The Secret Life of an Anorexic

By Kristen Noel

In The Secret Life of an Anorexic, Kristen, the author of this memoir, shares her remarkably evocative, honest, and empowering story about her discovery and constant battle with Anorexia. She takes you through the early years of her life and the experiences that contributed to her illness.

With the prodding of her friends, she decides to go to her universitys counseling services to be evaluated. Even though doctors diagnose her with anorexia, she doesnt accept the reality. When she finally admits to herself that she has a problem, she spends the next couple years on a heart-wrenching journey to pull away from the grips of this nasty illness.

In this epic novel about strength, loving yourself, and overcoming your past, Kristen shows the world that she and anyone else with this illness has the power to overcome it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477128930

Kristen Noel

Kristen Noel is currently an MBA candidate at Illinois State University, with an expected graduation date of May 2013. She wrote this book in hopes of helping girls with eating disorders and their families. Kristen also has started a charity, The Evolving Image, with the purpose of raising funds to help sufferers of eating disorders pay for the treatment they so desperately need. If you are interested in donating or becoming more involved with this charity, please visit www.theevolvingimage.org. For more information about this author, you may also visit the aforementioned web address

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by Kristen Noel.

Library of Congress Control Number:           2012910835

ISBN:                 Hardcover                 978-1-4771-2892-3

ISBN:                 Softcover                  978-1-4771-2891-6

ISBN:                 Ebook                      978-1-4771-2893-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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112479

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1                October 20, 2010

Chapter 2                The Beginning

Chapter 3                Grandma Lorrie

Chapter 4                Life As a Teenage Athlete

Chapter 5                My First Love

Chapter 6                College

Chapter 7                Round 1

Chapter 8                Round 2

Chapter 9                My Sister

Chapter 10              Round 3

Chapter 11              On the Road to Recovery

Chapter 12              Summer of 2011

Chapter 13              Suicide

Chapter 14              The Loves of My Life

Chapter 15              My Hero

Chapter 16              Losing a Baby

Chapter 17              Today

Acknowledgments

About The Author

This book is dedicated to

my therapist, Anne Weatherly, for helping me find my voice,

and to

Maddie, Lexi, and Ruby for filling my heart with love

when I needed it most.

Oh, my friend, it’s not what they take away from you that counts—it’s what you do with what you have left.

—Hubert Humphrey

Preface

Eating disorders are rarely understood by those who don’t have experience with them. This seems to be the case for mental illness in general. Mental illness is not a disease one can control. As much as I would love to say it was true, it is not as simple as picking the fork up and putting the food in your mouth or putting the bottle down or just smiling.

My name is Kristen, and I have an eating disorder. That is the first step of recovery, right? Admitting you have a problem? I have several problems, but those problems can be wrapped up in two words: anorexia nervosa.

I am the epitome of the type of person society pictures as having an eating disorder. I’m five feet and six inches tall with bleach blonde hair, big boobs (when I am healthy), and green eyes. I was a cheerleader for ten years, head cheerleader for some time. Everyone in high school knew who I was even if I hadn’t the slightest clue who they were. I was struggling with being the person I wanted to be and being the person everyone expected me to be. I had a role to fill. Every person I was involved with had a different idea of what my role should be.

I was a good student. Honor roll every year I was in high school… which was three years to be exact. I was an overachiever. I took summer college classes so I could skip my senior year of high school and move on to what I thought would be bigger and better things. I longed for approval. I started working when I was fifteen, babysitting when I was twelve if you count that as working. I took on a large amount of responsibility at a young age. I have been a grown-up since I was a teenager.

I am also a perfectionist. I aim to please people. I am probably one of a select few teenagers who can say they did everything their parents told them to as they were growing up. Looking back, I would change this. I let everyone think for me. I did not individuate. I did things to please the people around me. I never wanted to stir the pot. I put everyone before me. I had no balance in life.

Hindsight is 20/20. Though I cannot go back and fix the past, I can do everything in my power to make my future the best it possibly can be. In the last few years, through therapy and self-examination, I have learned much about myself. I have learned that I need to be more assertive. I need to be more comfortable standing up for myself and saying no when I do not want something. I need to work on putting myself first instead of last all the time. Most importantly, I have learned this is not my fault. I am still learning. This has been, and continues to be, a long journey to recovery. Know that it’s normal to feel like you will never reach the light at the end of the tunnel. I still have days like that. It is normal to get frustrated and go back to what is easy, but once you learn how to deal with feelings, you will start making small achievements, and soon, the end won’t seem so far away.

Chapter 1

October 20, 2010

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

—Napoleon Hill

How do you feel? Oh, the million-dollar question. Every therapist loves starting with this line. If I was good at thinking and talking about how I feel, I probably wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.

How do I feel? I feel like I’m suffocating, like a four-hundred-pound man just sat on my chest and is ignoring my cries to get off. I feel like I would be lucky if lightning would choose to strike down right where I was standing and take me away from this pain. I feel invisible. I feel like I am never enough. I feel like crawling in a hole and isolating myself from the world forever. I feel like if I can make my body perfect, if I can at least control that, everything else will turn around on its own. That is how I feel.

