As a kid, I was always thinking about the future—what I wanted to do when I grew up and what kind of person I wanted to be. I lived for the future. When I turned 25, a landmark age, I realized that I was already growing up, and I wasn’t becoming the person I wanted to be.
I had had an eating disorder for seven long years. And because it had gone on for so long, people had stopped thinking that it was going on. They had stopped caring that I wasn’t getting any better. My condition had become normal. Painfully normal. And I couldn’t shake it out of its normalcy.
All I knew was that I had health insurance, and I figured insurance could somehow be a key to the lock that was my disorder. My church hadn’t healed me, but who knew… maybe a registered dietician could help.
So, during my lunch break at the small college where I worked, I would sneak into an empty office and call Kaiser Permanente to see if there were programs that treated eating disorders. Sitting in the rolling office chair, with blazer and heels on, trying to maintain some shred of pride, I would ask, “Umm, yes, excuse me. Oh shoot, my ID number is: 002-43-56… Umm, yes, I’m calling to enroll myself into an eating disorder treatment plan.”
Because I had to make this call several times, I learned that I could expect two responses: First, I would have to explain my situation to several departments because this is an infrequently asked question, and second, I would have to repeat myself because apparently, no one reported on their own eating disorders.
Finally, after several stealthy and humbling lunch breaks, I was given a solution: there was an outpatient recovery program in Honolulu, where my husband and I lived. The only problem was that it was designed to serve teens. Thankfully, I’d been given special allowance because recent studies had shown that one’s emotional maturity is stunted at the age of developing an eating disorder.
Thank God, at age 25, I was really 17.
Two weeks after being accepted into the recovery program, I had my first meeting. The dietician who ran the program worked in Kaimuki, about a 10-minute drive away from downtown Honolulu. Before I got married, I had lived and worked in this neighborhood as a barista at the corner coffee shop, Coffee Talk, and as a waitress at the Italian restaurant, Bella Mia, down the street.
The dietician had a reputation in this neighborhood. Standing at 6’1”, everyone thought she and her methods were too big, too challenging for her patients. Kristin was unconventional in her approach to treatment; she and the psychiatrist who ran the treatment couldn’t have been further opposites in their physical appearance, and this was intentional.
Kristin was tall, had a large frame and was unapologetically loud. Dr. Patel, the psychiatrist, was very slender, compassionate and always cracking jokes. Together they made for an unlikely pair, but together they showed their patients that there is a spectrum to how a healthy body can look.
The most important thing was to be honest with who you were, embrace your genetics, and prioritize a balanced life of eating and activity. To be treated by these two women, you had to accept this fundamental philosophy. In practice, people thought their methods were counterintuitive.
During my first appointment with Kristin, she passed me a bowl of chocolate and said, “Eat one.” More of a command than a suggestion. You’d think this would be a simple request, but it wasn’t for me, and Kristin knew that. She knew it wasn’t easy for most of her patients. Yet, as the treatment progressed, the act of taking a chocolate from the candy bowl went from a requirement to an act of enjoyment. This transaction was one way she subtly measured her patients’ progress.
Additionally, Kristin and Dr. Patel insisted on exposing their patients to “real eating” practices, not just focusing on nutritious foods. The point was to learn how to engage with food in our everyday lives, to be comfortable at a potluck or out at a restaurant for a friend’s birthday. You had to learn to be okay with eating a burger or ramen or a bowl of ice cream.
To most people in the neighborhood, seeing this commanding woman herd a socially awkward group of teens around town, from restaurant to restaurant, seemed crazy. And at best, obnoxious.
Imagine how I felt at Bella Mia that one night. That is, unless they believed the story we told them—that we were a wandering book club.
The first night I drove to her office, everything felt familiar but out-of-body. The clinic was located in an area where I had become an adult, made lifelong friends, started careers, studied, bought groceries, and fallen in love. I owed my life to these five blocks, and now it felt like I was travelling back in time to undo the pain that had followed me into the present.
The night I came to Kristin’s office, I was to practice eating a full meal with a group of tweens. As I waited for the elevator to the office, a group of moms and teens gathered around me. They looked me up and down, wondering, “What the hell is she doing here?”
I knew what we were doing: we were here to practice eating, a fundamental task no matter what your age, yet a task I had not managed to master in all my on this earth. As we walked the long hallway up to office #312, I considered backing out at each impending step. “This is crazy!” “Who does this!” But after seven years, I knew my only hope of getting better was in a room full of kids born in the ‘90s.
Sitting there for the first time, feeling uncomfortably old for someone who’s usually thought to be in her prime, I felt like I was staring at a gathering of living, breathing mantras, each of us learning to replace negative ones like, “I feel fat,” for positive ones, like “Fat isn’t a feeling.” It was all a process of learning how to feel your feelings instead of eat them or restrict them. Sitting there before a bunch of sandwiches, it felt like we were just a bunch of mantra-breathing vessels—mostly hungry, mostly empty, mostly having no idea how we’re going to eat all of the food in front of us.
As I tried to pretend that I wasn’t bothered by the prospect of eating the foot-long subway sandwich to which I was assigned, I was confronted by the painful truth that my shame was not unique to me. I felt like a failure, but so did she and so did he. My self-deception wasn’t special. The other patients’ only hope was that they had figured this truth out right away, while they were still young, but it had taken me years to get to this point—to the place where I was okay drinking a full glass of milk and being honest with who I was. There was no pretense around this dinner table, just the ugly truth that life is hard.
After muscling through my turkey-sub, the 9-year old sitting next to me leaned over and whispered, “You have to eat both of your cookies; you can’t hide them under your seat, or she’ll notice.” Dang it. I was getting called out by someone less than half my age. I had just glanced at my cookies, and she knew exactly what I was thinking. She knew me; she knew the shape of my fears. Neither of us were special. We were the same—trying to shake off our fears by saying the same words, “Feel your feelings.”
During my years with the disorder, I had learned to use food as a way of managing difficult emotions. When things didn’t feel right, became stressful or I got anxious, I learned to restrict or binge on food. I chose food as a distraction and a way of coping with life.
What this kid, who over the course of a year, became like a little sister, taught me, is that growing up is only hard if you aren’t honest with yourself. For me, the truth I learned to embrace was that it took becoming 17 again to figure out how be 25.
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Ryan Grubbsis a Canadian-American, who grew up in a small farm town, in between Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia. She moved to Hawaii for her undergraduate degree and met her husband, Justin. After seven years on the Island, they moved back to the mainland and recently moved to Omaha. Ryan is a barista at Archetype Coffee, and when not drawing squiggly lines into lattes, loves to go out for a run. She recently completed her master's in religion and sociology. She has no idea what she wants to do with her degree but knows she loved every minute of it.
Ode is a storytelling series where community members tell true stories on stage to promote positive impact through empathy. It is produced by Siouxland Public Media.
The next event is 7 p.m. Friday, June 2 at ISU Design West in downtown Sioux City. The theme is “Stigmas: An ode to the power of opening up.” Tickets are available at kwit.org. For more information, visit facebook.com/odestorytelling.
