Interrupted Girl
A few weeks after turning eighteen, I packed my belongings into my boyfriend’s car and left for Western Washington University. In a short year and a half, I would drop out after struggling with substance abuse and an eating disorder, symptoms of mental health conditions that went undiagnosed until years after I left school.
Things at Western started out fine. I found a job pretty quickly, settled into my dorm, and did well in my classes. But around the middle of fall quarter, things spiraled downhill. My high school boyfriend broke up with me. I felt completely abandoned. This was intensified by my Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) symptoms.
BPD is a mental health condition often caused by childhood neglect, which rings especially true in my case. My parents were always more like my kids than my parents. They got married at nineteen, had me at twenty-three, and divorced when I was six. My dad got me on weekends, which meant I was living almost full time with my alcoholic mother. I had to grow up fast so I feel like I never really grew up all the way. I still feel like that eight-year-old taking care of my blackout drunk mom, cleaning her vomit from our sheets and holding her hair back as she kneeled over the toilet. My mom was around physically (save for a few times I woke up in an empty apartment, my mom passed out somewhere), but mentally she was gone. It made me feel worthless, like my own mother didn’t care about me. If she loved me, she would quit drinking, right? I struggled with this. I believe as a child I knew something was wrong, but it was just my life. I had to deal with it, so I rationalized. Because I could not understand my mother’s alcoholism, my brain made it my fault. And my mom helped by telling me I drove her to drink. I worried something was seriously wrong with me.
I learned to shove my emotions deep in my brain and put on a happy face. My mom could be messy and sloppy drunk, but if I showed any emotional extreme she called me dramatic and overly sensitive. If I tried to call her out, I was disrespectful and bratty. So I shut up. Or in the words of Allie Rowbottom in her 2018 memoir, Jell-O Girls (one of my absolute favorites this year), “it was her job to... smile and nod and assure the world she would manage her emotion, contain it inside her, a spell in a bottle, and shelve it away.” Combine the alcoholic mom with my nascent self-hatred, and thus, my abandonment issues were born.
I went off the deep end after the breakup. I felt out of place and confused, being away from home for the first time. Emotional trauma built up from being the child of an alcoholic left me woefully ill-equipped to deal with basically anything. Another poignant Jell-O Girls quote describes my mindset perfectly: “She knew what it was like inside the mind of a motherless girl. Long stretches of icy numbness inside and then rage, fear, and a dull longing for something she knew she could never have.” I was already angry, sad, and convinced I ruined everything I touched. Losing a close attachment, my worst fear, multiplied those feelings. I wondered what was wrong with me that made people I loved leave.
After things ended with my boyfriend, I felt lonely and depressed. So, I subconsciously did what I didn’t realize my mom was teaching me to do all those years. I turned to alcohol to numb the pain. It didn’t become clear to me until recently that some part of my brain learned from watching my mom that when we are sad or anxious we get drunk. I spent a majority of my freshman year drinking and my mental health predictably declined.
The summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I moved into a friend’s old bedroom at her mom’s. I worked as a summer nanny for two girls aged eight and ten, who I had also worked with the previous summer. I stopped eating.
I had struggled with body image since my preteen years, and again, my mom was no help. I remember going on a hike with her when I was about ten. My mother stopped to take a photo of me and told me to suck in my stomach. This is the first time I remember being aware of my body in that way, the possibility that I might be fat haunting me like that was the worst thing a person could be. Like my mom would only approve of me if I were skinny, her love contingent on how my body looked. As I was about to turn nineteen, I lost fifty pounds in six months.
This was also the summer that I tried cocaine for the first time. I was visiting a friend from high school in Los Angeles and we went to a party. Cocaine and alcohol made me fall in love with artificial happiness. Being on cocaine felt like nothing painful could touch me. It made me feel part of something. It made everything good. To a young girl in pain, the quick fix was irresistible. It didn’t hurt that it helped me skip meals. The smaller I got, the more control I felt I had. After a lifetime of completely uncontrollable external circumstances, the internal control I got from shrinking myself to nothing was another drug.
At the worst point in my eating disorder, I would allow myself one meal a week, surviving on my “safe foods,” Sour Patch Kids and Wheat Thins, in between. My life was spiraling, and starving myself was the only control I had. Sickeningly, it made me feel powerful each time I went down a size or lost more weight. The eating disorder started to show in more ways than just my shrinking body. My hair fell out. I was freezing all the time. I stopped going to class because it was painful to sit in the plastic chairs. My bones pressed against my skin, leaving bruises.
I could no longer deny I was sick. I moved back into my friend’s mom’s house and got sober from drugs. But I still drank. After years of struggling, in January of this year I knew I needed to quit drinking. I had an epiphany that I was going to stay depressed and unable to control my emotions if I kept coping with them by drowning them in alcohol. I tried dry January and was unsuccessful. I tried doing Whole30 and only made it two days without a drink. I think these things were a way for me to try to fix the problem without fully admitting what the problem was. I was neglecting my mental and physical health. I did not know how to help myself. I lied to my psychiatrist about my drinking habits. I wasn’t sure if things were bad enough, because I maintained a job and a façade of being “okay”.
By June, I reached a breaking point. I was suicidal and suffering. I could not bear it anymore. I checked into the psych unit at my local hospital and spent nine days there. It was honestly a relief. I could finally take off the mask I was wearing by pretending everything was okay, the mask I had worn since childhood. There was some freedom in admitting that things were very much not okay. At the hospital they helped me get sober and out of my immediate mental health crisis.
After I was discharged, I had a follow up appointment with my psychiatrist. She referred me to a partial hospitalization program (PHP) that I am about to finish as I write this. August 15th was my first day of PHP and I had no idea what to expect. I knew it was based on Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) which focuses on changing emotions through behavior. The patients and staff were all folks who identified as women, which made me feel safe. PHP is fifty hours a week, ten hours a day. We basically do group therapy, learning DBT skills and doing other therapeutic activities like yoga, meditation, and art. We also have an individual therapy session once per week, something I had not had since a preteen.
Again, Rowbottom’s story parallels my own. She spent three months in an outpatient eating disorder treatment center. She writes, “Although I wept with nerves before the first meeting, I quickly felt encircled by a coven of women who shared my story.” Reading this passage gives me chills. There is a sense of sisterhood in the simple fact that we are all in PHP together. I have formed fierce attachments with a lot of the girls. It is hard to watch them graduate, even though I am immensely proud of them. These girls (and my incredible therapist) helped me find my voice again, after I numbed everything out for close to eight years.
I will finish the program on September 21, three days from now. I feel so much about that fact. Sad, anxious, excited, scared, proud. The DBT skills I have learned and the friendships I have formed brought me out of darkness. I am so thankful. After PHP, I will step down to a shorter program that is three hours a day, for seven more weeks, and continue adding DBT skills to my tool belt. I feel completely changed. I have ninety-two days of sobriety. The terrified girl who checked into the hospital would never have thought that could happen. I have learned skills to actually cope with my emotions instead of pushing them away. I have finally decided to live, for myself, and myself alone.
-Anonymous
