The View From Where I Stand

Joelle Deyo holds a degree in Fine Arts from Cal Poly, Pomona and is an artist residing in Glendora, California.

Joelle knows the pain of marital infidelity, betrayal and divorce, and she is a survivor of addiction, childhood sexual abuse, and Anorexia.

She brings a wealth of experience to Wings Like Eagles, and is willing to be transparent and real so that our readers who have traveled similar paths will have someone with whom they can relate.

She is an advocate for the recovery process, and is a firm believer that there is hope, and a fulfilling life on the other side of Crisis.

It is Joelle's hope is that her experiences, past and present, will bring perspective and encouragement to those who are in the middle of their own life battles and who have been stuck in the pit, just like her.

Today marks my one-year anniversary as a recovering Anorexic. I have gone one full year without starving, purging, abusing substances, or killing myself at the track to drop weight. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, just one short year, but believe me, it’s a huge thing.

I struggled with disordered eating and a skewed image of my body for a good 15 years – nearly half of my life. But, I did not know, or would not admit, that I was in a dance with death until about four years ago, when I began to purge after nearly every meal. I was addicted to the act – it gave me a rush of endorphins and calmed the intrusive feelings of anxiety and self-loathing that plagued me daily.

I hated my body. It always seemed unclean to me. Having suffered at the hands of a sexual predator when I was a child, I grew into a young woman who did not have a healthy picture of herself and had no true sense of self-ownership.

My right to control what was done to my body was taken from me long before I ever understood anything about human sexuality or consent. I was not an adult. I did not consent. I just survived and locked away the pain. What I lived through was shockingly traumatic and left me with very deep wounds that eventually became infected.

Without an emotional vocabulary for dealing with the events that left me so damaged inside, I grasped at a sense of control in the only way I could think of. I sought ways to rid myself of anything that made me feel unclean. And food really made me feel unclean. It became Enemy #1.  I wanted to eat – I’m actually sort of a foodie, if you can believe that – but I could not stand having anything in my body that I thought could “hurt” me in some way.

I had periods of time when I tried very hard, but very unsuccessfully to get well. I wanted to do it all on my own, but without any accountability or skills for managing my compulsions, my efforts turned into frustrations, which turned right back into managing my body through extreme measures. I felt proud of myself for not eating and kept vigilant watch over the number of calories I consumed in a day. The closer I came to passing out, the better I was doing.

My weight began to plummet rapidly and oh how I rejoiced as I slid smaller and smaller sized jeans and shirts over my 5’9 frame. I ignored the fact that sitting had become painful due to my protruding tailbone and that I was suffering from major vitamin deficiencies.

Eventually my body lost the ability to regulate its temperature. It was not uncommon for me to soak in a bathtub full of hot water for several hours each night just to keep warm. All the while, strangers told me I should go into modeling.

My family told me I was looking painfully thin. I didn’t believe that any of them knew what they were talking about. During this time period I also began to suffer from terrible migraine headaches and seizures.

The first time I seized, I was standing in my closet getting dressed for the day. A funny feeling that I can only half-describe as a mixture of incredible happiness and total devastation flooded my brain. My vision went red and hazy. I felt hot and then numb. I grabbed blindly at the shelf in front of me in order to remain standing because I thought I was dying as hallucinations of laughing, pointing CIA agents danced before my eyes. I don’t know how long I was in that altered state – probably only a couple of minutes – but when I came to, I felt like Rip Van Winkle waking up from a twenty-year nap. My brain had crashed and rebooted without me even realizing what was going on.

I spent most of the next year in and out of the neurologist’s office, submitting to tests, having nodes stuck to my head and lights flashed in my eyes. Things were poked and prodded. I went on meds that turned me into a walking zombie, but killed my appetite, so I stayed on them; happy for the extra pounds they helped me to lose.

Sleep clinic. MRI. More tests and dozens of hours of waiting, staring at the peeling GlaxoSmithKline posters on exam room walls.

Through it all I continued to starve myself and had no clue that there might be any correlation between what was happening to my brain and what I was doing to my body.

My sister acted as my sole interventionist. She had been watching me waste away and could see things that I couldn’t. I have my health and my sanity back in part because she took me aside one night and said, “I feel like you’re killing yourself and that you’re happy about it.” Those words chilled me to my marrow and finally shook me awake.

She was right. She held my hand the day I sat in my MD’s office and admitted, for the first time, to anyone, “I’m anorexic. I’ve been really sick and I need help.” That was how I started on my path toward recovery. I took one terrifying step in the right direction.

So, here I am, one year later and the view from where I stand looks very different now. I am so much healthier than I was, not to mention happier than I’ve ever been in my life. Yes, I still get anxious, and, yes, I still have to fight against persisting urges from time to time. I’m still learning to look at myself in full daylight without scrutinizing little things. But I no longer crave control. I know that I have enough within me to surrender to the moment or stand firm in it as I choose, without losing myself.

I also no longer feel unclean. I have nothing to purge, because I am not filled with the darkness of abuse. I have rejected the notion and the illusion of perfection and want simply what is right and what is good.

The farther I move away from that dysfunctional pit of a life I was trapped in, the more clearly I am able to see what good really looks like – what I really look like – and the more I want to embrace it with everything I have.

A lot can change in a year. Though I am aware that much of the change I have experienced has come through hard work and taking personal responsibility for my choices, the difference that just a little time can make still stuns me. That I am honestly able to say I have made huge strides toward peace with the pain of my past and that I am hopeful about my future is nothing short of a miracle to me.