For 18 years of my life, drug addicts, alcoholics and rehab facilities were only things I saw in movies. Depression and therapists seemed out of my world. But I have certainly learned that life is never the way it looks from the outside.
As a junior in high school, my life seemed perfectly on track: great friends, yearbook editor and varsity sports. But strangely, junior year to me is like an endless foreign novel: long and incomprehensible. The only parts I remember are the whispers of "she's so thin ." and the painful stares of judgment from afar.
Sent to therapy, I discovered emotional and psychological instabilities that I never knew existed inside me.
After Sept. 11, my father's international travel agency had gone bankrupt. We lost our house, our car and everything we could sell. Feeling helpless, my mind and body shut down on me, and I deteriorated, inside and out. It was so much more than just my weight, but that was all that people tried to see. It was painful to explain.
In the fall of 2003, I came to Penn as a freshman.
More than anything, I wanted to start life on a clean slate. I couldn't wait to leave the "anorexic girl" identity behind. But the first semester of my freshman year was very confusing. I made great friends, did well in school and fell in love with Penn - but I lost even more weight.
At the end of my first semester, I knew that I couldn't stay at Penn if I wanted to get better. I needed to be in a place where I could be someone who was struggling, and not feel forced to be a freshman with no worries.
Making the hardest decision of my life, I took a semester off from Penn and checked myself into an eating-disorder facility in California. After the scariest, most valuable experience of my life, I was discharged in three months. People were relieved, saying I looked healthy and so different. But my physical changes were nothing compared to my changes inside.
When I returned to Penn in 2004, I was too scared to tell anyone where I had been for the past semester. Though I had significantly recovered, memories of being treated as an anorexic girl had scarred me too deeply. One comment during high school from a faculty member particularly stuck with me: "Mana, when people look at you, they don't see the yearbook editor or the captain of the basketball team. They see you as an anorexic girl."
Those hurtful words still occasionally haunt me to this day.
Returning to Penn, I was petrified to think that my passions could again be overshadowed by an identity of "the anorexic girl," so I silenced my past for three years. However, keeping my past locked up was equally as painful as being "the anorexic girl." Inside, I was so proud of who I had become, but people couldn't understand me without knowing my past. Always hiding, I was never living in full confidence.
Ever since I began my recovery, I believed I would someday fight the cruel stigma against eating disorders and mental illnesses. Ironically, that very stigma silenced me for years. I was terrified of being associated with the labels of anorexia: "unhealthily trying to lose weight," "being too skinny," as if I were a felon intentionally committing these crimes.
Today, I could not be more proud of what I have gone through and how I live my life everyday. I live with this strength and gratitude for life, because I have struggled and have overcome so much. For anyone, life always has its ups and downs, and both are valuable experiences. Likewise, recovery is not always about getting better, but about taking steps forward and backward and embracing both directions.
In the past four years, I have experienced falling to the deepest pit, but the distance I have risen exceeds the distance that I fell. I now possess a powerful confidence in knowing that I can rise after any fall.
I used to think that "after I recover" I would stop hiding and take action to make a difference. But I have realized that there is no need to wait until after recovery. Why should the feeling of success be limited to the recovered? Struggling and fighting is a courageous process, and recovery should be experienced with pride and empowerment, not pain and shame.
While it is encouraging to hear and read about recovered individuals, I want to share my experiences while recovering, rather than being so focused on a "recovered" future.
Every day I'm recovering. Whether that be from stress, insecurity or pressure - I embrace it all, and that's what gives me hope.
