Cinderella: How I tried to save someone from an eating disorder — and failed.
By: Meiers Opinion
Tags: Eating Disorders, Love, Violence, Life, Psychology

I thought I knew, what an eating disorder is. After I was confronted with one through a dear friend, I had to change my opinion. I still do not know, what it is. I now barely understand, that it consumes an individual more, than anything else I’ve ever got the displeasure to know.

I cannot stress enough, how this is an individual experience. Every eating disorder is different and has its own unique causes.

Love from the first sight

We both went to the same classes in a big gym.

From the first moment our eyes met, there was something. She had those perfect deer-like brown eyes - yet, they were not boring at all. There was wit in them. A slight glitter.

At first, I assumed, that she just looked like that. That glitter had nothing to do with me. One time, I happened to be early for a training session. She was there, too.

She sat in a corner and looked to the floor, a little bit worried. I could not resist. From the second I started talking to her, all worry disappeared. The glitter - sure enough- was reignited. It was me alright.

Perhaps I should have become a lot more cautious the moment I found out, that she went to trainings every day. Or at least from the moment onwards, she confessed to be in intensive cardio lessons, although she had problems with her knees and took pills against the pain.

Perhaps I should have slammed the breaks, when I smelled her breath mere hours after our first kiss. It slightly reminded me of throwing up. It was a smell I grew to know very well. A smell, I grew to fear and hate. A smell, she could not hide, although she tried hard to do so.

Lies

We were very happy. At least - so I thought. She was adept at hiding her problems and mostly used her family as a reason, why we could not see each other more often. She never said ‘no’. She always said ‘Yes, of course we can do that!’. It just usually did not happen. No matter, what it was.

Several months into our relationship I found out, that her family believed her to be single and that she had not said a word about me to anyone. She made friends of the family believe, that I was a colleague of hers.

I liked her a lot, so I just ignored the fact, that she told a lot more, than she actually did. I graciously ignored, that if she finally did something, it was mostly a half-baked version that barely resembled to what she had promised in the first place.

So when I finally confronted her without any wiggle room, why she would not openly date me, she just postponed it with excuses about her work not allowing her to deal with additional pressure from her family.

Her conservative family was always a ready excuse.

Yet - they actually were very conservative. This was one of the most important parts of the problem, I'd never really understood.

They're being conservative and in set ways, unprepared to change in the slightest for someone like my significant other - was one of the reasons, she was in such pain. She was not at all conservative. She was a free spirit with own ideas. But she could not be herself around her family. She had to bend. Her siblings fit in, but not her. She was constantly criticised for being off. For being herself. For wearing the wrong clothes. For having her hair open. For attracting men. For talking to others. For having friends. For being fat. For eating too much. For looking like a slut.

You might be taken aback by that last sentence. It was one of many, I had witnessed from her mother in a slur of very unconservative words. From her superficial mother who believed, that nothing mattered, but money and looks. A certain look, only she knew about and which was the only acceptable look for any child of hers.

It was one of the things, my significant other had 'lied' about. She protected her abusers from the outside, because she was ashamed from them. She felt, as if it was her fault. She had grown up to believe, that she deserved her pain. That her siblings were better. That it was fine for them to get everything just like that and her, to have to 'work' for something and to get a worse option anyway, if at all.

My significant other had not looked like a slut. She was far from looking like a call-girl. If she chose to, that would have been her choice.

Ironically - her mother called her names, because she refused to wear sexy attire. Skirts and blouses. Big scarfs. High heels. Meaningful dresses. A lot of paint on her face. My girlfriend was a true tomboy. She wore sweaters. Sneakers. Sometimes she dared sporting a track-suit. If there was nobody at home. If she could avoid it, she would not use any make-up. She looked lovely. Dolled up, I could not resist to take her to the next hotel room. Just being herself, I wanted to hug her all day.

An intricate problem

The constant tension from the outside world with her closed-off family, the put-downs, her lacking self-esteem and self-value made her look hard for a solution. For something, that provided relief.

She found relief in paining herself. What started as a desperate try to satisfy the unrealistic expectations from her narcissistic mother ended in a never-ending cycle of torturing herself.

