The Torture That Took Me 26 Years to Heal From

The stories you tell yourself matter and they can be transformed.

I’ve shared my life story many times. You may have heard about the mental illness, or the near-miss with cancer, or the failed businesses, or the unemployment, or the multiple breakups.

I’ve been lying to you though.

I’ve never shared the full story without the convenient edits. It’s time I do this even though it’s raw, confronting, and going to hurt.

Here is my life told through the mini-stories I used to tell myself. See if a few of them ring true for you.

“I have an eating disorder.”

For most of my life, I suffered from an eating disorder. Once I turned twenty, things got really bad. I threw up in the bathroom of my 21st birthday dinner for no reason at all. My girlfriend dumped me shortly after because she couldn’t work out why I was always sick around mealtime.

I was too scared to tell her. How do you communicate that every time you go to eat you feel sick, but when you eat alone you feel fine? I had no idea how to explain it so I didn’t tell anybody. I hid the truth and let it ruin friendships, family, my life, romantic relationships, and even my career.

Every year when my company had a Christmas dinner, I had to force myself to be absent. Saying, “Yeah eating with people makes me feel sick,” sounded way too dumb to explain to people I barely knew. (I barely knew my work colleagues because I stayed away from them and couldn’t eat in the lunchroom with them. They just thought I was weird.)

Things started to reach a boiling point when I told my boss, at the time, that I was missing our team’s “Amazing Race” day. The reason for not attending was the dinner at the end. He wouldn’t take no for an answer though. He told me he wouldn’t let me be absent and pushed me to breaking point. So, I finally told the first person in my life what was going on.

I told him I probably had an eating disorder. Unlike the stories I told myself, he didn’t laugh. He understood and we set up a plan. Essentially, I would attend the Amazing Race, and then if I felt up to it, I could attend the dinner and leave at any time.

That get-out clause saved my life.

The compassion he showed me on that day still makes me emotional.

The day came around fast. The Amazing Race was heaps of fun. The last activity we had to complete was to make a piece of art using anything we could find in the local park we ended the race at. I can’t draw or do arts and craft so I felt a little stuck. Over my right shoulder was a homeless man who was clearly having a rough day. Rather than make something out of sticks or grass, I went over and sat next to the man. My work colleagues thought I was nuts but my boss had a proud look in his eye.

I started talking to him and asking him about his day. He told me how he was a heroin addict and I just listened without feeling the need to interrupt him and give him some pointless self-help advice I read in a book he’d probably never read.

The conversation made him so happy because it became apparent that he stuck needles in his arm because he was lonely.

Everybody ignored him and he had no friends, so he thought injecting heroin could give his life’s story some significance. After the conversation ended, I returned back to the group and told them what had happened. People listened to me retell his story with absolute fascination. One guy even called me brave for having the guts to approach a stranger and ignore the arts and craft brief.

My boss just said one thing that changed my life: “Tim was doing his version of arts and craft and it’s just as beautiful.”

Stories and human connections have an incredible power to change your life. This day in the park led me to become a writer and finally get help with my eating problem.

The Dinner

Then came the dinner. I built up the courage to arrive at the dinner on time. I prepared myself for the worst and had an exit plan ready to go. I ordered the safest dishes on the menu that were unlikely to make me feel sick.

The entree arrived. I began to eat. Nothing.

The main course came. I began to eat. Nothing.

The dessert came. Still nothing. It was time to celebrate and enjoy a meal with other people for the first time in as long as I could remember.

I’m not sure whether it was the homeless man in the park or having the courage to tell my boss about my lifelong eating disorder. Something changed in me that day. Having the courage to finally face my demons killed my eating disorder story.

“I am skinny which means I am ugly.”

An eating disorder and a skinny body shape go hand in hand. I was deathly skinny for many years and it made me think I was ugly.

You could see my rib cage which is why I never dared go to the beach or swimming pool with my top off. If it was an absolute must to attend, then I’d wear one of those wetsuit material t-shirts (known as a rashy in Australia).

