This one is going to be difficult for me to write, but it’s important that I do.

NOTE: I am not writing this to garner sympathy or seek attention. My intention is to teach and support those who need help.

The words I put out into the world are meant to reach those who need to read them.

I hope this reaches those who need to know that they’re not alone and that it is possible to manage it with practice, patience with yourself, and time.

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Bulimia.

What is it?

I won’t get clinical here. Basically, it’s the act of forcing yourself to vomit after eating way more food than your body needs in one sitting. Some people overexercise instead. There are other variations of purging as well, but the two I mentioned were my methods of choice.

How common is it?

It’s waaaayyyyy more common than you think. Just about every woman I know has self-harmed in one way, shape, or form in her lifetime…bulimia is the most common form that I’ve been confided in about, presumably because game recognizes game.

Why doesn’t anyone talk about it?

One word: Shame.

Now, I’m not writing a term paper on bulimia here, but I will link the one resource that I read before I wrote this.

There are millions of people — mostly women, who are five times more likely to develop eating disorders than men (according to this article — Eating Disorders — Bulimia Nervosa) — that will go undiagnosed and continue this secret behavior throughout their lives.

My article is going to focus on my personal experience of developing bulimia in college and trying like hell to heal myself of this behavior over the course of 20+ years.

Here’s why it’s taken me this long to write about this. It’s a disorder cloaked in shame, judgment, and self-loathing. Just…bucketloads of shame.

It’s also an eating disorder that often isn’t attributed to one’s body size like anorexia or binge eating disorder can be. So I’ve been able to fly under the radar this whole time.

The weight fluctuations that I’ve experienced over the years weren’t stone-cold proof of having an eating disorder. Many people fluctuate because of a myriad of reasons — changes in health, relationships, and living situations, to name a few.

(DEEEEEEP breath…exhale…)

Okay…here goes. Let’s get really personal.

Buckle up, beauties and cuties.

I became bulimic at age 19 when I was a sophomore in college. I briefly touched on it in my blog entry about my weight: My Weight Throughout The Decades.

But I’m ready now (I think) to dive further into why I did and how I struggled with it for so long.

So I’ll start at the beginning. (It’s helpful to have read the blog post I mentioned above, My Weight Throughout The Decades, before continuing. But if you don’t have the time for that, this should still be cohesive, as I’m a wordy bitch that overexplains things on a regular basis.)

The feelings of shame started early. As a child, I frequently experienced waves of it…about my body, my “fat face,” my nerdiness, my voice (I wanted to be a singer from the age of five but was often ridiculed about it), and my behavior (I was, admittedly, quite annoying).

These feelings only multiplied as I grew into puberty, developing the belief that no one but my mother could stand to be around me…not even my siblings, my father, or my childhood best friend.

As I went through junior high school, I found more and more evidence of that as friends decided that I wasn’t cool enough or that I was way too negative to be around.

I mean, they weren’t wrong.

With hindsight being as bright as it is, I don’t harbor any ill will toward any of these people. After all, we were all just children trying to stumble our way through the strange hormonal changes of the budding teen years. But at the time it was incredibly hurtful to be rejected like that.

I craved attention so much that I leaned hard into my sharp sense of humor. My tendency was to be self-deprecating, sarcastic, and judgmental. Soooo judgy. The more I judged myself, the deeper my judgment of others ran. That became a well-worn practice all the way up to my late 30s; that’s when I had my children and began to understand that being hypercritical is the polar opposite of being helpful.

My high school years were rife with letdowns. As I progressed further up the educational ladder, I began to audition more frequently. And holy shit, auditioning was brutal. My deep-seated insecurity would surface as terrible stage fright (and that lovely side effect continued well into my 20s). My throat would tighten and my alto voice would warble out as palpable nervousness. I would literally be shaking in my boots. (Or my jellies, as it was the 80s.)

Bring on more shame. And the sweating. My God, the sweating. The perspiration would be running down the sides of my face, dripping onto my neon pink Forenza sweater.

So obviously I didn’t get chosen for solos in the choir. I was always in the back of the chorus in the musicals, and I did not get cast in any featured roles. As involved as I was in creative extracurricular activities, I didn’t shine or sparkle or have whatever manic-pixie-dreamgirl quality required to be featured in those high school productions. I wasn’t acknowledged as talented or special.

And good fucking grief was I resentful about that.

Instead of working harder on overcoming the nerves or, I don’t know, examining my attitude, I twisted that negativity into a verbal sword with which I stabbed everyone around me. By my senior year, I had attracted a wonderful little gathering of underclassmen who giggled at my muttered, snarky comments during rehearsals. I can see now how disrespectful my behavior was…but then again, it was high school. Enough said.

