September 28, 2024

There was a monster at my door for a year and a half—or at least, that’s what it felt like.

When my dad took his last breath two years earlier, I felt the earth beneath me shift. I remember the harrowing shriek my mom let out; our collective grief bellowed like wildfire flames that July afternoon. I remember the ache that seeped into every crevice of my heart, the incessant ringing in my ear, the heaviness that crept into my bones and followed me like a shadow. How surreal it was—to see his body zipped up and carried away in a hearse. He was here, and now he wasn’t.

The edges of my world began fraying that day. The grief felt unfamiliar, and I didn’t have the language to speak to it. For a month, I combed through photos of my dad, desperate to latch onto anything to prove that he was real and that he had been here. I replayed a voicemail he left just months earlier, scolding me for never picking up my phone. Why didn’t I pick up that day?

Grief is universal—this I can understand. Maybe it’s how we wade through the muck that separates us. I wanted to believe that light existed at the end of the tunnel, like in storybooks with happy endings. But instead of starry skies and moonlit nights, time delivered a winter that froze everything over. The monster came with it, knocking at my door with an insatiable hunger. This version of grief promised to quiet the chaos. It whispered that it could quell these thoughts if I could just shrink myself—contort myself, become smaller. The weight of my grief shifted into something else—something darker. Slowly, it took the shape of an eating disorder, erasing the parts of myself I once recognized.

It started innocently enough. At least, that’s how it always starts, right?

The next year and a half of my life blurred in extremes. The heaviness in my heart swelled like the rising of an orchestra, and soon the only way I knew how to drown it out was by changing my body. I wanted to lose weight. I thought maybe the teeth of this monster wouldn’t cut as deep if I made myself smaller. Maybe if my edges faded just enough into the walls, I wouldn’t feel so much. For a year and a half, I played with the fires of compensatory exercise, trying to chase a feeling of quiet. I dove headfirst into running, convincing myself that with every mile, I could outrun grief.

I remember the stark feelings of each morning. Every day, I put on my running shoes, one foot in front of the other, and began my routine. On those dewy summer mornings in Austin, I collected myself just enough to push through an eight-mile run around Lady Bird Lake. Those mornings were simultaneously sacred, gorgeous, fragile, and fraught. The sky was painted in pinks and oranges, birds humming across the trail, but my mind was devoid of color—fixated on calories and justifying what I’d eat later. I remember feeling trapped in grayscale. Each rumination was laced with blaring undertones of anxiety that threatened to spill. The gravel beneath my feet gave me a soft place to land, but I knew that wouldn’t be enough to keep me grounded.

In a few months, I was running the fastest paces of my life. The morning runs jolted me alive with endorphins, but the waves of emotions that followed told a different story. No matter how fast I ran, I couldn’t fill the void I was chasing. The truth was—my body was hurting. My knees ached. I was hungry. It was the kind of hunger that pulsated and gnawed at my chest. I ignored my body’s pleas for the softness of pillows and rest. My body made the final call when I tore my hip adductor near the end of a morning run. Limping back to my car, waves of pain shot through my right leg, but all I could think about was the recovery time—and how losing my routine would derail my ability to burn calories.

“Just give it a couple of months,” my physical therapist said a week later, gently swaying my right leg back and forth to test its strength. I grimaced with each bend, wanting to scream that I didn’t have a couple of months. I was angry at my human body. I was angry at the universe for being so cruel to me.

But the worst part wasn’t the physical pain; it was what the injury unfurled inside me. In its biggest and scariest form, when the monster in my head wasn’t lurking in the blacks and grays of shadows, it transformed into a loud, ear-splitting mountainous thing, convincing me that I didn’t deserve to eat. Even if I couldn’t run, I could still make myself smaller by eating less.

Over the course of that year, my cheeks hollowed, my eyes sank deeper, and my body grew thinner, swaying and shuddering from even the gentlest breeze. My body lost the ability to have a menstrual cycle. I became a blurry feature in the landscape of my life. If someone had peeled back my layers, they’d have found a burnt cauldron, cinders desperately trying to catch a flame. I was incredibly malnourished, underweight, and isolated.

I remember how lonely that chapter of my life felt. During that same time, the strings on my guitar gathered dust, each particle a reminder of the vibrant life I once lived but could no longer reach. I stopped singing altogether. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard the shutter of the camera I so loved and cherished. For a year and a half, my world stopped spinning on its axis. I was in perpetual orbit, and my body became the furthest thing from a home. It was like a house with boarded-up windows, a yard overgrown with uncut weeds. I went offline completely, unwilling to admit how far I’d fallen. I didn’t want to check in with anyone or tell them the truth of my story. How could they understand?

Later that summer, I quietly moved to Seattle. The promise of the Emerald City was inviting; I wanted to trace a city’s landscape where no one knew me. Maybe the soft hums of the lakes and mountains could fill me when my own river of joy ran dry. The flight to Washington felt like my own private memorial—one final goodbye to the version of myself I was leaving behind.

