Shattered Rose (Winsor Series) - By T L Gray Page 0,91
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“The reason this matters is because feeling in control is vitally important to me. My family were pros at avoiding conflict, so whenever there was one, nobody seemed to know what to do. I learned very quickly that feelings were best left to myself, and that’s what I did every time I felt anything. I would swallow it and put on a smile, determined to be as strong as I appeared.
“But I wasn’t strong, and I found at an early age that I could find solace in eating. That it would calm my nerves or ease my pain if I needed it too. It was something I could control when nothing else was going right. The end result was that in junior high I got really heavy. And while it didn’t bother me that much, it just about killed my mom. She started putting me on diets and making me exercise with her, all trying to get my weight under control.
“Eventually, kids started teasing me at school and soon it became very easy to believe the things they said, which were that I was ugly and fat. Between my mom’s need to change me and the teasing at school, my self-worth started to revolve around what I looked like, and every time I looked in the mirror, I hated what I saw.” Parker reacted to that admission and moved closer to me, taking just a moment to caress my cheek while he listened.
“A few years later, my body started to change, and I lost a lot of the fat I was carrying and even developed in a way that made boys start to notice me. It was the first time in years that I felt good about myself and started to obsessively diet and exercise to ensure that the weight would never come back.
“Unfortunately, since I had already wrapped so much emotion into eating, I found it really difficult to eat in a healthy manner. I would start to sneak food when my mom wasn’t looking to get the comfort I needed. But the weight started to come back, so I thought I’d try something I had heard people do, which is to make yourself throw up so you wouldn’t gain weight.” I stared down at my hands, not wanting to go on, but Parker continued to encourage me with his eyes letting me know he wanted to hear more.
“It worked for a while. I would diet for days or weeks, depending on my will power, and then when it got to be too much, I would go on a binge and throw it up. I had convinced myself that it was the perfect weight maintenance plan and never realized how much it was starting to consume me. I had convinced myself that I was controlling it, not the other way around, and when I got to college, I thought it would go away. I believed that being here would somehow heal me of all the issues that had plagued me being home. So, I stopped…for about four weeks. Unfortunately, I realized in that time that my body image had become so distorted that I needed the process to feel better. When I looked in the mirror, I could only see the flaws and somehow throwing up would make me feel better about it, and then worse again, creating this vicious cycle.
“Soon, it would make me feel better about a lot of things, a bad grade, a hurt feeling, a bad conversation with my mom. You name it, it became my coping mechanism, and I realized that I couldn’t stop. It was starting to control my life.
“I never told anyone. It was my secret and I knew as long as no one knew, I could continue to do it, but I started to see how it was effecting the rest of my life. One, I spent most of my freshmen year in isolation, not participating in events or with other students, because I felt so insecure about how I looked. I was constantly comparing my body to other women and always came up short.
“It was overtaking my life, and I wanted it to stop. So, I told my best friend and she was great about it. She would call and check up on me and would be there for me when I was struggling. This summer, I hit a milestone. I had gone two months without throwing up until the day I stepped back on campus, and then the stress