Love and Healing

I met my now husband at swim practice (though I was not a swimmer, I was a triathlete) in college. He and I bonded over shared future goals, a love for athletics, and a love for sushi. Our story started in the pool when he decided to be my lane buddy. During kick sets he would try and talk to me while kicking just fast enough that all of the water he was splashing up went right in my face.

He ran study hall for both the swim team and the triathlon team in the library. At that time I would tell you I went to study hall because my teammates were there and I wanted to hang out with them, but the real answer was there was a tall, blonde swimmer who I liked a lot. I knew he was there twice a week on the second floor of the library. He started walking me to my car after study tables and texting me to make sure I got home safe.

Our first date didn’t quite go to plan and we ended up at a local pizza parlor rather than at the sushi restaurant he had planned to take me to. I fell in love with him a few months after our first date. I knew that I was in love with him and I wanted him to know everything there was to know about me except for one secret that I had been hiding from so many people. I had an eating disorder.

The day that I decided to tell him was almost an accident. I had been thinking about it, I went to a dinner earlier in the evening and struggled through the meal. It was getting harder to hide now that I was spending so much time with him. He needed to know but I had no idea how I was supposed to tell someone that I was having such a hard time with myself. How could he love me when I couldn’t love me? I texted a friend of mine who knew and asked her what I should do, she texted me back quickly confirming what I had already known. I needed to tell him, he deserved to know. So, in that same library where we had first started talking I blurted out to my boyfriend of a few months that I had an eating disorder, I maybe wanted to recover one day, today was not that day though. He hugged me, told me that it was okay, and asked me how my dinner went.

I don’t know what I was expecting from that conversation but I can tell you it was definitely not that. Over the next several months he continued to ask questions, check in on how I was doing, and fall in love with me.

Several years later we moved in together. My struggle with an eating disorder continued to loom over our relationship. One evening in February he and I were up late talking. He was asking how I was doing, I was telling half truths, and he told me that I needed to get help. My eating disorder had become too invasive. Later, when I asked him if this intrusion was affecting our relationship too much he would say yes but not in the way that I thought. He would tell me that it was intruding on my life and my happiness and that hurt him to see. It hurt him to watch someone he loved hurt so much.

On that evening in February I began Googling names of people who could help me and collecting information from blog posts and instagram grids. This was not the first time I had tried to get help, I had seen counselors and been referred to specialists in the past. I had read blogs and silently stalked instagram posts from those who had already recovered. It hadn’t worked in the past and while I was doing my research this time I didn’t expect for anything to be any different.

I reached out to a therapist and a recovery coach. I began journaling again, challenging fear foods, and attempting to talk back to the voice in my head that would try and tell me that this attempt at recovery was some terrible burden that someone else had put on me. I tried, I wanted it to work out this time, I was feeling better. A few months after this conversation, my life took some turns and I stopped working with my team, I was doing better and thought that this time was different. I was still going through the motions of recovery however without the support I needed my disordered behaviors started to creep back in until I was in the middle of a relapse.

One evening in December of that same year I cried into my journal about what I mess I thought I had made. Everything was back to the way it had been, in fact it might have been worse, and the man who I loved so dearly didn’t know. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been there for me to tell or that he had not stopped checking in with me but that I was hiding and explaining away everything.

I decided that I once again had to tell him that I had an eating disorder, one day I wanted to recover, today was that day. I am not sure that I have ever seen someone as relieved as he was that night. He had been worried about me, I wasn’t hiding it as well as I thought I had been. He loved me and all he wanted was for me to love myself. Not because that was a requirement for our relationship but because he wanted me to be able to see myself the way that he was always able to see me.

I reached back out to my team and asked if there were any openings for me, I wanted to try again. They welcomed me back, we made a plan, this time it stuck.

The thing is, my husband loved me through all of this. He loved me through all of the times I could not love myself. He saw the strength in me even when I couldn’t. He believed that I was worthy of love and recovery even when I was unsure of that. If I could go back to the library when I was questioning how someone else could love me if I couldn’t love myself I would say this:

Dear Cambria,

You do not need to earn love. People will love you no matter what, you are worthy of love. I know that right now it’s hard to love yourself but that doesn’t mean that others can’t see all of the beautiful and magical parts of you that you can not see. You did not play some kind of trick on them to get him to fall in love you, he just does. He can see all of the magic, beauty, and wonder of your existence, even when you can not.

Dear reader,

You do not need to earn love. People will love you no matter what, you are worthy of love. I know that right now it’s hard to love yourself but that doesn’t mean that others can’t see all of the beautiful and magical parts of you that you can not see. You did not play some kind of trick on others to get them to love you, they just do. They can see all of the magic, beauty, and wonder of your existence, even when you can not.

- Cambria