Hiding your skinniness only makes you feel more skinny.

All the movies I loved to watch showed perfect Hollywood actors with six-packs and chiseled arms. The false reality eventually led me to think that was normal.

Calling myself skinny was yet another form of torture I put myself through.

“I can’t play any sport which means I am weak.”

This torture of not being able to eat and feeling stressed about it led to all sorts of strange diets and attempted body hacks.

In my early 20’s I started training in the gym. I could barely lift the smallest dumbbells on offer. The goal was to get buff and attend the gym. Not much happened and I gave up. In my mid-20’s I went back to the gym with a new lease on life. I was still fighting an undiagnosed eating disorder and so I thought the gym was going to be the answer.

I nervously picked up the phone one evening and rang the number of the personal trainer who ran sessions at the gym I was training at. The first question he asked was this: “What’s your goal for training?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was my goal to get rid of my skinniness and perhaps not have to deal with feeling sick while trying to eat. Instead, I gave a generic answer: “I’m just seeking general fitness and a healthier lifestyle.” What bullshit. That was a lie.

I rolled up to the gym on the first Sunday after our call. I was the skinniest dude in the gym. He asked me to do a few exercises and I really struggled physically. He didn’t say it but I could tell he didn’t think this gym lifestyle would last very long. Still, he was getting paid so what did he care.

I trained with him three days a week. Before every session, I would follow his instructions and try to eat a huge meal at work beforehand. My stomach would get so full that I’d roll up at the gym feeling bloated. As soon as we started training, I’d feel like vomiting for the entire session. Many times I would have to take a break after a set and excuse myself to vomit.

Then I’d come back and lift weights like nothing was wrong. Part of the deal when I signed up to train with him was that I had to follow his meal plan. It involved eating six meals a day to bulk up and rid myself of the skinniness disease. I followed his diet to a tee. Within a month I started putting on weight. At work, I’d have to eat before meetings and while on the phone. At home, I’d eat non-stop while in bed and do the best I could to pack in the calories. “Peanut butter on everything” was my motto.

While at a nightclub I’d have a pocket full of assorted nuts with me to keep the weight piling on. One time I even remember having my pockets checked by a security guard before walking into the nightclub and having him think my clear plastic bag of nuts contained drugs. In a way, the nuts were my drug.

The first time on the scales was daunting. Weighing myself once a week with my trainer was a mandatory requirement. It was a stark contrast as he was one of the muscliest guys in the gym and looked like his uncle was Arnold Schwarzenegger. The veins on his arm popped out and his posture was perfect. He too would eat through our training sessions, his friend’s weddings, and even the birth of his first child. He took a huge cooler bag everywhere he went, full of chicken and vegetables.

I would stand on the scales as a skinny guy trying to get buff and feel “enough” again. He would stand next to me at nearly four times the size and move the metal plates that would determine my weight for the week.

Thanks to the diet, I was packing on about 1 KG a week. After six months, I remember my trainer admitting that he thought I’d give up. One of the greatest compliments he ever gave me was this: “You may not be the muscliest client I have but your determination is incredible.”

He was referring to the fact I trained through the flu, on 40+ degrees celsius days, after a loved one died, and even with a hangover. No matter how I was feeling, I’d attend the gym and do a workout with him. Training and gaining weight felt like life or death to me (and it was).

By the end of the first 12 months, I went from 60 KG to over 100 KG.

People didn’t recognize me. I could finally wear the tight t-shirts that made my newly minted biceps pop out. Even with the gym results starting to pay off, it all came crashing down.

I had to leave a business I loved and my mental health fell off a cliff along with my finances. I was forced to cancel my training sessions because of the money side and everything was on fire around me.

Despite all the training, my eating disorder and mental illness remained. All the gym did was change my body but not how I thought of it or the demons that caused my mind to turn every situation into a struggle for survival.

