Trigger warning: mentions of eating disorders, imposter syndrome
This is not the part where I reach my happy ending. In fact, it is still quite far away from that.
After understanding the technical parts to why I’m having such a hard time coping with myself, I tried to undo the things that I’ve been doing in order to stop it from happening. With my binge-eating disorder, I had gone through some therapy sessions online to understand where my urges to binge were coming from and tried to revert that urge into something else instead of falling through. Although I smiled and said, “I’ll give it a try”, in reality, I could not succeed.
Staying positive was a tough job. I felt like there was no possible way for me to get out of this mess, which ended up making me feel even worse. Nothing was on my mind other than the constant debate of whether I should eat or not or whether I’m good enough. Schoolwork just became tedious and an absolute hassle for me to get through and I don’t think I’ve ever procrastinated so much in my entire life.
And the form of procrastination came through as eating because I knew that there wouldn’t be anyone telling me off for trying to eat. Most of my binge-eating sessions were done in secret so, to my mom or friends’ eyes, I was still eating painfully little — even more so than in the past because I was trying to balance out the calorie intake by reducing my meal portion. Then I would get hungry and binge all over again. This dreadful cycle never ceased.
I was trying to change myself at the pace of others. This led me to lie to myself about the positive differences that I have gone through (even though they never happened). I tried believing those lies but when darkness came and I was sitting there, emptying a whole box of cookies, feeling sick as I did so, I’ve never felt emptier. The lies that I told myself and others came back to taunt me and it seemed to further prove that I had not been good enough.
My attempts to change had failed miserably and at this point, I couldn’t see the point in trying again because there was nothing that I could do to stop these miserable cycles. One day, I’d be feeling a little better but that would crash and burn after a few days. Was there truly no way out of this?