Bragging by Proxy

So I've done a bunch of downer posts about me and I'm starting to feel guilty/embarrassed/boring.  Plus today was such a doozy that the last thing I want to write about is my status right now.  So in lieu of more of my usual lamentations, I'll talk about some other people in my life that are actually successful/inspiring.

Like I mentioned a while back, one plus to being in the segment of my summer in which I'm staying with family is that I'm back in the town where I went to high school (for the first time in the 7 years since I graduated), and it's given me the chance to catch up with a handful of old friends that either still live here or are similarly passing through for the summer.

I struggled with my ED pretty severely from the 7th grade all the way through high school, with just a year or two in there of subtle reprieve health-wise.  I was definitely not the only person in my cohort with issues, of course.  Over the past week I got a chance to catch up with two friends that have also dealt with EDs*, and it was SO fantastic to see them happy, healthy, and moving on with their lives.

Friend #1 had a short but steep bout with anorexia when we were seniors.  Her older sisters and some of her soccer teammates caught on to it, but not before she had lost a very significant amount of weight. Her parents forced her into therapy (she was against it at first, or course), and took a very heavy-handed approach (which I would have loathed but still kind of wish my parents had done)--very much the "wham-bam" treatment option.  And it worked.  Within a year she was back on track and has been healthy and ED-free ever since.  She is one of the smartest, strongest, funniest and most genuine people I've ever met, and I love that she's a testament to the fact that you can indeed kick the ED to the curb even if you start out fairly resistant to treatment.

Friend #2 had sort of a longer, rougher route to wellness.  She suffered from major swings of depression throughout high school, on top of struggling with bulimia and cutting.  Her mother was anorexic for a long time and actually committed suicide a couple of years after we graduated from high school.  I think her mother's suicide, while tragic of course, was a huge turning point for my friend, and really spurred her to start looking at her life more objectively and finally get the resolve to dump a toxic relationship, stick to her meds to better control the depression, and start taking an upper hand with a lot of other things. She went back to finish her degree, found a guy that treats her like the goddess she is, and has made leaps and bounds in therapy. She still has some body image issues, but overall she is doing SO fantastic.  And the cutting is so in the past that she has a beautiful new recovery tattoo covering the worst of the scars.  The whole time I was sitting across from her, I wished I could have shown the 2005 version of herself a video of the 2012 version, just to reassure her that the future WAS worth soldiering on for. She looked so happy, calm, balanced, and healthy.  Very inspiring.

So, woot for those two, I am so proud of them and glad to have them as reminders that recovery IS doable.  Just wanted to brag for them.


 *I don't want to give the impression that I only hung out with EDers in high school (we actually didn't talk about our EDs much at all, I never even said the words "I have an eating disorder" out loud until I was a junior in college), but in a school of 2,000 students, there were bound to be a few of us that were at least obviously struggling, and probably many more that flew under the radar.  These are the only two friends I had that I know had EDs; it's just a coincidence that they were both among the 5 or so people I've gotten to hang out with over the past couple of weeks.