Memoirs of an Outstanding* Teen

Chapter 46: It Gets Worse

What followed was a tragedy. I was smart enough to realize those university books weren't helping at least. But that's about it.

I still say, to this day, that 2014 is where my life began falling apart. The amount of damage that I did to myself, physically and psychologically, between April and August 2014, with the desperate decisions I made, and my short-sighted recklessness, would not only, make 2014 the worst year of my life, but would also, take me years to recover from. (It's April 2017 as I write this, and I still haven't fully recovered).

After I got my report card that April, I still consoled myself by saying it would all be all right in the end because I would get the top spot in the country at the end of the year. All I had to do was even work harder and this time focus on only the syllabus assigned work.

Now, I was already spending most of my time with school work. And other than the beginning of the year where the other prefects and I had to organize the Grade 8s' concert, there were no major LRC projects taking up my time.

The only way I could possibly spend even more time on school work was if I slept less, and cut out those 30 minutes I spent on exercising. And maybe study in the car on the way to school too. So, I decided I would not sleep more than 3 hours every day. Yup. Not a single minute more.

But I soon faced two problems: If I wanted to stay awake for 21 hours every day, I would need more coffee (500 gallons of it probably) and that would mean eating more calories. And as I discovered on the second or third day, staying up so late at night, I would get hungry. If I'm hungry and tired, I won't be able to think of anything else other than how hungry I am. And I was already not exercising, so those extra calories would not be burned off.

I was still obsessed with my weight at this point. With the running and the exercising, I had managed to keep it between 47-50 kg.

You know that saying that goes, "No one can serve two masters"? That's what made me give myself the wager. I had to decide whether I wanted to "stay skinny" or "pursue my dream of topping the list in the country and sacrifice everything for it." I chose the latter.

I wish that's where it stopped. I wish I just decided it's okay to eat if I get hungry at night and to drink the extra coffee, and I left it at that.

But no. I decided that if I was going to give up on my ED, I might as well give up on it completely. "You know you have to get out of this eventually. Don't you want children some day? Don't you want your period back? Who knows what two years of missing it has done up to now..."

Again, I Googled how to get out of EDs, and again the answer was "Just throw away the scale and eat when you're hungry." So that's what I decided to do.

I know some of you reading this might be like, "Great, she's finally getting over her disorder," but no, this wasn't healing. You're telling a girl, who has followed a strict eating timetable for almost three years to just go out there and "eat when she's hungry"? That's like telling an alcoholic, "You can just go out there and use drugs whenever you want to, as long as you don't drink." Just opening the door to a new problem. As it turned out, I was just stepping out of the fire and into the acid.