Project Heal

i visited Philly for the first time ever with some friends during my senior year of high school. After three short days in the city i knew these streets would be home someday, i just wasn’t sure when or how. Fast forward four years later i am proud to say i’ve been a Philadelphian for over a year, attending Temple University as a social work major, and working as a nanny for some amazing families. i want to tell you that my love for this new and exhilarating place overshadowed the struggles and isolation i felt my first year living here, but i quickly learned that love is no easy feat, even if it’s just brick and mortar that’s stolen your heart. i’d be lying if i told you that my first year in the city was comfortable, easy, and painless; but i would also be lying if i told you that i wasn’t exactly where i was supposed to be. 

i was 13 years old the first time i stabbed the back of my throat with my fingertips. i can’t remember where i was or who i was with. i can only remember feeling the desperate need to empty myself of all of the garbage inside. i spent the next years intermittently resolving my fears and anxieties by starving them away, puking them up and bleeding them out; and remaining relatively silent about it. To my dismay, during my freshman year of high school the scars on my ankles and my wrists no longer went undetected by my family and friends. Those scars landed me my first therapy appointment, and many more after that. Despite the multiple therapists and inpatient experience i had, i never mentioned my disordered eating behaviors to a clinical professional until i was twenty years old. After spending nearly seven years in denial about the reality of my eating disorder and the impact it was having on my life emotionally, physically, spiritually and relationally i finally started to come to terms with the fact that i needed help and support that i simply could not provide for myself, no matter how hard i tried. i simply could not do it alone. The year before moving to Philly i started seeing a therapist and for the first time i addressed my eating disorder in therapy. My biggest set back during my time with that therapist was that i wasn’t going to therapy because it was something that i truly wanted to do for myself. i was going to therapy simply to please my loved ones that had grown increasingly concerned with my weight loss and my relationship with food that i could no longer hide. i still had not fully accepted my own reality and therefore could not put in the time and work that i needed to in order to move towards healing. Moving to Philadelphia gave me the space to process and fully understand where my life was and where it was headed if i continued to treat my mind, body and soul the way i had been. It gave me an opportunity to introspectively explore what healing meant to me and understand how to pursue that path wholeheartedly not just because loved ones were worried, but because it was what i wanted for myself. Unfortunately my denial followed me to Philly and it took almost a whole year until i truly and deeply began to accept the reality of my eating disorder and saw healing on the horizon. Intellectually i think i’ve always known the way my eating disorder eating disorder was affecting my life, but it wasn’t until July 2015 that i fully committed that reality to my heart.This past summer i made the choice to see a therapist and for the first time felt determined to seek true self knowledge and healing from this insidious disorder. The process of accepting myself and my eating disorder is one i am still definitely undergoing. i still have fleeting thoughts that tell me i’m not sick enough or thin enough to seek out intensive treatment, but i am slowly learning to recognize those voices as echos of my ED and how to acknowledge them and work through them without believing in them as truth. 

Summer came and went and although i was in therapy and doing my best to be honest with my therapist about my ED i still silently suffered when in company of most family and friends. Fall semester began and i had a full course load of classes staring me down that i believed i was ready for. It was the second week of school and i was just barely balancing my emotional well-being, working almost full time, relationships, prospective school work, and spending most of my day with my thoughts consumed by my ED. Over the past year i had gotten pretty good at this balancing act, but on the second day of the second week of the semester, as i was on my way to the gym around 6 am, i was attacked and mugged and just like that the show was over. He hit me with his bike and i fell backwards and hit the concrete hard. He got away with my phone, and fortunately i got away with only a few minor cuts and bruises, a sprained knee and a slight concussion. Unfortunately, my emotional wounds reached much deeper. After the attack I began experiencing extreme hyper vigilance and heightened levels of anxiety; to the point where I was unable to leave my house to attend class and I found it very difficult to concentrate on my school work. In between waves of anxiety, I experienced undertows of depression. Those tides dropped me off not too far from suicidal thoughts and left my thoughts drowned out with ideas of constant danger, death and self-loathing. Having experienced previous trauma, I believe this event compounded preexisting PTSD symptoms and made my self-injurious and disordered eating behaviors and thoughts exponentially worse. i spent the rest of September desperately trying to stay afloat and continue my balancing act, but i could no longer deny the fact that i was drowning. i withdrew from my classes and spoke to my therapist about seeking more wholesome and integrative support. Due to limitations with health insurance i didn’t have access to the specified and intensive treatment that i truly needed to heal from trauma and my eating disorder. In October i spent sometime at an intensive outpatient program for anxiety and depression. Ultimately this program did not fully address my needs, but at that point in time i didn’t have very many options so i attended and took away from it what i could.

