The Cali Trip

"What are you most afraid of?"

My therapist asked me this as I sat in her bright spacious office, on her soft beige couch, with succulents and cute quotes and paintings hung around the walls. I looked outside her little window where the light filled her room and I thought about her question. What is the one thing I am most afraid of...

As I continued to stare out of the little window, not knowing what to say, she decides to tell me how perfect practice this trip is going to be for me. She explains that this trip will be a chance for me to step outside of my comfort zone and take every triggering situation to my eating disorder head on. California is an extremely triggering place for people with eating disorders, hence why there's at least 20 different eating disorder facilities in just the west coast of California. My therapist was right though. I took on so many different challenges on this trip, that once I returned, I felt like I could do anything. There are some people who believe that in order to teach someone how to swim, you have to throw them into the deep end and let them figure it out on their own. This means they are going to struggle though...a lot. This means that they are probably going to need a little assistance. Taking this trip to California was basically throwing myself into the deep end. I struggled at first, without a doubt, and even came across some times where I felt like I was barely keeping myself above water. Then there were times where I felt like I was treading the water. I was breathing in the air while the water sloshed and surrounded me. I felt like a 20 year old college girl, spending a week in California, and totally living life. I was rocking it, and I don’t feel bad for that. I wont feel bad for the food I ate, or the late night desserts my friends and I had on the beach, or the types of clothes I wore that showed more of my body than I would usually allow (side note: Los Angeles was having a huge heat wave during that time I was there, so summer clothes were a must).

A few things I want to share with you about this trip are things that I feel comfortable sharing and are things that I believe will help others who might be going on a trip this summer and feel the pressure their eating disorder might be putting on them about their vacation. In no way do these experiences define my trip as a whole or guarantee the same thing to happen for someone else just because it happened for me. Everyone is different and everyone's recovery is even more different.

So..

Picture this. Five friends, riding in a 2009 Nissan Armada, exhausted, stiff, and eager to get out of the car, cross the state border of California and immediately head to an in-n-out. If you don't know, in-n-out is a very famous burger fast food stop in a lot of high populated states. It was really late at night and we had eaten pizza a few hours before at our stop in Flagstaff, but my friends were hungry again and eager to get some food. Everyone decided to order something except for me. Now, you're probably thinking, well that's not good, you're listening to your eating disorder, you should have ordered something. But in fact, I was legitimately and honestly and completely listening to my body and what it was telling me. I was tired. It was probably 2 or 3 in the morning and I knew, I could tell, that if I ate anything at that moment, especially a huge burger with fries, I would be sick all day. I knew what my body needed, and at that moment, it wasn't food. However, on the way back from California, I made everyone stop at an in-n-out regardless if they wanted to or not, because I still hadn't gotten the chance to try the infamous in-n-out burger and I wasn't going to leave Cali until I did. Just an FYI...best burger I ever had.

Now, we made it to California and got everything checked in to our hotel. By the time we got to our hotel and through the awful LA traffic, it was about 5 pm, and everyone was completely exhausted. We all slept for about 3 hours and then decided to go eat dinner. We decided to go to Bubba Gump Shrimp & Co. Ordering our food took a while, but once it finally came, everything was a mess. My best friend didn't get what she ordered at all, our drinks weren't delivered yet (besides water), and I was the only one who didn't have silverware. So we called over our waiter saying we needed our drinks and I needed silverware to eat the food sitting right in front of me. I mean, duh! We were all really really hungry from driving all day and trying to get to our hotel and then sleeping for hours, so it made sense why my friends didn't bother to wait to eat until I got my silverware. So I sat there for about 20 minutes, waiting for our waitress to bring me silverware...AND our drinks! My anxiety and my eating disorder started to really hype up. I sat there watching my friends eat, waiting and watching. This whole situation was completely out of my control but the entire situation just reminded me so much of my past life and what I would normally do on nights out with friends, which is...watch them eat. However, when our waitress finally brought my silverware with our drinks, I devoured that salmon like it was still alive. I don't really have a reason to why I felt the need to share this or why it stood out to me from our trip, other than it was a situation that I handled with recovery, rather than my eating disorder, and that felt pretty good.

Okay, now for the heavy stuff. This is around the time where I'm in the deep end of the swimming pool, really struggling to keep afloat...Beach day. Something I want to acknowledge about my stay here was that I never felt judged or weird around my friends in our hotel. We all shared one big suite room with two beds and one bathroom. Now normally I would not be very comfortable with this, sharing a bathroom with three other guys, but it was probably the very least of my worries. When going on vacation with friends, I think it is so important to make sure you're comfortable with the friends you are going with. So, it's beach day and I knew this was going to be one of the harder days for me out of the week in Cali, and I was right, but not completely. My best friend and I wanted to take some cute beach pictures, so one of our guy friends offered to take them for us. We took a bazillion pictures and I was so excited to look at them...until I did. I hated most of them. Standing next to my best friend, I hated my body and I hated my self for taking the pictures.

"What are you most afraid of?"

My therapist's words echoed in my head and I knew this was it. This was the moment of the trip when I realized that the one thing I was most afraid of...was me. Now I know that sounds silly, why would I be afraid of myself? Well, let me give as simple of an explanation for this as I can. Ever since I was diagnosed with anorexia, I started to notice when "me" wasn't me. There was a part of me that was never truly the Caitie that everyone knew. It was ED. So when I say it's me I'm most afraid of, it's the ED part of me, the evil, cruel, and deceiving part of me that terrified the true me and the me that has fought so hard to overpower the false me.

I saw those pictures, and fake me shown through. I became completely aware of my body and everyone else around me. I compared more, I hated more, I self-deprecated more, and I really started to struggle the more and more I thought about those pictures. If I am being honest, it took me most of the day to finally get over those pictures and shut fake me up. The majority of people in this century who take pictures of themselves, don't love every single one, and if you do, leave a little comment down below and tell me your secret. But we have all been there. Not only do we take countless selfies and only end up picking one we actually like, we sometimes don't even do anything with it. I was thinking about this as I lay in our hotel room after a long day at the beach, scrolling through our pictures and I realized there were pictures I did in fact like. I ended up posting more than just one on my Instagram and got a lot of positive feedback.

The moral of this, is to not obsess over pictures or pictures of yourself. We all have different bodies of all different shapes and sizes. There is no point in letting one or a few or several "bad" pictures ruin your day or change the way you take care of yourself. It is also okay to sometimes not like a few pictures you've taken. We have all been there. However, I think it is so important to keep in mind while you (and I) dislike a certain picture, that we are all beautiful human beings. We all have beautiful bodies with beautiful faces and we should not be giving them any hate. Again, I am constantly having to remind myself of this as I too continue to struggle with self image.

So, to reiterate, these short stories and experiences did not make up my entire trip as a whole. I had plenty other challenging, fun, and frustrating times during my week in Cali. These are just a few that I felt like sharing and that stood out to me. I hope you or anyone reading this can benefit from my experience, or realize through my challenges that you are not alone, whether you're dealing with an eating disorder or not, being comfortable in our own skin is a long hard battle, and no one gets there overnight. It takes work, and struggle, and discomfort. It requires risk and the possibility of being thrown into a deep end of a pool that you never thought you'd be thrown into. Just keep swimming, and someday you'll get to where you want to be.

Thank you for reading. You are appreciated, you are loved, you are enough! Have a good day!