It is here that I would like to note that I actually did have accomplishments in those four years. I absolutely killed it in my music composition class, ruining the curve and getting the highest grade in a class primarily consisting of boys; I was accepted into a national show choir that had a (televised) performance at Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.; I even won a Vocal Achievement Award at the end of my senior year.

But those accolades just didn’t measure up to the disappointments in my mind. I showcased those and continued to stoke that raging fire of self-loathing.

Despite hyperfocusing on my shortcomings, I decided to major in music composition in college. It was the only thing I actually enjoyed doing at that age…other than complaining and sulking, that is. (As far as I know, there is no way to major in those two highly sought-after skills.)

I was pretty decent at singing and songwriting, so I decided to pursue the lucrative and not-at-all-ferociously competitive career path of becoming a musician. (Clearly, I refuse to entirely abandon sarcasm. I do love it so!)

However, I was not very good at playing piano, because that took patience and lots of practice, two things that I definitely didn’t excel at in my teen years.

By age 15 I had finally convinced my mom to pay for piano lessons while also having convinced myself that I was so far behind that I would never catch up. What a way to reach for your dreams, Dana!

So that’s what I spent my energy focusing on — I can’t play piano because my mom wouldn’t let me take piano lessons straight out of the womb, so I’m doomed to failure. Excellent attitude to carry forward to my higher music education.

I auditioned for and was accepted into the music program of a small liberal arts college in central Pennsylvania. My main instrument of study was my voice; my major was Music Composition.

Overall, the learning environment was competitive but supportive. But instead of looking for encouragement, I allowed one embarrassing moment to cloud my decisions over the next four years.

Moving away from my childhood home into a college dorm offered me an opportunity to reinvent myself, and I was raring to go. Fresh-faced and bright-eyed, I decided to try out for the school musical in the fall of my freshman year. The music department was putting together a production of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes,” which had already been done in the summer theater at my high school. As I had been in (the back row of the chorus of) that show, I knew the music very well. I went to the campus theater and asked to audition for the chorus.

The song I chose was “Take Me Back to Manhattan,” which is just really fun to sing and smack dab in the middle of my alto range. I was blessedly able to control my nerves on that day and was pretty satisfied with my performance. To my surprise and delight, the casting folks were impressed. I was offered a chance to read for the role of Bonnie, one of the lead roles.

And as a lowly freshman! Oh, my stars!

They directed me to move on to learn the choreography routine that was being taught to the other students auditioning for featured roles. They directed me to the stage area and instructed me to tell the choreographer that they asked me to be there, even though freshmen were typically not invited to audition for leads.

I was pretty excited about it, and despite the fact that I’m a slow learner when it comes to the dancing part of musicals, I’m actually not bad at it once I have the moves down.

But…it did not go well. At all.

The choreographer was hesitant, but he reluctantly allowed me to join the others. My nervousness became fully engaged…and it wasn’t pretty.

He took one haughty glance at my second or third stumbly attempt at his magnificent choreography, and loudly demanded I leave immediately because I had NO BUSINESS auditioning for A LEAD ROLE!!! (Stomp stomp stomp)

Oh, that man was soooooo precious…but he was also revered at that school. I was absolutely humiliated. My self-esteem retreated back into its corner.

And with that, my extracurricular activities at that university came to an end before they’d even begun. I didn’t audition for anything else after that, despite being encouraged to do so several times over the years.

Even with that humbling beginning, those four years were some of the best ones I experienced. I made amazing friends that I am still connected to today. I learned so much more about music composition, instrumentation, and performance and loved (almost) every minute of it.

During the middle, though, I developed a terrible coping mechanism for dealing with heartache and stress.

My first real boyfriend and I had broken up a couple of months earlier, and I was still devastated. Eating in secret had taken hold…I had gradually become a binge eater at this point without even noticing. Funny how that happens.

So I found myself regaining the 20 pounds I had dropped quickly from the “devastation starvation” technique I had cultivated after the breakup, having convinced myself that he broke up with me because I was “fat.” Not because I had the emotional intelligence (EQ) of a 13-year-old with undiagnosed ADHD, which was the actual reason. But I digress.

That’s what led me to inadvertently seek out a solution. This was all during the year I was a Resident Assistant (RA) on campus. I was a sophomore and the RA for a hall of freshmen. One of the young women in my dorm offered up the idea.

I’m unsure of the exact details, but very sure I was complaining about gaining weight because that’s what I was doing most of the time. She confided in me how she avoided gaining the infamous “Freshman Fifteen” — she made herself vomit anytime she felt like she ate too much.

