Author's Note
Dear Reader,
I'm very excited to share this story with you all, but before we can begin I felt a need to explain this story in itself.
I began this story today after an appointment with my dietician. I started writing this and couldn't stop. I wasn't planning on writing this or ever dealing with this topic on this site, but today I just felt a vital need to get this out there.
This story is extremely personal to me. I've battled with an eating disorder for nine years of my life. The numbers on the scale, the number of calories in food, the need to get it out, and the need to not eat at all or eat way too much are all very real. I've heard people laugh when I talk about how afraid I am about gaining weight, but it's no joke. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. I've been in treatment for this with girls who couldn't weigh more than eighty pounds soaking wet. These disorders can kill you, and they will.
By no means do I intend to glorify mental illness with this fanfic. In fact, I caution you all right here, right now, that some, if not most of the behaviors illustrated in this story are able to be imitated. But I DO NOT In any way condone or encourage these destructive behaviors. Instead I hope to promote awareness for the deadliness of these diseases, and to hopefully help someone to not make the same mistakes that I made. If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, please get help. Go to the national eating disorders association (NEDA) website to learn more and get help today.
And to my readers who are indeed struggling with these serious issues, Here's what I want you to know:
You are beautiful. The scale can't measure your worth or potential. What people see on the outside isn't what makes them beautiful. It's the beauty on the inside that makes an impression. You deserve to love yourself today. You CAN recover. You can beat your anorexia, your bulimia, your binge eating disorder. You are a warrior, and you can win this battle. You deserve treatment, and you deserve to be happy again. I know how scary it is to ask for help. I was terrified of it. But you can't let it stop you from getting the recovery that you deserve. And if you're struggling and need to talk, my inbox is always open. You are deserving of freedom from your disorder. But you have to want recovery for yourself, not because someone else tries to force it on you. They can't make you follow through. Only you can do that. It's your body, and it's your life. What you do with that body will affect you for the rest of your life. Take things one day at a time, one step at a time. And please know that you are enough just the way you are.
I hope you all can find some hope or healing in reading this the way I did writing it.
-FabulousDivaRarity
Blessings Of The Damned
My eyes are painted on me wide open.
There is so much we do not see, because we are not looking, or we don’t want to look. A select few of us are born with our eyes open, and others have our eyelids ripped off as we are forced to see what we do not wish to. I am the last one of these. Somepony tore through the protective canopy over me that said I was worth something, and opened me to things I wish I did not see.
I am Crystal Gleam. My parents gave me my name because they said that when I was born, I shined and sparkled for them like a crystal. I grew up believing that story. But now I see differently. I do not shine or sparkle. I am a rock that is beaten against by waves, wearing away at me with every almighty crash. I had a good foalhood, and my parents were good ponies. I have never blamed them for what I have become, nor will I ever. I know that the demons inside me are of my making, and not theirs. I am damned to live with them festering inside my head. And yet sometimes it feels as though they are trying to help me, to prepare me for the realities which I believe I was never prepared to face as a filly. The world, even in places like Equestria, is still a rotten place at times. I never got a glimpse of it as a child, and it left me woefully unprepared to deal with it. I was too sheltered, too protected, to see things for what they were.
But now I see.
Anxiety gripped me while in school. I did not like public speaking, but was forced to do so anyway. Slowly, the anxiety about that grew into one of speaking at all, and then being around ponies, until I was isolating myself. I needed something to control when my head was spinning, and the object of that control was food. I could control what I put into my body, and I could control getting it out. It helped me cope with the anxiety, by having that one thing that I could command. Since I had already been a picky eater, it was only natural for this to grow.
I was ten years old when I made myself sick for the first time on purpose.
Before that, it was all a haze of late night binges of snacks. There was no rhyme or reason to why I binged. Looking back, maybe I was trying to fill this emptiness inside of me. I hadn’t gotten my cutie mark until I was eight, and I thought maybe that was the emptiness- that sense of not having a special talent and therefore a purpose. But even after, I did not stop. That day at the age of ten, I can recall very clearly.
The school day had been awful. A colt had been bullying a filly, and I tried to speak up for her, but the anxiety was crippling me. He had laughed and laughed. My cheeks had been burning with humiliation. The teacher had come and broken it up, and I had made a swift retreat home, and the only thought filling my head was to make that emptiness stop. I had shoved food in my face. Chips, ice cream, pretzels, chocolate, cheese, cupcakes. Anything I could get my hooves on. But it wasn’t enough. I remember glancing at myself in the bathroom mirror and feeling so ashamed and disgusted by my own actions. And suddenly, there was a voice in my mind saying that all of that food would make me fat, and I needed to get it out. So I did. When I was done with my deed, I felt lighter, almost euphoric, and in a daze. I went back to my bedroom and flopped onto my bed.
