I didn’t tell anyone I planned to "come out," so to speak. Instead I took my phone down to the beach to be alone and started drafting an Instagram post—just writing it down helped me a lot. I started crying. Even for me, it was powerful to read the truth. I felt lighter.
The photo of me in the white bikini that I chose to accompany the post has become my infamous anorexia photo. When I’d taken it a year earlier, I remember I wasn’t allowed to post it. My mom knew I looked unhealthy and she didn’t want me to open myself up to a flood of public shaming from the internet. I think that’s ultimately why I used that photo—it was taken at one of my worst moments, and it showed just how far I’d come.
I figured I’d get maybe 2,000 likes on the photo—but it went viral. It has over 38,000 likes.
My mom, who had been flying at the time, called me in a panic when she switched on her phone to a flurry of texts asking if I was okay. Initially she wasn’t happy; I’d just opened up about such a big part of my life that our family was originally going to keep private. But at the end of the day, it was my story. It was something I had gone though. I had the right to decide how and when to talk about it.
I get why she was concerned. I was still at an extremely vulnerable time in my life when I came out about my eating disorder. In the wake of my anorexia, I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune disease that screws with your thyroid. My body was reacting to being starved for so long. With Hashimoto's I’m going to have to take two pills every single morning as soon as I wake up, maybe for the rest of my life. Obviously that’s not the worst thing in the world, but it’s hard knowing I did this to myself.
Dealing with this was a lot. I was already tremendously insecure, so to have people saying, "Oh, she gained weight! She gained weight!" was really hard. I know I gained weight. I was terrified of gaining weight. I felt like, Geez, thanks for pointing it out and making it worse.
But if I’m being honest, if I hadn’t come out about my eating disorder when I did, I probably would have relapsed.
Here’s the thing about sharing my life on social media: I have eyes on me 24/7. After sharing my story, they weren’t just anonymous eyes but eyes that knew this intimate detail about my life, that were watching me and my body every single day. When you’re in recovery from an eating disorder, it’s so difficult to continue pushing through even when you have bad days where you just want to go back to your old habits. Sharing my story has helped keep me accountable. I want to be a role model, to be strong for all the people who look to me.
