One Size Fits None

“I’m great at drawing,” I write. Immediately, I slash it out. “I love hanging out with my friends,” I try again. Another strike-through, harder this time, like I’m erasing the person who wrote it. Ten minutes in and my notebook looks like a crime scene, ink and paper conspiring to bury an eventful life I apparently once lived? Okay lock in or the  22 year old PCP running our eating disorder group therapy will give me another, “baaaad mark.”Today’s prompt: Name something you’re good at, something you value about your life outside of your sick body. 

Around me, the other girls murmur about how hard the prompt is. They say their bodies have always been their worth—or at least, that’s what the world taught them.

I start to laugh, thinking it’s a joke.

It isn’t.

Sitting there with my pen bleeding all over the page, I realize something: I’m not like them. I’m not trying to reclaim a body I used to love. I’m fighting because I never valued mine at all.

The eating disorder treatment center they shipped me off to at 16 was nestled in the sleepy, suburban armpit of upstate Massachusetts. A place so wholesome it felt like if you sneezed too loud, someone in yoga pants would offer you herbal tea. To be clear, the program was amazing. I credit it for saving my life. But also,  I stuck out like a sore thumb. It was $15,000 a week without insurance. Naturally, the “priority” beds went to girls whose parents could pay out of pocket—no questions asked, no paperwork, just vibes and AMEX cards. The result? A treatment milieu filled with white girls from two-parent homes,and  private schools. They were honestly lovely, but they were also so far from my world that being in group therapy with them felt like I’d been beamed into an alternate timeline where everyone wore Lululemon and cried because their parents didn’t get them.

Meanwhile, back home, I grew up in a city that regularly made the evening news.  The crime rate was the worst in the state. I knew multiple  people who didn’t live to see senior year. Dead by gang shootings and stabbings before they turned 16. 

Single teen moms.

Kids raising kids

Box fans in the windows. (The true crime)

My dad? Lived states away and only came through in the clutch with the one thing that could get me into this place: private insurance.

So here I was, uprooted from a world of bodegas, box braids, and reggae spilling from busted speakers—and dropped into a place where the week’s biggest tragedy was whether Jake Gyllenhaal felt bad about the scarf.

(I became a Swiftie by Stockholm Syndrome. Zero regrets.)

I knew they hadn’t treated many Black girls when I asked for hair products and was handed a fine-tooth comb—for my locs. Another time, I asked for lotion after a shower. They gave me one tablespoon of Vaseline.

It was winter. In Massachusetts.

Nonetheless it never made a difference in the kindness and understanding I was shown by the staff. I thought it wouldn't make a difference in my treatment, as well, until I sat there, in group therapy. One by one, the girls spoke. They loved being praised for losing weight, they said. They loved how quickly family members noticed, how friends whispered compliments. I sat there, silent, thinking how I’d never once lived in a world where shrinking got you applause. In my community, weight loss didn’t earn admiration, it earned concern. Aunts and cousins would be showing up with platters of mac and cheese, oxtail, plantains, greens—food as apology, as glue, as love. Curves were the goal. Thicker thighs, bigger behind. Losing weight meant something was wrong. In that room, I felt like an anomaly. And for the first time, it hit me: eating disorder treatment might come in one size fits all, but the “one size” they were thinking of wasn’t mine. It was built for middle‑class white girls with body image issues, not for someone who had grown up with food as salvation, not scarcity. Even now, I can’t tell you how I ended up there. Maybe it was the chaos back home, the need to control something. Maybe it was food insecurity twisting into its opposite. But it wasn’t because I hated my body. Body image never entered the equation.

Naturally, because I’d never had body-image issues in the first place, and because I was finally in a safe, structured environment, they declared me “healed” from them. Just like that. Four weeks later, I was discharged into outpatient care. The plan was simple on paper: my mom, a full-time working, breadwinning, single parent of 3 kids, was supposed to stay home for three months to prepare me three balanced meals and three snacks a day. As if she could pause survival to focus on recovery. We made it two weeks. Then life picked up again—bills, work, the noise of everything we couldn’t afford to ignore. I relapsed four times before I found anything close to real healing.

When they asked us to name something we value about ourselves beyond our bodies, I couldn’t answer. Every sentence I wrote felt like a lie. But now, I know what I should’ve said: I’m good at surviving. I’m good at coming back. And I give back—because I know what it’s like to feel invisible in a space meant for healing. I give back for the girls who never see themselves in corny stock image filled recovery brochures (you know the ones: two white girls smiling over salad). I give back because no one explained to me that you could be strong and still be lost. That you could grow up with food as love and still find yourself afraid of it. That you could have no desire to be thin, and still end up starving. For the ones whose pain never fit the mold.

The eating disorder? It’s the least interesting thing about me. I’m not here because I was sick. I’m here because I made it.