In the moments after, I was filled with the knowledge that I would do this again. I felt like I did not have an option. I could fill that emptiness and then maybe get rid of it completely. So I tried to. A funny thing happened though. That emptiness was because, I realize now, that I did not have a goal for my life. Even after getting my cutie mark, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it. In eating and then making myself sick, the emptiness was replaced with a goal: To be thin.
I was ten when that started. A few times per week at first, then daily, then multiple times a day. It took time to work myself into that lather, that frenzy. By the time I was fourteen I was dependent on it to get through the day. I thought I had found a great secret for succeeding in life. I gave my body food as it so required, and then got it out so no damage was done. But I was too blinded by the monster gripping my body to realize that I was doing damage, irreparable damage to my body, and to myself. Physically, I was not giving myself nutrition, I was wearing away at my teeth with vomiting, I was destroying my bowel functions by consuming laxatives, and I was destroying my stomach and esophagus with every retch. Mentally, I was feeding a demon that told me I had to be thin, I was crushing my self esteem, and placing my self worth in something that would nearly destroy me.
Most think ponies are immune to suffering, that we are so happy and carefree and have all of these friends that we go through life without a care in the world. That is completely inaccurate. We suffer just as other species do, just not for the same reasons. All of us have our personal demons. Mine just happened to be my reflection. I was trapped in that cycle of trying to need and not need, and it was like being on a hamster wheel, and not being able to get off.
I was exercising every day for hours. I walked to a lake near my home and would gallop around it as many times as I was able. My stamina, though, kept building. Every day I covered more ground. But that too took it’s toll. My joints would scream at me until I finally saw a doctor about it and he gave me pain medication. He told me to ease up on the running. I, in all my wisdom, did not listen. I wish I had.
All the while, I fought a war with my reflection. I bought a scale and weighed my self before eating, after eating, before purging, afterward, Before bowel movements and after, before and after exercising, and in the morning and before I went to bed. I charted every weight in a small journal to try and keep track. I tried desperately to find a pattern. Morning weigh ins were always less. I became entranced by those numbers, trying to see just how small I could make it. It was a game. Some days I felt I was very good and winning it, and others I was a loser. Every time I was in the bathroom, I looked in that mirror and kept telling myself I needed to be thin, to be pretty, to be enough. But it wasn’t enough, and it would never be enough. That’s what I didn’t understand.
I was twenty when I passed out one day while at work.
Now this was not the first time that had happened. But usually it was from exercising too hard. I would wake up by the lake those times. Occasionally some pony would find me and ask if I was okay, and I would say I was fine and had fallen asleep. Simple. That day, I had skipped breakfast. That in itself was not an unusual occurrence for me. But I had fasted the previous day, and exercised too much as per usual. Normally I would get a warning before I passed out. My vision would blur, my brain would feel fuzzy and far away, I wouldn’t be able to focus, and then the tunnel vision would come and I would be gone. But that day, it just happened. I fainted dead away, and they took me to the hospital.
I remember waking up in that hospital bed, with the doctor looming over me. He was smiling but it didn’t reach his eyes. His eyes were so serious and he pulled a chair over to speak with me.
“Ms. Gleam, our tests show that you haven't eaten in over twenty four hours. Your blood sugar is extremely low and your heart rate was so slow that it made you faint. The tests show that your electrolyte levels are imbalanced, Your cardiogram is abnormal, your jaw is swollen, and your potassium levels are low. I've also seen your gums bleed, and you have teeth marks on your hooves.”
With every symptom he checked off, I felt my heart sink. I had been found out.
“Ms. Gleam, are you bulimic?”
Bulimia Nervosa. The title of my disease. I never called it by that full name. It was just Bulimia, or as my personal demon called it, Mia. I think the stricken look on my face when he said it must have been all the confirmation he needed. He continued without waiting for a verbal response from me.
“I’m sending you to residential treatment.” He said. “You will enter a treatment facility next week. Pack your things accordingly. I will give you a list of what to bring and what not to when you come.”
I couldn’t speak at that point, I was so overwhelmed. I think I nodded, or at least gave him some indication that I had understood, because he had nodded at me and then left.
I was released two days later. I explained the situation to my work and they let me go, and then packed my saddlebags and two others with what I thought I needed, and I got to the center. It seemed to be a ranch, out in the middle of nowhere. They had goats there. I remember petting one before I went inside.
"Are you Crystal Gleam?" Asked the rounder stallion with a gray beard, pot belly, and sparkling blue eyes.
"Yes." I said, slowly.
"My name’s Garden Lush. I'm one of the aides here, and this is my partner Briar thorn.”
"Nice to meet you." I said numbly as I greeted them.
”Come on in and get out of the heat." Reluctantly, I followed him into the doors. A large desk greeted me when I entered, and a woman with light red hair and glasses was shuffling papers when she saw me.
