I was around 11 years old when I found out I had scoliosis. Before the diagnosis, I had complained of back pain, among other things — and what followed was a parade of doctors, specialists, x-rays, and the kind man who made all three of my back brace molds, whose humor got me through every uncomfortable session.
When you have a chronic health condition at any age, you learn a lot about what’s wrong with your body. Looking at x-rays, being told all the things that aren’t working right, that does something to a person. Children tend to blame themselves for things that go wrong. And while that experience also built real resilience, self-advocacy, and emotional intelligence in me, there was a cost.
The body stops being just the thing you live in and becomes something you manage, monitor, report on. It becomes an object of scrutiny — yours first, and then everyone else’s.
When you’ve spent years learning to be suspicious of what your body does, any new change doesn’t read as normal. It reads as one more thing to manage. More evidence of a body that won’t behave.
I’ve never spoken openly about my struggle with an eating disorder. My earliest memories of food restriction were around age 11, coincidentally when the scoliosis was diagnosed and I first became acutely aware that my body looked “wrong.” Puberty arrived on top of all of that: more changes, unsolicited, to a body I was already trying to control.
Eating disorders are not, at their core, about food. They are about control. And when your relationship with your body has already become adversarial, when it has been a source of pain and unwanted attention, when you have been poked and prodded and examined, the logic of trying to control it yourself is almost inevitable. I turned to food restriction and overexercise because I was terrified of what my body might do next. Of losing control of it again.
There is a logic to it. A disordered logic, a harmful one, but a logic. The body is the problem. You will fix it. You will make it smaller, quieter, more manageable. You will stop it from surprising you.
This is what I want people to understand, especially those trying to support someone they love: it isn’t vanity. It isn’t a phase. It’s a coping strategy that made sense once, in a context that was genuinely hard, and then kept running long past its usefulness. Chronic illness, injury, any experience that puts your body outside your control — these create conditions where disordered coping can take root. Not because something is broken in the person, but because the mind is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: looking for safety.
Healing wasn’t linear, and it wasn’t a revelation. There was no single moment where everything clicked. What it looked like, mostly, was slowly learning to be less at war — therapy, time, and eventually enough distance from the acute years that the hypervigilance I’d carried since childhood started to loosen. That vigilance had protected me once. Eventually I got to let it rest.
What I’d want someone who loves a person going through this to understand: the body stuff is almost never really about the body. You can’t logic someone out of it. But you can refuse to treat their body as a problem in your presence. You can model, quietly and consistently, that bodies are just bodies — not measures of anything, not projects to be fixed. That, more than almost anything else, is what helped.