I was thinking today about how when I was younger, I was obsessed with reading the stories of struggling girls in the back of Seventeen magazine, or through the messed-up-teens-help-books my mom got. I didn’t read them to identify; I read them for inspiration. I remember a particular article about a teenage anorexic that made me feel especially competitive. “That girl got down to 80 pounds? I’m only at 89? I have to get skinnier!” I learned new tricks and techniques, and each article or book I read pushed me closer to my disorders- not to recovery. From those articles, I felt like my self injury, eating disorder and drug use were all somehow validated. I had it in my head that the girls in the articles had gotten bad enough to deserve attention and to deserve help. When I had begun to feel like I could no longer carry on doing what I was doing, I resisted asking for help because I wasn’t as bad as the kids in the articles. I didn’t weigh 80 pounds, I weighed 89. I hadn’t gotten stitches, but I couldn’t stop cutting myself. I wasn’t a teenage runaway on heroin and crack, but my drug problem was getting me into trouble at school. I felt like in order to get help, I needed to be worse off.
Fortunately, the people around me thought that I was deserving of help and recovery. At Visions Adolescent Treatment Center, I was able to receive help for all aspects of my disordered thinking. I worked on the core issues that had blossomed into my self injury, eating disorder, and drug abuse. I met other teens like me, and learned not to compare myself to anyone. The most important thing I think I learned there was that everyone’s story is different, and that it doesn’t matter how bad it got for me. The only thing that matters is a desire to get better. Everyone is deserving of a chance at recovery, and I’m so glad I took mine. Click here for adolescent treatment for girls.