"Hello, Crystal Gleam. My name is Rosewood Bark, and I'm the admissions coordinator here Trottingham Centers For Eating Disorders. We're so pleased to have you here." She said, shaking my hoof. "If you'll come with me to my office, I have some paperwork for you to fill out.”
I went in, and filled out everything in a daze. I wasn’t sure what I was thinking then, or what was driving me. Now that I look back though, I think it was that small spark of hope inside of me that kept telling me that there was more to life than all of this hell.
That first day was a flurry of meeting new ponies and touring grounds. I barely had time to unpack. I had to meet with a psychiatrist, a counselor, a dietician, a physician. I repeated the same stories and medical histories so much that my tongue was tired. That wasn’t even counting the blood draws they had to do and the vital signs they took on me every few hours.
Trying to understand the routine and dynamics of a place I thought I didn't want to be was awful. But that added with being forced to eat foods I didn't like and being prompted to share my feelings at every group was a closing in of pressure on me. I felt like I was going to explode. And with any time I wanted to explode, there was only one way I had ever known to release that building tension: purging.
But there was absolutely no way of that happening. The bathrooms were locked, and when ponies were in the restroom, we were monitored. We weren't allowed to flush until the monitor had seen that we hadn't purged. Even in the dormitories the bathrooms were monitored by the nurses. There was no chance of me getting all of the horrible food that was polluting my insides out of myself. With three meals and three snacks a day, I felt like they were treating me like a prized pig, filling me up and stuffing me with food for a fair. Soon my body would blow up into a balloon, and I would be fat and ugly, just like I had always had nightmares about.
I expressed my fears about all of this in my therapy, and my therapist had just nodded understandingly and told me that change was hard. I wanted to put my hooves around her throat and squeeze until her eyes bulged out when she said that completely calmly. She did not understand just how hard this was. Nopony who was not in our horseshoes could. I wanted to scream, to cry, to bang down the walls and run forever so I would never be there again. But I didn’t. Instead, I bottled that up until I got to the dormitory that evening, and then cried and screamed into my pillow.
My therapist had said change was hard. She was right about that. But one thing she didn’t mention was that change was slow and often small. I did not notice many things during my first weeks there. I spoke haltingly in group, I participated in psychodrama, listened to nutrition classes, worked on whatever my counselor wanted me to. I didn’t see change. But my team did. They saw I was beginning to speak, that I was making more of an effort, that I wasn’t trying to sneak away and purge. They never told me this until the day I left.
However, I made progress that I could see in the weeks after. Not being afraid of certain foods, speaking up more in groups, taking initiative to get better. I think it was after being asked to write a letter to my body and saying how much I hated it, but then realizing how much it did for me, that I really began to understand that I wanted to change and I wanted to heal. I worked harder. I poured myself into learning about nutrition, about the possible side effects of what I was doing to myself, about why this all started, and why it was food that I had chosen to control me.
I was there for three months. And every day, I liked myself a little bit more. On the day I looked in the mirror and said to myself, “You really don’t look all that bad.”, I knew I was going to make it.
The staff there congratulated me on everything I had done, and how far I had come, and it made me proud of myself. I hadn’t felt that in such a long time. I smiled at them, thanked them for everything, and went home, where I threw out my scale and my book of numbers. I didn’t need them anymore. I had learned that I was worth something.
I have friends now. Close ones, who help me check myself if I start slipping into behaviors or bad thoughts, instead of the ones kept at hooves length to keep them distant. I threw out the junk food in my house, and now I commit to eating better, occasionally allowing myself a treat. I meet with a counselor, psychiatrist, and dietician at home to stay on track, and I follow the meal plan they sent home with me. I visit my doctor regularly, and since treatment, he tells me that I am doing better. Some of the damage I have done to myself cannot be erased, but the fact that I am not worsening it is a comfort.
I still have bad days where that demon whispers in my ear, giving me the easy way out. But I don’t listen, because I know I’ve worked too hard to let myself down. When my eating disorder came, I thought it had ripped off my eyelids and let me see the world for what it was. What I did not know was that it had put up blinders that only let me see one way of thinking. But now, I have gotten rid of them, and am seeing clearly for the first time.
I will always be haunted and damned by this demon. But I realize now that it is one bad voice in a sea of good ones. There are ponies who support me every step of the way, and they are who I listen to now, because they see me without the devil on my back that I carry. Though I have my demons, I have exorcised one. It’s presence still lingers there in wait, but it will never be at full power again.
I am at a party today. I look around at the smiles, laughter, and joy. I smile and eat a bite of apple without feeling guilty or trying to calculate the calories inside or the weight it would put on me. I simply enjoy it. I enjoy my life.
I smile, and I think to myself, these are the blessings of the damned.