If I wasn’t so selfless, and I didn’t care so much about the effect it would have on other people, I’d finish off this bottle of Vicodin and drift away to what surely has to be a better place. I am a prisoner of my own mind with many failed attempts to escape. Have you ever had to force yourself to get out of bed in the morning? I have. I know I have responsibilities, but if it were up to me, I would sleep all day. That is what Vicodin is good for. Physically, you really only can sleep for so long; but when I don’t want to think anymore, I take a Vicodin, and I’m knocked back out. Now, I am aware this sounds like another problem. This does not happen often. More times than not, I just starve myself. It is so much easier to focus on working out and not eating than it is to think about things that I should be dealing with. This is where my problem gets messy.

I am constantly asking why. Why am I like this? Why do such shitty things happen to me? Why are people the way they are? Why doesn’t everyone live by treat others the way you want to be treated like I do? I often wonder if this disease is a product of nature or nurture or a combination of both. The most prominent questions I have are how did I get here? And will this ever end?

I guess we can start from the beginning…

Chapter 2

The Beginning

A house must be built on solid foundations if it is to last. The same principle applies to man, otherwise he too will sink back into the soft ground and becomes swallowed up by the world of illusion.

—Sai Baba

I had an amazing childhood. Amazing may even be shorting it of the credit my childhood deserves. My parents provided me with a loving environment to grow up in, all the opportunities in the world, and they showed me what true love is.

Let’s start with the basics, a little background on two of the key players in my childhood, my parents.

Ann, my mother, grew up an only child in Chicago. She went to an all-girl high school, played tennis, and graduated with an associate’s degree from the local community college. My mother had a less-than-perfect upbringing. My Grandma Lorrie, her mother, is, well for lack of a better adjective, mean. Throughout my mother’s life, Grandma was overly critical of her.

When my mom was in high school, she gained some weight. Grandma destroyed her self-esteem for this, constantly letting her know how fat she was. My mom stands five feet and seven inches tall and at the time weighed one hundred sixty pounds. This is not stick thin, but by no means should it have been considered fat. Whose mother calls them fat, anyways? My mom joined weight watchers and lost the weight but till this day is still tormented by my grandmother about everything. She vowed to give her kids (myself and sister Juliet) a better childhood than she had.

My daddy (yes, I still call him daddy), Edward, also grew up in Chicago, but with three siblings: one brother and two sisters. All the siblings were spaced five years apart from each other. Still to this day, it blows my mind how different my aunts and uncle are, considering they were raised by the same two people. As far as I know my dad had a fairly normal childhood. When he talks about the past, he normally tells tales of fishing with my late grandfather at the lake. My daddy is very headstrong. When he has an idea about something, it is difficult to change his mind.

My parents married October 27, 1985. Two years later, on Christmas Day, they had me. From that point on, this is how the story goes…

–

The first thing I can remember from my childhood is coming home from preschool and my daddy asking me how I liked it. Of course I liked it. What three-year-old doesn’t want to play all day with kids their own age (up until a year from this point, I was an only child)? This girl did!

As soon as I told him I loved it, I remember him saying, That’s good because you’re just getting started. You’re going to college! Right, Kristen?

That was a rhetorical question. Whether I answered, Right! or not, I was going to college. Expectations have been set high since I was a tiny little thing.

I remember my dad was sitting on the couch in our family room while I was leaning against our old sofalike rocking chair discussing the future. This became one of my favorite things to do with my dad, discussing the future.

We had these discussions throughout my childhood. Talking to my dad about school and the future gave me this rush. I felt so motivated and ready to take on anything. In fact, by the age of eight, I let everyone I talked to know that I was going to be a lawyer one day.

My daddy and I talked about colleges and things I needed to do in order to get into a good college. We talked about how important it was to get good grades and think ahead. Boy, was my family surprised when I decided not to go to law school!

Chapter 3

Grandma Lorrie

When you learn to accept instead of expect, you’ll have fewer disappointments.

—Robert Fisher

Another major influence in my life was my Grandma Lorrie. My sister and I would spend summers at her house while my parents were at work. Since I can remember, Grandma was mean. I remember writing her a letter shortly after seeing Little Rascals that went something like this:

Dear Grandma,

I hate your stinkin’ guts.

You make me vomit.

You’re the scum between my toes.

—Kristen

I realize that was a bit harsh, and I really didn’t mean a word I had said. I just saw it on TV and repeated it. My mom made me write an apology letter. I did as I was told, but when the time came to give it to Grandma, I pretended to sleep in the car because I was embarrassed. I didn’t understand why it was okay that Grandma did and said what she pleased and didn’t take our feelings into consideration, but we had to consider her feelings.

The minute I hit puberty, my grandma started telling me how fat I was. I was five feet and four inches tall and ninety-seven pounds. My body was changing into a woman’s. I was getting curves and boobs. Most girls are excited for this. Not me. I thought something was wrong with me.

I dealt with this all throughout puberty. My parents would constantly tell my grandma to quit it, but she was relentless. I remember coming home from college, and in the same night, my grandma told me three times in three different ways that I was fat and needed to watch what I eat. For the first time, I cried in front of her. She promptly told me to not be so sensitive.

Grandma had many infamous sayings: Pick the lesser of the two evils, If you just bounce on your ass, Kristen, it will get smaller, or "Why are you drinking that milk? That is why you are huge!" Right, I am enormous. Silly me for drinking milk.

One night, we had my grandparents over for dinner. My