Now or Never

walls. It had a bunch of charts on the wall, a patient bed, and a scale. A fucking scale the size of my body. What the hell are they trying to do to me here?
    Before I got to the center I weighed myself over 30 times a day. On my trip to see my dad I packed my scale in my suitcase, it was more important to me than pants.
    There it was, my worst fear staring me in the face…and I assume this whole weighing thing was going to be happening daily. But I was in luck! The nurse said I could do something called blind weights. I could step on the scale backwards and have them just write down my weight for my nutritionist (my what?) so I didn’t have to see it. Then things got really weird when the nurse asked me to take my gown off.
    “You have me drugged up, half naked and freezing my ass off and now you want me to disrobe?”
    I could tell the nurse was trying to keep her cool with me, or she was just going through the motions of dealing with another hard ass patient. “Says here you are on the self-harm track, and these are what we call body checks. For now you will get them daily, but we hope to cut that back the further along you get in your recovery. Now please remove your gown I have 20 other girls to see before breakfast starts, you don’t want a non-compliance do you?”
    “Yeah maybe I fucking do want whatever the hell that is because I think I have had all I can take this morning without you body checking me.”
    The nurse just put my file down and looked me in the eyes and said, “Sweetie if I give you a non-compliance you are going to have to go to two extra groups this week and eat at two extra snack times.”
    My gown came off before she could finish her couple of words.
    She saw the cuts on my arms and legs, and jotted them down in my file. I felt like a science project.
    That non-compliance threat scared me straight, at least enough to get me to speak at the processing group after dinner tonight.
    I told them my OCD treatment story…I think I get out of things, or make myself feel more comfortable by putting humor into things.
    My mother is anorexic, and refused to believe I ever had an eating disorder. She did however blame my obsessive compulsive disorder for everything food related. She had me go see a specialist when I was 15 who did biofeedback therapy. It was a bunch of crap, and I used humor a lot in those sessions. So anyway I told them one of my stories from that hell.
    When it was my turn to speak at processing, I wanted to say “pass” again so badly, but I also had that stupid non-compliance threat in the back of my head so I spoke up.
    I shifted uncomfortably in my chair holding on tightly to my ribbon, “Um hi…my name is Willow and I’m new here. I don’t like speaking in front of big groups, especially about personal shit, but I guess I have to try.”
    This time there was no laughter to try to comfort me, only silence and about 12 very sad and sick looking girls looking at me or looking at their hands in their laps. The group leader eventually spoke up after we heard the crickets chirping from the silence, “Willow tell us something about what got you to this point in your life.”
    “Uh ok…well I guess I should have been here a lot sooner. My mom has an eating disorder and never really owned up to it to this day. So when I started acting ‘weird’ with food my mom decided to put me on OCD meds and take me on an hour drive once a week to an OCD resource center. I did a lot of biofeedback therapy, but it was mostly just me holding hot dogs for an hour and then going home.”
    Silence.
    “They thought that it was OCD because I didn’t want to touch fatty foods because I thought they would go through my skin into my blood stream and make me fat. We started out having sessions where I would hold a piece of chocolate in my hand, but that ended up in a melted anxiety attack. So we switched to hot dogs for the remainder of our sessions.”
    Laughter came from all over the room. This time, it did make me feel a little bit better.
    Maybe we choose to stay in a constant state of ignorance as a protective instinct — maybe I was just in denial. I just don’t get how you can be completely in love with someone one day, and then all of a sudden you just aren’t. I will never forget that day, the day where I became numb.
    How can you be basically living with someone for almost two years, and decide to just become this different person? I will never forget that day, the day where I