Learning to Trust the Current

For a long time, I lived my life as if I were holding onto a massive rock in a river and I couldn’t let go. I thought the river would drown me, but it was actually trying to carry me home. If you’re reading this and your hands are tired from gripping the rock, I want you to know the water is safer than you may think. Years from now, you will look back down the river and know that you have traveled far. The journey is one you were always worthy of taking. 

When I was only seven years old, I remember the clinical smell of the doctor’s office when my pediatrician looked at me and asked, “Don’t you want to be skinny and pretty like your mom?”

In the stillness of that exam room, my doctor handed me a heavy map. It told me I wasn’t skinny, I wasn’t pretty, and that my worth was tied to those two things. It told me I wasn’t enough. For years, the world, strangers, media, even people I loved, just kept handing me copies of that same map.

As I grew, I realized that the “map” wasn’t just held by the people closest to me; it was woven into the fabric of our society. I faced more bullying in school than any child should have to endure. I was used as a target. While others used me as a reflection of their own insecurities, they landed in my own body.  I experienced a medical system and a culture that views curvier bodies through a lens of brokenness or inferiority. As I continue to age, I’m learning this lens is deeply rooted in a history of misogyny and systemic biases that dictate which bodies are worthy of respect.

I grew up in a world that often weaponizes weight, a world where the history of body standards is often linked to power and control. For years, I was made to feel unsafe in my own skin. I felt so isolated and alone. I compromised my safety for others’ comfort.

Despite all of this, I continued to hold onto hope.  Hope that so much more was waiting for me on the other side of this disorder.

By my twenties and early thirties, I had entered a long, grey season of “functional” survival. To the outside world, I was living an ordinary and content life. I was a teacher, a mother to two amazing children, and I navigated the beginning and ending of a marriage, eventually reaching a place of peace within that relationship.

But inside, I was living in a rain cloud that followed me around wherever I went.

My eating disorder was a silent thief. It occupied 90% of my brain. I was physically present in the classroom or at the dinner table, but I was never fully there. I was lost in the logistics of the disorder and the weight of its shame. I didn’t even have a name for it then. It wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I realized what I was battling was an eating disorder. Up until that point, I just thought I was failing at being “perfect.”

I lived on a pendulum that never found its center. I swung between extremes, extreme control and the total loss of it. If I couldn’t eat or exercise “perfectly,” I would retreat entirely. This perfectionism kept me stuck. I was holding onto a rock in the middle of a river, terrified that if I let go, I would be swept away.

One of the most difficult stretches of the river came with my diagnosis of colon cancer when I was only 36 years old. My ED voice found a new way to hurt me. It told me that I had done this to myself. It whispered that the years of struggle, the “pendulum” of weight and food, had broken my body beyond repair.

I felt a profound sense of shame, not just about the ED, but about what I feared I had done to my physical self. I felt more disconnected from my body than ever, treating it like a failing machine rather than a partner in my survival. I felt completely isolated, convinced I was the only person in the world drowning in this way, with this much intensity and pain. Then, the pendulum swung the other way. This time people were praising me because my body was shrinking, but my ED was growing louder than ever. There is a part of me that wanted everyone to know that I had ED, that my smaller body was not a celebration but a cry for help. Shame kept me silent. 

For a long time, my ED was a rock in the middle of a rushing river. I clung to it until my knuckles were white. Even when I tried to let go, I kept it in my sight, terrified of what would happen if I drifted. I would swim back to it over and over because it was the only thing that felt solid, but I knew it wasn’t life giving. Ironically, while I was holding onto that rock for “safety,” I was missing the world. 

During this time, I searched for a community, but many spaces I found were not healthy; they were still rooted in the very perfectionism I was trying to escape. I wish I had known then about safe, supportive communities like ANAD. While my therapist and nutritionist held the lantern for me, I realized that recovery is so much easier when we are not floating alone.

Healing began when I stopped trying to fix my body and started trying to inhabit it. My recovery was a slow, gradual process, much like the river itself. 

