Dear Blog Readers,
Men with eating disorders are underrepresented in our community, in research, and in the public conversation about what these illnesses actually look like. That invisibility has a cost. It makes it harder to recognize, harder to name, and much harder to ask for help.
David’s story is not unusual, even if it has rarely been told. He is 45. He has a career, a routine, a life that looks fine from the outside. And he has been fighting something privately for a very long time.
This piece is raw and present-tense because that is where David still is. Not at the end of his story. Just at the beginning of a different part of it.
If this resonates with you, or with someone you know, we are here.
Be kind to yourself and remember to nourish your body, mind, and that place inside you that makes you who you are.
Your blog moderator,
Kira
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The Fine
by David L.
Everyone thinks I’m fine.
I say it myself, probably fifteen times a day. Fine. Good. Busy, you know how it is. I say it to my sister when she calls on Sundays. I say it to the guys at work when we grab coffee I don’t drink. I say it to my doctor, who nods and types something and doesn’t push, because I present well. I’ve always presented well. That’s the thing nobody tells you. You can be very good at looking like a person who has it together while something else entirely is happening inside your body and your head, every single day.
I am 45 years old. I have been doing this since I was 19.
I don’t know what to call it, even now. I’ve never used a word for it out loud. I know the words. I’ve googled them at 2 a.m. more times than I can count, read the lists of signs, closed the tab, told myself it didn’t apply. That it was control. Discipline. That I was just particular about things. That everyone has their routines.
My routine is this: I wake up and the first thing I feel is a kind of inventory. A checking. Not conscious exactly, more like weather. I move through the morning with it running underneath everything. At work I am good at my job. I sit in meetings and contribute and no one knows that part of my brain is always somewhere else, doing math that has nothing to do with the agenda. I eat what I have decided I am allowed to eat. Sometimes that changes without warning, the rules shifting overnight, and I wake up to a new set without having agreed to it.
I’ve cancelled plans because of it. Not often enough that anyone’s noticed a pattern, just often enough that I know. A birthday dinner. A work trip. A first date, years ago now, a woman I actually liked, and I stood outside the restaurant for ten minutes and then texted her something about a work emergency and went home and sat in my kitchen alone. I told myself I’d reschedule.
I didn’t.
The loneliness is the part I wasn’t prepared for. Not the hunger, not the rituals, not even the exhaustion of managing it while pretending it doesn’t exist. The loneliness. The specific feeling of sitting across from someone who loves you and knowing there is an entire room inside you that they have never been in and probably never will be.
My sister asked me last month if I was okay. Not the usual way. She stopped, looked at me, and asked like she actually wanted to know. I said fine. She didn’t look convinced. I changed the subject.
That night I sat with my laptop open for a long time. I don’t know what I was looking for exactly. Proof, maybe. That this was real. That I wasn’t being dramatic. That 45 wasn’t too late to admit that something had been wrong for 26 years.
I found Sheena’s Place.
I read the whole website. I read it twice. I read that they have groups, that men come, that you don’t have to have a diagnosis or hit some kind of bottom first. I read it and felt something loosen slightly, the way a knot shifts before it actually comes undone.
I haven’t called yet.
But I have the tab open. I’ve had it open for eleven days. That feels like something.
Maybe it is.