Within months, all the gym gains were lost and the muscles evaporated into thin air. I was back to being the same skinny person. But a slight shift had occurred in my thinking which went unnoticed.

“I am tired.”

For as long as I can remember, I was a tired, sick little boy.

When I woke up, I told myself I was tired. When I made a mistake, I blamed it all on being tired. During those extreme gym days, I was even more tired from the huge amount of carbs I was consuming.

Always feeling tired was my norm. This meant if something went wrong I was reacting from a place of tiredness. This had horrendous results. My next-door neighbor once chased me home with a baseball bat after I swore at him for revving his Harley Davidson outside my house. I ended up having to call the cops because he literally wanted to kill me and probably would have.

Feeling tired had more to do with how pointless my life seemed than the amount of sleep I was getting. I’d generally sleep around 9–10 hours and still wake up tired. Sometimes it was the sugar and other times it was the hangover from the night before. There were so many ways to numb the pain.

“I am sick.”

I always told myself I was sick. Family were so used to me being sick that they would constantly ask me, “Are you alright, Timothy?”

I tried every diet. I had every medical test. I experimented with many different types of exercise. I watched endless documentaries. Nothing worked because I didn’t work. I was broken.

The one area I never looked at was my mental health. I always assumed a sore stomach was the result of what I ate, or an upset tummy, or a mystery illness — not as a result of what I thought.

After going down the rabbit hole of mental illness, it became clear that all my health problems were caused by a sick mind. I was anxious, stressed, and needed a band-aid for my brain. I started seeking the help of a psychologist. On the first appointment I rolled up with an action plan (apparently no patient had done that before, according to the Shrink).

He made me look at these weird cards, listen to strange music, and draw pictures. The whole thing was weird so I fired him after five appointments. A few weeks later I bumped into him at the supermarket and we both pretended not to know each other (patient privilege, I guess).

Then I got an upgrade. I found the most expensive psychologist there was and started seeing him. He looked at my action plan too and was somewhat surprised. Using fancy self-help speak, I had written up a comfort zone challenge, although I had no idea at the time that’s what it was.

Each week involved me doing one of these challenges. They were things like ride an elevator up 35 floors, go on a plane or do a job interview. They were all things that scared the crap out of me.

At the end of our time together he said something strange: “You already have all the answers and now all you need to do is implement them.” It was a lot of money to spend to hear that. Essentially what he was saying is that I’d already found the answer to my mental illness. I’d realized my anxious thoughts, seen the false stories I was telling myself, and built confidence again through the various comfort zone challenges.

I was never the same again after those sessions. I finally believed in myself for the first time in my entire life.

“Everybody hates me.”

Imagine walking to work each day and thinking everybody hates you. Imagine going home at night and believing your family thinks you’re stupid.

Imagine catching up with friends and thinking they were going to divorce you any minute now. That was my life. I tortured myself in my own head trying to guess what other people thought about me.

It turned out nobody hated me; I hated myself.

Learning to be kind to myself wasn’t some soft act of compassion fuelled by a picture-quote. It was learning to live with myself, then accept myself, then care for myself.

Caring for myself took the form of walks, reading books, relaxing more often, eating plant-based food, exercising for health (not muscle), showing an interest in the lives of others, and finding ways to be helpful through creative expressions such as writing.

Over the space of a few years, I slowly began to tolerate myself. I became my own biggest fan and cheered myself along, even against the backdrop of online trolls and people at work who wanted to see me fail, badly.

Final Thought

I haven’t been this raw ever. This is the story of what it took to overcome my fears and finally start living instead of existing.

Writing this made me feel sick and took me through many waves of emotion that I haven’t felt for a long time. It had to be said and I hope it helps you.

No matter what your life story is, you can change it and turn it into a tale of triumph. Your sad story ends when you admit the raw, confronting truth with yourself and then one other person. It’s never too late to make your life a happy one.