Dear Kathryn:

“if I am not in the right frame of mind.. I don’t know what to say, and my eye contact is quick, sporadic, all over the room… off.. horrible. Other times.. I can make steady eye contact, be funny, animated, and social… I continue sometimes to spend some nights in a stupefied crying haze.. But then I wipe my tears away ad go to sleep or get on with my life… I was also pretty miserable when I was living with (family)… Sometimes I scream at the top of my lungs in the car… Then I get over it… I always find myself so exhausted and unmotivated… sometimes I feel so drained from constant talking and sensory overload… I feel stuck and so tired all the time… I’m not sure if it is normal for someone my age.. to lay in bed so much and just relax… I am ashamed a lot of the times of my (eating) manners, I am afraid of people seeing me eat sometimes.. Sometimes, I eat in secrecy in the bathroom.. I truly want my relationship with food to get so much better and simpler.. I wish I would allow myself the pleasure of eating nicely. But I am so  terrified of letting myself go and gaining weight”-

This is what I see as I imagine you as the little girl that you were: a scared little girl, living at home where she doesn’t belong. She needs so much and gets so little. She is anxious, distressed a whole lot. She cries but no one pays attention, she screams, or wants to scream, but no one hears her, no one pays attention, so she wipes her own tears, but not because she  is done crying.

She is miserable a whole lot of the times, but there are those times that she takes much needed breaks from misery, from fear and loneliness, and she celebrates those breaks with food.

She eats passionately, oh how tasty this is, how good it feels. And she wants to feel good, she needs to!

Sometime along the way, maybe as a teenager, maybe later, she gains weight or fears that she will  gain weight, this scares her, spoils the joy of those  breaks that she takes.

She notices that other people eat calmly, not passionately like she does, so she feels shame and hides  in the bathroom as she eats.

The breaks are not only when eating, but sometimes they take the form of being unusually social and feeling confident. But the fear is always there underneath and it comes up again and again. It exhausts you, this is why you need to lie down and relax a whole lot. It is tiring to be scared for so long.

Am I seeing correctly?

anita