Crow and Flame

Let’s talk about disordered eating and body dysmorphia—the quiet, consuming wars we fight beneath our own skin.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with food. Not just love or hate, but something tangled, something sharp. After being sexually assaulted in my young adult years, that relationship shifted into something unrecognizable. My body stopped feeling like mine. It became something separate, something to control, to punish, to disappear from.

I turned to bingeing and purging, chasing control and never catching it. The cycle fed itself—shame, hunger, excess, regret. My weight climbed. My health declined. And the voice in my head grew louder, crueler. I hated myself in a way that felt absolute.

Even after losing the weight, the war didn’t end. It just changed shape.

Exercise became another form of control, another place where “enough” didn’t exist. I didn’t allow myself rest because rest felt like failure. Slowing down felt like losing. There was always more I should be doing, more I should be fixing, more I should be shrinking.

Because I was never enough.

Last year, that voice cornered me in a gym. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and something snapped. My chest tightened, my breath fractured. A full panic attack, right there between machines. The thoughts came fast and vicious—you’re too big, you’re going to break this, it won’t hold you.

Logically, I knew better. I saw people larger than me using those same machines every day. But logic doesn’t speak the same language as body dysmorphia. Logic is quiet. Distortion is loud.

And now, here I am again.

Watching the scale like it holds my worth. Chasing a number that shifts just out of reach every time I get close. Looking at food not as nourishment, but as something to fear. Something to calculate. Something that could undo me.

Even now, I hesitate to take medication my doctor prescribed—something meant to help my body heal—because one of the side effects is temporary weight gain. Temporary. Rational. Manageable.

And still, it feels unbearable.

This is what people don’t always see about disordered eating and body dysmorphia. It isn’t just about food. It isn’t vanity. It isn’t a lack of discipline or too much of it.

It’s disconnection.
It’s fear.
It’s grief.
It’s trying to reclaim control in a body that no longer feels safe to live in.

It’s standing in the ashes of yourself, trying to decide whether to rebuild—or burn again.

But here’s the truth I’m learning, slowly and unwillingly:

The body is not the enemy.

The body is the witness. The holder of everything we’ve survived. The place where pain landed when it had nowhere else to go.

And healing doesn’t come from punishing it into submission.

It comes from learning, piece by fragile piece, how to come back to it.

Not perfectly.
Not all at once.
But enough to stay.

This is not a story tied up with a bow. I’m still in it. Still fighting the urge to measure, to restrict, to chase something that keeps moving.

But I’m also here.
Aware in a way I wasn’t before.

And maybe that’s where the flame starts again—not in perfection, but in recognition. In naming the fire without letting it consume everything.

If you’re in this too, if your reflection feels like a stranger or an enemy, know this:

You are not alone in this war.

And even if it doesn’t feel like it right now—your body is not something you have to defeat to be worthy of living in it.