Facing facts can stop eating disorders from consuming our lives

Fear and denial keep these deadly dangers in the shadows, writes Louise Gallagher.

Even before she named it out loud, I suspected its presence. My daughter was disappearing before my eyes. Vanishing. Carving out the soft curves of her body. The edges of her bones becoming visible beneath her skin.

I felt powerless. Helpless. Confused. To confront or not? Be patient or push for the truth? Challenge her or trust she’d come clean?

We talked around it. I shared articles I thought would interest her about self-esteem. Selfworth. Self-care. But, because I was too afraid to look at the monster stealing her away, I was blind.

An eating disorder is like that. It hides in the shadows of our fear of facing it, while it consumes the ones we love. It was humbling. Frightening. I wanted to cry. To scream. To punch a hole in the darkness that was consuming her, so the light could get through.

I wanted to run after her and force her to turn around, to see herself through my eyes. But the eating disorder held her fast. She was lost in its insistence that the only way to be worthy was to become less and less. I was powerless. No matter how much I loved her, she could not feel my love.

All she knew was the need to lie to protect the truth of its presence in her life, while I lived beneath the awful fear of losing her to its vicious insistence she was unworthy of life.

It is Eating Disorder Awareness Week in Canada. From a teenager to her mid-20s, my eldest daughter danced with eating disorder.

She is 30 now and holding fast to her recovery. Recovery was not a straight line. There were many detours back to the darkness, moments when I thought she’d made it, only to find her disappearing before my eyes all over again.

For her, it was a daily, conscious choice of life over eating disorder. Of choosing worthiness over worthlessness. Of not giving into eating disorder’s insistence she throw away her hard-won prog- ress beneath its insistence it was the master and she its puppet.

In her journey, my daughter has taught me a great deal about courage and trust, bravery and truth, fearlessness and selfacceptance.

I still have moments when something she says makes me fear the worst. When I must learn to let go of my fear and trust all over again in her power to choose life.

There is no one moment in time that opened the door to eating disorder’s presence. No one thing I did, nor any one person did to cause it to appear.

Eating disorder lurks everywhere. It is in the commercials of carefully airbrushed models feigning a perfection no human can achieve.

It is in our insistence there is happiness waiting if we just get the latest outfit, lose that five pounds, run that extra mile.

It is in the seed of doubt that lays buried in our minds, waiting to be fed in the darkness of our fears we will never measure up to some unknown yardstick of success. My daughter had an eating disorder.

It is a mental health disorder that has an insatiable appetite for control and will kill if left untreated.

Recovery is possible. There is no one-size-fits all-cure, but when we speak up for education, when we learn more about this mental health disease that continues to ravage the lives of those we love, we are speaking up for those who are lost in the darkness of eating disorders.

And, while we may not be able to punch holes in the darkness, when we stand together and choose to face the facts of eating disorder, it loses its power over our lives.

An eating disorder is like that. It hides in the shadows of our fear of facing it, while it consumes the ones we love.