19 Hunger

About the Author

Leah Schill is from Mountain View, California. She is an upcoming junior studying Social Work. Leah enjoys thrifting, going for walks, and listening to music. She is very passionate about mental health.

This essay composed in February 2022 and uses MLA documentation.

FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, EIGHT. My breath begins to hurry as I pirouette again and again. I’ve been training for this for weeks. I can’t fail her now. Come on Leah, push yourself. Mom is watching. Ms. Sarah is watching. Everyone is watching you. I glissade across the floor and strike my final arabesque. I finished. But I’m not content with the minute and thirty-second variation I had just exerted all of my energy into. The usual critics were dished to me: turn out, stretch, don’t forget to point your feet. I never once got the correction to remember to smile. I always would. I smile through just about anything. Ballet had been the love of my life. Until it wasn’t.

One foot after the other, I stepped onto the scale. I said a prayer and closed my eyes. I needed this work to finally pay off. I was down to 500 calories a day. It seemed like enough to me. Thoughts rushed through my mind as I waited for the scale to calculate my worth. And suddenly, there it was. Tears began to well. My mind quickly ran through everything I had eaten that day, as well as trying to carefully calculate the caloric intake of each food. I had messed up. I wasn’t good enough today. No one was home. I locked the bathroom door and knew what I had to do. But I couldn’t do it. As I tried and tried to purge, my eyes began to well with tears. I couldn’t do it. And in my mind, that just meant that I wasn’t good enough. I stopped suddenly when I heard the garage door begin to open. I was quick to wipe away the tears, brush my teeth, and put on a smile.

The day I met Dan Yang, was one of the worst days of my life. In early 2020, My therapist had recommended I see a psychiatrist. My life was perfect at the time. I had a guy who was really into me. Friends, for the first time in my high school career. And an ounce of popularity that I had been praying for every night since I was 10. Not to mention, I thought looked great. I was on top of the world. I was unstoppable.

Mom didn’t have quite the same opinion. She had noticed a change in me. As if a switch had been flicked, and her once happy and vivacious Leah was now lost and nowhere to be seen. We drove the 10 minutes to Bay Area Clinical Associates. I remember parking near the train station and walking around the corner; feet trembling and heart beginning to increase its pace. I arrived at the office and went to the bathroom. The room was filled with a pale blue paint; with the light from a single window pouring in. It was beautiful, in a simplistic yet semi-depressing way. I looked at myself in the mirror, body checked, took a few deep breaths, and stopped. I remember I had planned my “perfect” outfit. I had to look good to meet my louring fate. An hour later I would walk into that same bathroom with a tear-stained face. I was diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety that day. 10mg of Fluoxetine (an antidepressant) was prescribed to me. I felt numb. I was struck with a sense of disbelief. How could I, happy, always smiling Leah, be taxed with this? I drove to school that day and couldn’t hold back my tears. I began to hate my brain. As if I didn’t already hate every part of myself.

Although mental illness doesn’t have a face, I don’t think anyone would initially place it with me. I am a well-off, upper-middle-class, white girl with a once positive outlook on life. I had a happy childhood, filled with love and support from the people around me. But as I’ve been through what I have been through, I’ve learned that mental illness isn’t picky when it chooses the people it affects. Young and old, rich or poor; it doesn’t matter. When it chose me, I was heartbroken. My ever-present smile became less and less familiar with the new Leah. The newly diagnosed Leah.

“Hunger”, is a term we are all familiar with. It’s that feeling you get when you forgot to eat breakfast, or when you left your snack at home. But “hunger”, is also a lot more than that. There are two definitions of the word. The more familiar, a noun, is a “compelling need or desire for food” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). And the other, a verb, “to have a strong desire”. Both definitions pertain to my story. Literal hunger is a feeling we all know and hate. The aching of your stomach is accompanied by the appetite for something delicious to fill that void. Your insides churn and growl as you wait until you can rush home for a meal. But hunger in terms of desire is another emotion that we’ve all probably felt as well. We yearn for things in our life; material things, feelings, places. It’s human nature to want more in life.

For the past seven years of my life, I have struggled with a variety of eating disorders that have now morphed into Anorexia Nervosa. I’m not alone in this struggle. According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD), “9% of the U.S. population, or 28.8 million Americans, will have an eating disorder in their lifetime” (ANAD.org). This jarring statistic is an unfortunate reality, that is a result of a variety of terrible factors. Adding to the list, I have also been diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, Anxiety, and PTSD. I used to wear these labels like a chain around my neck. Ashamed, embarrassed, and scared, could all describe how I used to be. For the longest time, I let these diagnoses, these terms, define who I was.

Last winter I was put into an intensive outpatient program for my Anorexia. This involved therapy two times a week, working with a dietician, countless group therapy sessions, countless meds, weekly vital check-ins with a nurse practitioner, and lots of talking about how I felt. The smile that I always had plastered on my face began to fade as I started to realize the consequences that my illness had taken on my body.

The hardest part of all of this has been the feeling that I am a burden to people. I desire to get better not just for myself, but for the people I care about, and who knows what I am dealing with. The first time I harmed myself, I told my mom, whilst shaking in fear of what she would say. She bandaged me up and told me that it would be okay; fear in her voice. Later that day, my little sister and I were laying in my bed, when she noticed the bandaids creeping out from under my sweatshirt, strategically placed to cover the pain I had tried my best to inflict on my wrists. She began to cry. That was one of the worst feelings I have ever felt. You couldn’t find a smile on me for a long time.

Amidst all of this, I kept going. I graduated high school and completed a year and a half of college. To my own amazement, I have made it pretty far. While my literal hunger pertained during my recovery, a new type of hunger was discovered. The hunger for peace with my mind and body. I think the day my mindset switched, was the day I shared my story to a group therapy I was in. We worked to challenge all of the rules about food and our bodies that had been ingrained in our brains from media and culture since day one. It hurt to do this, but it made me hungry for a Leah that is confident and in love with herself; not a Leah who is doing everything in her power to tear herself down. Being a part of a group of people who struggle to love and accept themselves was life-changing. It made me not feel alone and it helped me learn to lean on others for support. My fake smile soon morphed into one that was genuine.

I am exhausted from fighting this. I always want to give up. But I don’t. I know I am fighting for something bigger than myself. Here I am. Stronger than ever. Looking at life through a new, deeper perspective. I am in the middle of an outpatient program. I’ve been in therapy, group therapy, met with many different doctors and nurses, been on countless different drugs, and now I’m happy to say that I see a silver lining in all the mess. I still hold back tears and plaster on fake smiles now and then. But I’m hungry for more in my life. I’m hungry for a sense of normalcy and to be comfortable in my own skin. Not once, since I first developed my eating disorder had I loved my body. But now I am starting to.

Works Cited

“Hunger Definition & Meaning.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hunger.

“Eating Disorder Statistics: General & Diversity Stats: Anad.” National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, 3 Nov. 2021, https://anad.org/eating-disorders-statistics/.