About Me

I am Danielle and I am not an eating disorder. I will not define myself by my eating disorder any longer. It has evaporated any semblance of life over the past six years and it continues to do so even today.

I am a psychology student because I love learning and thinking, but more importantly, because I want to help others who are suffering from an eating disorder. I know what it is to surrender everything to an illness that has become so much a part of you that you can’t imagine ever letting it go. And I know what it is to live a life full of lies and shame and hopelessness to keep it alive. I think a part of me feels like if I can help others, and if I can save them, then in some way, I can go back and save that part of myself; that little girl who didn’t get the help she needed when she needed it the most.

Sometimes when I am alone, I sit and think about things... things I don’t think people consider often, or often enough. Like, when was the last time I hugged someone? When was the last time I picked up the phone and called a friend who had been in my thoughts? When was the last time I told someone how much they meant to me? Why do we hesitate to do these things? You never know when a simple gesture, like a hug or a phone call, will pull someone back from the edge.

I am a private person. I am so private, yet so extroverted that sometimes I feel as if there are two separate people living inside of me. One part of me is a reserved, quiet girl who just wants to recede into an envelope of reflection and deep thought. She wants to read, write, sing and draw. She wants to think. She wants to question. She has an appetite for the underlying layers, the strata of life that she could curl up and lay in them forever and not need anything else. The other girl is her antithesis: she is loud, personable and energetic. She wants to run and dance and play. She wants to live out her dreams past her threshold of experience. She can’t just exist vicariously through her tangled thoughts.

Recovery has led me to a window into self-awareness that looks out at a quiet corner of the earth. There is a terrace nestled in the trees as they stretch their arms over a nameless body of water. I am tucked away somewhere inside the mountains that wrap around me, holding up this house I don’t recognize. If I want to touch all the beauty in the world around me, I can just release the latch and open my window. But when the wind blows, I know it won’t always bring me love and light; sometimes it will carry sorrow and darkness. Nothing lasts forever and I don’t want to live from behind the glass because I am afraid to open myself to the world.