to my fifteen-year-old self - a letter by Ellie Jeans for eating disorder awareness week

[image description: a woman with pink skin and black hair gazes at herself in the mirror with a straight expression]

Graphic by Alex Skyrme.

To my fifteen-year-old self, 

One day you will be well enough to be this lucid.  

You’ve wrestled tirelessly with the darkest parts of yourself and until now you’ve always seemed to lose. These dim clandestine affairs of skin and cold porcelain are the consolation prize. You know well enough, I know, this voluntary self-defeat is making you infinitely worse. But getting better feels redundant. It’s not just the Re:stacks fuelled teenage nihilism that’s making you write shit poems about killing yourself. You’re really unwell.  

Girls you know are starting to get morning-after pills from Boots while you’re there furtively buying industrial strength laxatives after school. The woman at the till doesn’t ask why you’re there every week but the same look registers on her face each time. Her eyes scan across your school uniform as if it explains something.  She makes you feel weird, and at fifteen, that’s a loaded word. I’m really sorry she made you feel like that, and I’m sorry she didn’t ask if you were okay.  

I’m sorry you didn’t feel like you could tell anyone, and I’m sorry that you think that, if you did, no one would give a shit.  I’m sorry that you haven’t had a period in like a year and you still ask people at school for tampons once a month as if they’re keeping tabs (you’ve never even felt adult enough to put one in.) I’m sorry that you run the shower so your mum can’t hear you throwing up.  I’m sorry you can’t bring yourself to masturbate, let alone picture having sex, because you are so terrified of your own fragile scaffolding. I’m sorry you are so acclimatised to feeling like you’re underwater that you’ve forgotten there’s air above the surface. And most of all I’m sorry your bulimia lies to you, and you believe it. It likes you best when you’re vulnerable, when you’re on your knees. You think you might want to die soon, but you don’t really know what that means. 

I want you to know that one day next year it’s going to get too much and that that will be a good thing, because sometimes things have to get even worse to get better. You’re going to tell a professional everything, and she will listen to you. And after a while, for the first time in years, you are going to come up for air. The cold air will burn and sting your skin and it will be tiring to resist the urge to limply slip back down. But you won’t, and the help you are getting is going to save your life. Your illness will get angry with you for the exposure, and ignoring that anger will be the hardest thing you ever do. It’ll make you angry too. You’ll be angry at the world for a while, but that’s okay. Your therapist tells you you’ll have to tell your mum everything, and when you do, she will cry.  

You’ll trial-and-error some medication that makes the room spin and your stomach flip, but you’ll find the right one eventually. You’ll have to journal your feelings for your therapist every week. At first it will make you cringe, but it will get easier. And gradually, as you navigate your way steadfast against the currents, things will start to change. Your periods will come back. You will fall in love for the first time, and out of love and in love again, and you’ll have some bad sex, some mediocre sex and some good sex, and most importantly you’ll learn to give yourself pleasure (a lot).  You’ll be able to sit in front of plates of food and its ejection won’t even cross your mind. You will eat, you will be bloated, and that will, one day, as hard as this might be to believe, be a good feeling.  

In four summers time, you’ll be on holiday with some friends from university. I know that feels a lifetime away. You’ll have three beers with lunch. Evidence of the lunch will protrude a little through the translucent white swimsuit and you actually won’t mind. You will take yourself off alone for a second and stand by the sea, grounding your feet in the water. As you look at the heads bobbing above and below its undulating surface, and you hear your friends in the distance, you will think how easily this could’ve all happened without you. In some ways you are acutely aware of your own insignificance, but at the same time, you have never felt your own presence so strongly. And it is in that very moment you will realise how far you’ve come, and (this will make you cringe) you will begin to cry. All those micro-victories from recovery, and all the failures in-between, suddenly feel completely worth the wait. For the first time ever, you will feel proud of yourself, and you should be.  

Until then, hang on in there. It gets better.  

Love, 

Twenty-one-year-old you. 

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Ellie Jeans is a fourth year History of Art student at the University of Edinburgh. She is committed to the de-stigmatisation of mental illness, and is the founder of mentalhealthedinburgh, where you can find a Google Doc of free resources accessible during lockdown.