She loved food. Yet she had to be thin. So she did, what already the romans knew about.

Because this not being enough, she also trained a lot. In the end, it was every day.

Still not enough, to satisfy her mother, she went weeks without properly eating and merely drinking orange juice. Her mother scolded her for it:

'Of course you are so fat, if you drink this garbage all the time.'

She weighted around 110 pounds at 5.6 feet, when I met her. I believed her joking, when she named her goal weight to be 70 pounds. Over time I realized, that she was serious about that. I also realized, that she would never be able to reach that goal. Her training sessions were useless, because she never ate anything, she did not also purge again. Her body was in constant crisis mode.

Seldomly, she would treat herself to a cookie or some bread and be content. Usually though, she binged and purged.

This whole procedure was still not being enough pain to make her mother love her. She used the rest of her time to study like a maniac and stood at attention for every whim her parents called upon her. Always making sure, that the siblings were praised in front of her and assuring her of her place. A place barely allowing here to even exist.

Her father, frustrated by his uninterested and cold wife, used to incarcerate my girlfriend in her own room. When drunk, he beat her up. Once, one of her siblings threw her down the stairs, because she found a quarter she would not give up. She broke her nose in the process.

My girlfriend completely submitted herself to a torture she felt she needed.

The only thing, that ever made her pause, was the interest in another human being. The interest in me.

Freedom?

After months of work, we managed to get her out of her 'home'. She was kicked out, after she ‘confessed’ having a boyfriend and would not give him up. She was able to use their reaction to her advantage.

After staying with me for several months, we finally found her an own place. Three times. Unexplicably, she had to leave every place until she had an own appartment.

Her family completely ignored her as punishment. Eerily enough, she was sad about this. Her demons kept haunting her. And they started haunting me.

I had believed, that she would start being herself, once being out of the toxic environment.

Quite on the contrary, she started assuming the role of her own mother. She did not want to see a therapist, believing her dream-weight in danger.

Thirty years of ingrained terror were not going anywhere. She continued terrorizing herself.

She also tested her boundaries with me. She tried to make me jealous by getting very near and open-hearted with other people. As this did not help, she broke off the relationship. Several times over.

She also claimed various times to having been pregnant from me and having aborted said unborn children.

Even if she really had been pregnant — it could not have been mine, because we barely slept together and never without protection.

Once, she suddenly had signs of a fungal infection down there.

During the time we were in an on-and-off relationship, she had five different jobs. It was never her fault, that she was let go.

I never knew, what was real and what was not. What she truly believed and what she told me to get me where she wanted me to be. Where her illness needed me to be. She destabilized my world, like she had destabilized her own. She was not willing to change for the better. To get well. She wanted the world to change for her. So that she could continue her path to self-destruction.

She played the same games with me and the rest of the world, her mother had played with her.

Why would she not?

How would she know all of a sudden, how one was supposed to behave?

Breaking it up

I was devastated.

Still I could not let her go for a long time.

I had saved her, had I not?

She was still vulnerable, was she not?

I waited months. Half a year.

Finally, it came to me.

I was vulnerable, too. Very vulnerable. More vulnerable, than I had ever been. I believed, that I could make a difference. That I could save her from herself. Yet — I was just being destroyed in the process, too.

There was no family to be accused anymore. It was just her. She increasingly invented things that never happened to explain her situation and her unability to cope with work outside of her family’s office.

She failed her studies on her own, although there was no one to incarcerate, hit, or shame her.

No one held her from seeing a therapist about her steadily increasing binges and purges or her childhood-trauma.

Rather, there was someone who supported her and even went to several therapy sessions with her, until she claimed out of the blue, that the therapist had retired. Once she was out of her family’s prison, she had made her own instead.

She tried to make it all up by buying expensive gifts she could not afford.

It was, what her parents had taught her.

I was not her therapist. I was her boyfriend.

The next time, she 'broke up' with me, I took her by her word. She tried to reach out several times, but I would not budge.

I hope, she will find peace with herself and her demons eventually. I tried to save her from her family and I definitely contributed. Yet - I was not enough, to save her from herself.