I had caught whispers of bulimia in media before this moment (there’s a scene in the 1989 film “Heathers” about it), but didn’t know what it was called or how it was done.

“I…um…How do you do that?” I asked.

Not WHY. How. Ugh.

I think she explained that she gagged herself with the opposite side of her toothbrush…again, the details are fuzzy. But I do recall her telling me that she’d already been doing it for years (keep in mind that she was only 18 years old at this time) and that she always brushed her teeth really well afterward. She emphasized how important it was to do that in order to not destroy the enamel on our teeth and that her teeth were still in excellent shape.

And it was just that simple. I could eat whatever I wanted, however much I wanted, and all I had to do was throw it back up.

I’m crying as I type this.

I was 19 years old. I can’t go back and tell those two young women that this is NOT the way to control weight gain. I can’t tell 19-year-old Dana that this will haunt her for the rest of her adult life; that her weight does not determine her worth.

That it wasn’t worth punishing herself in those oceanic depths of self-harm just because a boy, who also had the EQ of a child, broke her tender little heart.

Oh…did I mention that RAs had single rooms? Meaning I didn’t have a roommate that year. The privacy was glorious; the loneliness, not so much. And disordered eating is so much easier to develop when you’re alone.

But let’s not dwell. The toothpaste can’t be put back in the tube; the toothbrush has already been brushing my teeth after purging for so many years. The damage has been done to my throat, and therefore my vocal ability. The shame train has already been boarded over and over again.

So there’s the origin story of one woman’s battle with bulimia.

I continued binging and purging at varying degrees until I became pregnant with my older son in 2008. And during those 22 years, I sought help many, many times. I also lied about being recovered many, many times. I’ve gone through years of therapy, attempted to join Overeaters Anonymous (OA is not for me, but thank goodness it exists for others), and read countless self-help books.

The happy ending is this: After all of that effort, something clicked into place last year.

And it has led me here to you, my dear friends. Telling you this true story…this tale of woe, forewarning generations of youngsters to come. This generation of young people that are exposed to the nipped-tucked-filtered-kardashianesque influence of social media at such young ages and having their every move possibly caught on video and published to the internet for someone’s entertainment. I can’t even imagine that kind of pressure.

Today I am in recovery, but make no mistake about it — I still identify as bulimic. When I overeat, the shameful and judgmental thoughts that come at me are still there.

But now I have done the work necessary to lower the volume of those thoughts and remember that sometimes I will overeat and that doesn’t make me a gluttonous monster; that it doesn’t make me a lesser human being.

That I am not broken.

I no longer wallow in shame about being bulimic. I take responsibility for it, but I don’t blame anyone, including myself. Eating something to soothe myself began when I was a little girl, long before I had any understanding of what I was doing or why I was doing it.

It’s something that I chose to practice to comfort myself in stressful times. I mistakenly believed it would make me feel in control; then in its own twisted way, it made me feel safe because it became so familiar. That’s how any form of abuse becomes so acceptable to its recipient.

It ended up controlling me for decades. But it doesn’t anymore.

Jane Pilger, who is a Life Coach specializing in binge eating recovery, has helped me get to a place where I feel safe in my body and in control without practicing bulimia. (Jane is also one of my mentors and the best friend of my OG mentor, Corrine Crabtree.)

Note: Admittedly I haven’t paid Jane a dollar, but her free content is so valuable that I will continuously shout her name from the proverbial rooftops. Find her here: Jane Pilger Coaching

Yes, I am promoting another Life Coach because the most important thing to do is to share resources and help everyone who is seeking it find the support they need. 

If I’m the one you relate to, then YAY!! Let’s work together. But if not, keep trying until you find the coach or therapist that resonates with you. It may take longer than you like, but your long-term health is worth the effort.

The works of Geneen Roth and Kathryn Hansen have also been crucial in my recovery path:

Geneen Roth - Women, Food, and God

Kathryn Hansen - Brain Over Binge, 2nd Edition

And to those who are reading this that are battling an eating disorder - please don’t give up on yourself. 

To use a hackneyed expression: If I can do it, so can you. The people who say those words once felt as hopeless and defeated as you feel, but they’ve figured it out for themselves and practiced it enough times that it has now replaced that disordered behavior.

I was able to practice and mess up and struggle and relapse and try something else all the way to a place where I have found peace.

And you can, too.

IT IS POSSIBLE. But I’m not gonna lie…it’s HARD WORK. 

It can feel impossible at times, but that’s just your brain trying to keep you safe. We don’t like change, and our brains will resist it. 

Keep going. Keep trying. You are worth it. 

And life on the other side is so much sweeter. I promise.