Drowning Where No One Could See

It started with wanting to be healthy.

I began exercising more and paying closer attention to what I was eating, doing all the things

I thought were “right”. I had no idea that was the first small push of a snowball I’d end up

tumbling down with.

When I was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, I was shocked. I felt like I didn’t even deserve

the title. Surely it wasn’t that. Surely I was just being healthy.

But maybe they were right. Maybe it wasn’t normal to skip social occasions because I was

scared to eat. Maybe it wasn’t normal to choose the gym over seeing my friends, or to tell

my hunger it was bad. Maybe it wasn’t normal that my family looked at me with concern

every single day.

A hospital admission followed the diagnosis, and it was enough to start me crawling out of

the hole I’d fallen into. And I did. I crawled and I crawled.

The part no one warns you about

Here’s what I didn’t expect. As I got better, people stopped worrying. They stopped trying to

get me to eat more. They stopped questioning my exercise. And as strange as it sounds,

that made things harder.

Because I no longer looked sick, my habits became normal in everyone else’s eyes. Worse,

they were praised. Diet culture had a gold star waiting for me: I was “disciplined”, I was

“health-conscious”.

But I wasn’t okay. I was still struggling, just somewhere nobody could see it. I was in the

messy middle, where I didn’t look like I needed help, but I was still drowning.

Why the messy middle is so dangerous

Only a small fraction of people with an eating disorder present as underweight [check and

source the stat before publishing]. Yet that’s the picture most of us carry around of what “sick

enough” looks like.

So if you don’t match that picture, it’s easy to decide you don’t deserve support. That’s

exactly where I was. I spent years caught between trying to recover and believing I should

already be there, wondering why I couldn’t just “be better” when it looked like I was.

The language we hear every day doesn’t help. Comments about “clean eating”, “earning”

food, “being good” or “being bad” can sound harmless, even admirable. When you’re in the

messy middle, they land differently.

What began to shift

Things started to change when I got curious about why my eating disorder showed up in the

first place.

As I explored that, I realised that the food I ate and the behaviours I’d engaged in didn’t

make me a “good” or “bad” person. They were never a measure of my worth. My eating

disorder had come from a place of safety and control, at a time in my life when both felt

completely out of reach. It wasn’t a character flaw. It was a way of coping.

Understanding that gave me somewhere new to go. If the eating disorder was my way of

finding safety, maybe I could start finding it elsewhere.

So I began surrounding myself with people, and language, that helped me feel safe. I voiced

my fears, my rules and my beliefs out loud to people I trusted, and they helped me see

something I couldn’t see on my own: those thoughts weren’t facts. They were mechanisms

designed to keep me safe, and I didn’t have to keep living by them now.

Through Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, I was able to see myself outside the

rulebook I’d written. I started asking what it might mean to just be me, away from the eating

disorder and closer to my authentic self.

It wasn’t instant, and it wasn’t linear. But for the first time, I wasn’t trying to be “good enough”

at recovery. I was getting to know who I was underneath it.

Where I am now

I struggled in silence for eight years before I reached a place of peace and freedom, and a

place free of the shame this illness had handed me.

What got me there was breaking the silence. Voicing my fears, my rules and my beliefs out

loud gave me the chance to question what was actually true. Not everything I’d believed for

so long held up once it was out of my head and in the open.

Today, I work as a Holistic Hypothalamic Amenorrhea and Food Freedom Practitioner, and

the heart of what I do is exactly this: helping people who feel stuck find themselves outside

of their rulebook. To come back to who they were before the world told them who they

should be.

For years I wondered whether I was “sick enough” to deserve help. I wish I’d known then

that it was never the right question. You don’t need to look a certain way, hit a certain point,

or wait until someone else notices. Wanting support is reason enough.

I didn’t get out of the messy middle alone, and you don’t have to either. When you’re ready,

tell someone you trust what’s been going on for you. Even a small honest moment can open

a door.