention of being mended. This will always be a huge fear of mine. Eating is a constant thought on my mind. I fear eating in front of others because I fear the judgements they are making about why I am eating, what I am eating, and how my body will react to this sudden binge eat of a small salad. My childhood, my experiences with life, and the social pressures that are put on me and that I have put on myself, all contribute to why I have such a massive fear of eating. It is important to face our demons, which has been done by writing this essay. For years I just thought that skipping meals and purging was a part of growing up as a teenage girl. I avoided having the words of anorexia and bulimia in my vocabulary. I never wanted to admit that I felt out of control of my own body. I never wanted to acknowledge that this had become a serious eating disorder. Today, I can gladly say that I am two months free of purging. Do I have completely normal eating patterns? No, but I am working on it. I am attempting to achieve my goals by taking it one day at a time.

A fear cannot be explained to another person unless they have experienced it themselves. Many people may not understand why I still let this get to me, why I struggle, or why I cannot simply eat a meal in front of an audience. I get why they cannot comprehend this issue, but to me, this is a normal strain in my life. I cannot just openly describe my panic regarding food to others, for they would just not get it. Now that I have looked at what contributes to my anxiety of eating, all I have to do is face it. I need to realize this is a problem worth solving. My health does not deserve to be overlooked. I do not deserve that. I need to take better care of myself. I need to start putting myself before others and their opinions. Conquering my fears will motivate me to become a better daughter, sister, friend, athlete- and most importantly, a better version of myself. I want to find my way back to the girl that smiled and laughed during a meal, rather than having tears roll down her face at the sight or smell of food. I want my anxieties to stop talking to me. I want to release myself from the stressors and worries that come with calorie counting, food intake, and extreme exercise sessions. I want to start looking at the practical side of life, rather than the hypothetical. I cannot worry about eating in front of others. I cannot worry about what others think. I will be much happier when I overcome this, and I will. Although my fear of eating has been a humongous part of my life for such a long time, I will not let this defeat me. I will not let this cycle take all of my control and power in life.