Rewind to a few months prior to all of this i was surfing through Instagram checking out ED recovery blogs and accounts when i came across one called Project Heal, an account for a 501c nonprofit organization that raises fund for ED treatment for those who don’t have access to the care they need. Although i had been following them and reading stories of grant recipients for a month or two it hadn’t crossed my mind as a possibility until near the end of October. i had just quit attending the day treatment program for anxiety and depression i was attending and had no clue what was next or how i would get the support i needed to overcome my ED, when the thought crossed my mind to apply for a treatment grant through this organization. i immediately did some online research and discovered that the next application deadline was November 1st, about two weeks away. Applicants would be notified within two weeks if their applications were being further considered and notified by December 1st if they were chosen to receive a grant. i had never been so brutally honest about my struggle with both an eating disorder and self-harm as i was filling out that application. It was hands down one of the hardest things i’ve ever written. i also began to realize that not only did i need more integrative treatment and courage to be honest with my self but i also needed to reach out and be honest and vulnerable with those around me whom i trusted and loved. i began by sending the application to three key people in my life who i felt safe with for them to read over and give me their feedback. My application was submitted by October 28th and i got an email on November 3rd letting me know that i was being further considered for grant funding. 

In my ideal world, if i were to receive the grant, i would begin treatment in early December and go through mid-January and be released just in time to start my spring semester of school. i was eager to go back to school and put the past failed (as i perceived it at the time) semester behind me, so naturally i enrolled in a full course load and began imagining myself back in the classroom, swamped with papers and deadlines, but loving every minute of it. December 1st came and went and I didn’t hear from Project Heal. Hoping for the best but expecting the worst i began to come to terms with the reality that the treatment i felt that i needed to move toward healing and health might not be accessible to me at this time. Still unsure of what was next i kept my focus on the month ahead of me and making it through the holidays. One week later, i got a phone call from a woman named Kristina who immediately greeted me with a congratulations to let me know that i had been chosen to receive the grant. i couldn’t find the words to express the amount of gratitude i felt during the few minutes of that phone conversation. i also couldn’t find words to express all the emotions i was simultaneously feeling, that i wasn’t particularly proud of. A combination of gratitude, excitement, shock, fear and anxiety welled in my stomach and i began to cry. i had allowed fear and shame to control my narrative for too long and now it was my turn to write my story. The sense of self i felt i’d lost to my disorder began to reappear as whispers of courage and hope. i felt my body rise out of the water that had been suffocating me. This opportunity brought with it steady breath in my lungs, but not for long. One of the first things i learned about recovery is that it is a process of breakthroughs and setbacks, and sometimes they’re one in the same. 

i soon learned what i think i knew all along, if i was going to pursue treatment wholeheartedly i would have to take another semester off of school. This fact felt more earth shattering than it really was and my reality was that if i was going to successfully pursue a degree at all i would have to start first by caring for myself and addressing my emotional and physical well-being. After my initial excitement of receiving the grant began to dissipate, feelings of fear, anxiety, and even anger began to settle in. This was it. i was going to change my life, write a new and different chapter in my story, and leave behind my world of control and self-destruction that i did everything i could to protect and preserve for seven years. i was scared because this world was all i had known, experiencing the world through the lens of my ED was how i made sense of everything. Then there was the anger. There was a part of me, the critical part, the ED control panel, that was upset with me for being vulnerable, reaching out and making steps toward recovery. This cocktail of emotions is something i continue to wake up and grapple with everyday.

Since before i can remember i have known that i would spend my life helping, serving and loving others. For most of my life i believed that i could successfully care for and love others even with absence of compassion and love for myself. Although i found this to be true every once and while, it is not a sustainable way to be in the world effectively be a source of light and hope. The process of giving love must also be met with an act of receiving, or it is not wholesome and unconditional. Pursuing radical self-love is no longer an option if i truly wished to love those i come into contact with unconditionally. My desire to help and serve others has lead me to some amazing opportunities to serve others through ministry, education, and volunteering in the United States as well as developing countries, and has brought me to my current goal in life: to become a social worker.These past few years have taught me over and over again that i cannot effectively help and care for others if i don't do the same for myself. i currently work as a nanny for two families with little girls ages two and six. Through my darkest days over the past year, they have been my light, my hope, my drive. My desire for them and for all the children i come into contact with is for them to believe that their story matters, their voice is powerful, and for them to learn to love themselves unconditionally. So despite my fear, anger, and anxiety i’m going to continue to be hell-bent on loving myself. And on days that i can’t, because there will be days, i will look for the light in the eyes of those i love and have hope in their story, find power in their voice, and strength in their love. 

Lexi, August 2015

Stella, October 2015

~Nayyirah Waheed~