Before the move, I remember the trembling in my mom’s voice as she told me she didn’t want me to move halfway across the country just to watch me die from this sickness. Her voice, usually as delicate as a lily, grew hoarse as she told me to cancel my flight. Her emotions felt like an earthquake I couldn’t contain. How could I carry both my grief and hers—for a body that felt like it was failing?

In my first six months of living in Seattle, it felt like the monster had crossed state lines and followed me. My dreams still felt like rooms where the candles had burnt out. I was still limping from my adductor strain, but this only seemed to incite the monstrous voice to retaliate, pushing me toward another form of movement as an escape. Quietly, my fixation on movement morphed into an unhealthy obsession with cycling. Biking became the new runway where my heart could crash.

On weekends, the black smokestacks of anxiety pushed me out the door, and I would bike until my emotions were numbed. For months, I continued to feel like a butterfly with broken wings. The promise the monster had sold me—the ivory towers and love and acceptance handed to me on a gold platter—proved to be sharp knives pointing at me. Even though I was achieving incredible physical accolades, the emptiness I felt lingered. The nails of the monster kept its rigid foothold for six months, as I bent myself to shrink in every way possible.

Until one day, I heard the faintest knock.

The version of myself hidden beneath a trapdoor tapped gently, letting me know she was ready to come out of hiding. The bow that held together the need for excessive movement slowly unwrapped. I felt the weight start to lift as the desire to live a full life gnawed at my heart. The graves in my heart didn’t have to stay graves forever—there could still be room for light, for warmth to touch even the coldest tombstones.

The journey for my eating disorder recovery looks like messy paint strokes, accidental lines, both casual and intentional. The painting of my recovery has different hues, and in some parts, the paint is still drying. The blues of it all show hope and progress. The maroons and blacks tell a story of an internal war that’s ongoing. I see a therapist now who specializes in eating disorders, and every other week, I see a dietitian. The sessions float between grief and sorrow and hope, like the first bloom of a flower in spring. Now, when I glance in the mirror, I avert my eyes from seeing the flesh of my own body. I shower with the lights off and slip my fingers over nutrition labels to avoid seeing the calories. I don’t want to be broken in the same way, but this is how I cope for now.

In the past couple of months, my rigidity around exercise and guilt over food has significantly softened. On the weekends now, my partner and I lazily wake up next to each other, sheets tangled between us, and the storm that used to churn in my head has softened into stillness. The warmth of our skin blends together, and I am reminded of how bountiful it feels to exist in the quiet. I no longer feel welded to the need to move my body in ways that leave me feeling empty.

On my commutes into work on my bike, I am more attuned to the whispers of the breeze that cups my neck and arms, the morning kisses of a sunrise as I bike across Lake Washington. I feel like a heart that is slowly becoming whole again. On my best mornings, these commutes feel like prayers answered—like a song quietly being born, unfolding with each breeze and sway of the trees along the trail.

My closet is now an altar to my body. I wear pants that give warm hugs to my hips. They speak with a gentleness that invites them to grow if that is something that comes with aging. My skin now brushes tenderly against the cotton of my clothes—a contrast to the boxed tightness that I once contorted myself into. When I dropped off my smaller-sized pants at the donation center months earlier, I remember the overwhelming grief for the person I used to be. It felt like staring at a porcelain coffin with the casket wide open. The clothes I buy now are generous and inviting, pronouncing my body in ways that feel like each word is spoken perfectly.

Nowadays, my life is measured in different metrics, with a deeper regard for the quiet and indigo of life. To me, it looks like the first warm sip of a honey latte, the embrace of my partner after a day of longing, the sounds and frequencies of my friends’ voicemails when they tell me to call them back because they miss me, the low tides of the ocean that leave behind seashells, the warmth of a hug, intentionally drawn out.

On my good days, the skeletons in my closet can still look like skeletons. In their verses, they promise a reality where grief is impermanent and the armor for taking hurt is impenetrable. But I can recognize now what it really is—a space in my heart that yearns for protection, and a love for my body that is immeasurable. I don’t have to become smaller to achieve that. I can simply become. I’ve learned that the depth of who I am and what I’m capable of is not tied to my physical accolades accordioned together. My heart is not stitched together by the miles I’ve run or biked.

When I feel the pangs of grief from my dad’s passing marching in like a drummer, I let myself become enveloped in it. I let the tidal waves creep up to my toes and dance around my fingers until they tire out. I let grief stand by me as we watch the sunset together. I still remember the threads of his personality—from his rigid, iron-like stubbornness down to the sting of love he’s never been able to verbalize but always showed through action. The space he fills in my heart is expansive and free of borders.

Months ago, my partner and I were lying side by side, naked in bed. With my ear against her chest, I listened to the richness of her heartbeat, the crooning of its pitter-patter like a song. She smiles at me with her ear-to-ear grin. Moments later, she’s laughing as she claps both of her hands to her stomach and plays it like a drum. We both laugh like we’re kids in a schoolyard. How innocent this is—the softness of her human body, the belly-full laughs. I watch her, so at ease in her skin, and marvel at the simplicity of a body loved just as it is. In these brief moments, I am reminded of how love for a body can exist—pure, sweet, and without judgment. After a while, she turns to me and asks, “What do you want for breakfast?”

“Anything,” I reply.