When I was 13 I was really into my eating disorder. I was in treatment six times in one year. A few times they were afraid they were going to lose me. I was home-schooled my freshman year of high school because I was in and out of treatment. My sophomore year I returned to school where I met my best friend. Things got better and I got through high school. I have graduated, turned 18 and am moving for college next week. My eating disorder plagued me as an adolescent, and although I may have been able to hide my love for my eating disorder for the past four years, but I can’t help but want it back. I know it will be hard for me to get that sick again because my family will make sure they stop paying for college if I do. I have never been more conflicted in my life. I love my eating disorder so much. Looking at me, you’d never know. Its funny how people assume only skinny people are anorexic. I am anorexic, but you’d never guess.
I just turned 29. I am married and I have a three year old. I love my wife but she can’t seem to keep a job. I don’t know why it happens. She is smart and really good at what she does but she doesn’t make friends well and that plays against her.
While I love her I can’t shake the idea of how much she holds me back. Always having to work a second job to help support us while she is looking for a job again.
I want to go back to school and finish my degree. Then she could just stay home if she wanted.
I am thinking of leaving her because if I stay I might end up hating her and I don’t want to hate her. I can stand the idea of not being with her more then I can stand the idea of hating her.
What happened to me in Switzerland:
17 years old: I went overseas for the first time with 50 bucks and no idea what I was doing. I fell in love with a boy with whom I could not communicate verbally and taught myself his languages.
I taught myself the unwritten language of Swiss German (which, contrary to popular belief, is an entire language of its own and not a dialect). My love became an alcoholic. He abused me. I was scared to leave, scared I couldn’t survive in Europe without him.
This was after we were married.
I quit art school to go marry him… our relationship lasted five years through the Iraq war, from a week before it was declared until it should’ve been long since over, but unfortunately the war lasted longer than our love and is still thriving. Our sad relationship is jealous of the Iraqi war and its comparative longevity.
I left as a 22 year old self-taught trilingual. I opened my own gallery and lived on painting sales until I got out of Switzerland. They tried to deport me. They sent me a letter saying I should leave the country and my old love came to the petition rally to sign the petition that got my deportation repealed. I abandoned the gallery and moved back here to Michigan this February when my 35 year old brother had a heart attack and two seizures. He is waiting for a kidney, pancreas, and heart transplant and lives now only hooked up to tubes.
I spend my days and evening holding the fibers of my family together.
I deserted my marriage and my life and I feel like a failure.
I never finished college and I don’t know where I am going, but I am trying so hard.
Im sitting in my university’s computer lab and I cant help but wonder what it would be like to be sitting anywhere else but here. What would it be like at this exact moment in Thailand or in Brussels? I could be walking down thousand year old streets and rediscovering things that the modern world has forgotten. But instead I am destined to learn about all these things in a classroom. I’d much prefer to live them.