The Consequences Of An Abusive Voice

With a heartbeat pounding against your ribs and hot tears streaming down your cheeks, it is hard to focus on anything but an abusive voice you try to hide from. Victims of these voices cannot escape the abuse for years on end and often are forced to face a variety of physical, social, and emotional consequences decades after their freedom. After my liberation, anorexia nervosa gave me all of these consequences, but I made it my responsibility to overcome these obstacles in order to reach the life that I deserved to live, no matter what the abusive voice said I could do.
At the time of my diagnosis, my physician had no option but to place me in strict bedrest at our local hospital until my weight rose, which proved to be more painful than it

sounded. With my abuser still living with us, breakfasts in bed became bitter nightmares, and family dinners only infuriated my illness. Additionally, I had spent my life serving as a humanitarian and a scholar student, so the people I had known before my eating disorder began dropping off of the map. Forced to stay alone in bed and in my head, I struggled with flashbacks of abuse and obsessions over my protruding bones. It was in one of these moments that I became aware of my reality. Since my abuse had ended, I began abusing myself, and the time had come to end my insanity. In light of this revelation, I fought fatigue and pain to scarf down every meal, reach out to volunteer centers, and stay after classes to exceed in school once again.
Back in my first days of bedrest, my physician told me “you will be fighting a war in your mind for the rest of your life, so at any moment you think you won’t have to leap over a hurdle, another mountain will be put in your way.” Every day since my experience in the hospital, I have been working through every moment of exhaustion, anxiety, and traumatic stress to become the altruist that I once was and the college student I always planned on being. I will face these same issues in the future as well, but as long as I focus on what aspects of life are worth it then everything will be okay.