My name is Aiyana, I'm 19 and
I live in West Cork and study in UCC.
When I was about 14 and a half,
there was just a big change in my life.
I moved house and school
and I had to leave behind all of my friends and
also like, gender dysphoria
and then, you know, like underlying
just body image issues.
Kind of all at the same time
made a recipe for an unhealthy
coping mechanism
that ended up being an eating disorder.
I didn't really know what it was.
I kept silent.
There was a lot of like shame
because it's not talked about
and I didn't even actually
find the word for what it was
until I already had those
behaviors for several months.
Before any
like commonly recognised
behaviours of eating disorders,
there is the thoughts behind them,
and any coping mechanism
really comes out of a sense of a lack of control.
Why it specifically became
an eating disorder for me
was because of the underlying body image issues.
When that started manifesting
as certain behaviours,
and then those behaviors
became a comfort zone.
That's the spiral,
because once you're
once you're at that point,
it's much harder to get out of that.
It's not just like one
adverse childhood experience
where someone told you that you looked fat or whatever.
Like this is a constant reinforcing
of certain beauty ideals, certain
body types,
the striving for perfection.
Like that's a consistent issue
within social media and just like
general society.
- A word that comes up in our work
a lot not necessarily for everyone,
but is this idea of control.
So an eating disorder
it gives a control- sense of control to the person
that things in their own life
may be very chaotic
but they can control
their relationship with food and then it can
then jump into things like overexercising,
the bingeing and the purging that we
sometimes see as well.
And there's a big piece as well
that I think families often pick up on.
So something we would see a big change in a person's personality.
The thinking patterns
can become kind of very distorted,
very kind of inflexible and rigid
and very black and white.
So it's really
a multifaceted illness, it's
not just the change in the relationship with food.
And actually the research would say that
certainly in anorexia
because of the physical malnutrition,
the brain can shrink.
So there are a lot of, you know, very serious
and risky medical consequences of an eating disorder.
And as much as it takes
time to develop an eating disorder,
it equally takes a very long time to then
recover or be in recovery
or consider yourself
recovered from an eating disorder.
There came a point where I just
didn't want to have that
be my coping mechanism anymore.
It was like, I want to recover.
I don't want to be in this anymore.
'Cause you get sick of it, right?
Like nobody wants to be like that.
It's exhausting but also you can't improve
your mental health when your body is like starving for calories.
Like, that's not how it works.
One thing has to come before the other
and that decision that I made
it was a big step
in starting that recovery journey,
and it was necessary that
I let go of that
fear of no longer having an eating disorder.
It probably sounds a bit strange to anyone
that hasn't experienced that,
but it's definitely very,
very real because it meant another change.
It meant letting go of control.
It meant examining
a lot of different things
that were behind it, so.
I consider myself to be recovered.
The thing is, like, while I no longer
rely on the behaviours,
for me, I do have to be constantly vigilant
of those thoughts creeping back in there
because all of the things that cause
the underlying issues
are still out there in the world
constantly being reinforced.
So yeah, it's like a process
all the time of just being aware
of, of thoughts.
When the people around you
don't respond out of their own fear
and instead respond
from a place of compassion and perhaps
taking a step back
from that kind of initial and completely
understandable and valid concern.
It's actually a lot more helpful
and the opposite
when people are reacting
out of their fear, the feeling becomes
immediately
reinforcing that initial shame.
You can't just tell
somebody it's really dangerous,
stop doing this because it's assigning blame.
But also it's this notion that like
someone can just stop doing something
because they're asked to but like it's highly irrational.
Nobody would be doing it if they could just stop you know, like
the difference
when you have
like empathic and compassionate people around you
that know about your recovery journey.
A bump in the road
becomes not a failure
or like a setback
all the way to square one.
It just becomes exactly that.
Like you fall down, you have people
to pick you back up
or even just
wait for you while you dust yourself off.
You know, like that's really, really important.