I was 17 or 18 when our family doctor first gave me told me that I was in danger or being defined as anorexic. I was 5’9″ and weighed about 110lbs. Years later I was cleaning out my closet and found a stash of booklets about eating disorders. That was it. That was the extent of my treatment.

I don’t think anorexia was ever the right term for my relationship with food, but it was mostly the luck of going to college and finding ramen noodles that kept me in the triple digits.

It all goes back to a refrigerator packed with salads, casseroles, and everything else to keep us alive and functioning. I was 12 years old. Mom was sick and she wasn’t going to get better. Family and friends came to visit and help care for her and watch me. When she went to the hospice the nurses used to make sure the fridge was stocked with pudding pops just for me. There were none there the day she died. Dad and I went home to a fridge packed with food that kept coming and coming.

I remember the day of her funeral. I ate 13 ham sandwiches plus who knows what else. I couldn’t fill the hole. We went home again to that fridge filled with casseroles and salads and leftover funeral food. It was too much. I couldn’t even look at it all. I just went to my standbys. I ate frozen pizza, chips, pretzels, and Franco-American spaghetti-o’s and ravioli. Nothing worked. Nothing filled the hole.

Dad saw it happening. He saw all the food in the fridge that friends and family brought us and he saw the garbage I was eating. He knew it wasn’t okay. He knew something was wrong and that he had to do something. It was the 1980’s and he was a middle-aged man picking up the spatula. He did his best to be sure that my brother and I had good food to eat. I tried to eat what he cooked. Fresh and homemade it didn’t fill the hole any better than my junk food disaster.

The hole kept growing. By my late teens I was feeling truly lost. I came to a point when my body and soul were so broken that I couldn’t take it in anymore. I literally couldn’t swallow. It wasn’t that I wanted to lose weight or didn’t want to eat. I couldn’t. I couldn’t swallow anymore. It hurt. So, I stopped.

Lot’s changed over the years. I’ve done a lot of work to address the sorrow of losing my mom and to see myself in a better and clearer light. I never did get that eating disorder diagnosis, but I still understand that hole and still question that relationship.

I’ve used a low-glycemic diet for the last several years to help address my epilepsy. I decided a few months ago that it was time to end the diet. Tonight, as I wander into the new year, I’m asking myself “how do I go forward?” My whole life food has been both a hideaway and a control tool. That little girl eating 13 ham sandwiches to hide from the pain of death or the me today that weighs myself at least once a day usually twice. I’ve been able to use counting carbs as a tool to fight epilepsy. I don’t know that it helped me, but I kept trying because I can count my carbs and I lost nearly 60lbs from a once obese state to a “healthy” weight. I could be in control. I could never fill the hole with food, but I could control it, but that depends on maintaining control. I find myself asking, “who’s in control here, me or the food that I eat or don’t eat?”

I’m asking myself tonight if it’s okay to order a pizza. I’ve been asking myself that same question all afternoon. It shouldn’t be that hard of a question to consider, but yet all the ups and downs of my dietary life leave me wondering if a pizza will leave me ill or destroy me or if it’s something that is just simply okay, something I can do and enjoy.

This has been a bit of mess of a piece to write, but at least it’s out. Maybe I’ll be able to create something more clear and well written in the future, but this is the mess I feel in the moment.