I was fortunate to find a therapist and a beautiful soul, who specialized in eating disorders. Through somatic work, we began to move the pain through my body so it wouldn’t stay “stuck.” I learned that my trauma wasn’t just a memory in my head; it was a physical weight in my bones. We worked in small, manageable pieces to discharge that energy. I wanted recovery to come quicker; I wanted to be “healed.” But along the way I learned the value of the journey.

As I began to regulate my own body, my work as a teacher transformed. I realized a fundamental truth: Students cannot learn until they are self-regulated. If they are stuck on a rock, they cannot absorb the beauty of the river and the lessons in and out of the classroom.

I became yoga certified and deepened my study of somatic work. I started using these skills to help my students move through their emotions and feelings. I wanted to give them the tools I never had as a child, the tools to feel safe in their own bodies regardless of what the “maps” they were given might say. As I help to heal them, I am also healing the child, the teen, and the young adult within myself.

The passion I had to heal the young versions of me and the students I work with culminated in my children’s book, The Tangle. It was the book I desperately needed when I was that seven-year-old child on the doctor’s table. It’s a resource to help children navigate their own internal “tangles” using somatic strategies. Seeing it in print is a reminder of how far I’ve come; I’ve taken the “tangles” of my own life and woven them into a lifeline for others.

Now, I speak on issues related to education, somatic work, trauma, and ED. I would never have been able to stand on a stage or lead a classroom with this much presence if it weren’t for the radical act of recovery.

Last week, I stood in a room at a medical facility, looking into the eyes of people who are currently where I once lived. My nutritionist asked me to share my story with an ANAD group.

As I walked in, the old ghosts tried to crowd me. They told me I wouldn’t “look” the part or that I would be a trigger. But as my therapist reminded me, it is not your responsibility to water down your truth. When I saw the faces in that room, all kinds of bodies, all kinds of people, I was reminded that ED does not have a face. We are connected through a painful disorder, but also the hope of a healed life.

I shared my story the way I breathe, through visuals and metaphors. I told them that I am no longer holding onto the rock. I am far down the river now. ED still pops up, maybe 5 or 10% of the time, but there is so much more space now. Space to love my people. Space to be present. Space to just… be.

Standing in that room, I realized that hope is a two-way street. By offering it to them, I felt it settle more deeply within myself. I am so deeply humbled by the souls I met that day. I didn’t stand before them as someone who is “perfectly healed.” I stood there as a person who knows the weight of their struggle because I carry the memory of it in my own bones.

There was such a profound, quiet healing in simply being with people who know. To those in that room, and to anyone else still holding onto that rock: you aren’t just a diagnosis or a struggle. Your story isn’t over; you are right in the middle of a chapter that is leading somewhere new.

I am so grateful for the way they received my story, and in doing so, helped me hold my own. 

I am far down the river now. I’ve learned that my body is, quite frankly, the least interesting thing about me. It is the vessel that carried me through cancer, through teaching, through motherhood, and through the storm of my ED.

I see the full river now. It’s beautiful. There are still rocks, sharp sticks and twigs, and even the occasional waterfall, the reality of being human, but I’m letting the water carry me. It’s a slow movement, like watching your children grow. You don’t see the inches of progress day-to-day, but when you look back, you realize you are miles from where you started.

To families, friends, and loved ones: You have stood on the riverbank, watching someone you love hold onto this rock, even when it doesn’t serve them any longer. Sometimes even reaching out your hands until your own arms ached.

There is a humbling reality we must hold together: you can love us, you can support us, and you can hold the lantern, but you can never fully know the weight of the rock. Just as I can never fully know the lived experience of those who walk through the world with different skin, different identities, or different battles. And that is okay, it’s what makes us human. Support shouldn’t feel like a heavy anchor in the river, but like the gentle grip of a sea otter, staying connected and safe while still allowing the current to carry us forward.

We heal, not in isolation, but through safe communities. We need each other to find the way back to ourselves.