Chronic pain teaches you to gamble with yourself. There’s always one more treatment, one more possible cure, one more specialist. It’s the economics of hope: You trade parts of yourself for the promise of relief. With eating disorders, you’ll whittle away parts of your body for the dream that one day you’ll feel that you’re enough.
At first, my migraines seemed to ease—most likely due to a placebo effect, my doctor later said—but after a few weeks, they returned in full force. At a follow-up appointment, I told him the truth: The migraines hadn’t improved, I’d lost a significant amount of weight, and I could feel my eating disorder reawakening.
“If this was the slam-dunk solution to your pain,” he said, “I’d tell you to stay on it. But it’s not enough to justify the trade-off to your mental health.”
My neurologist—the one who prescribed me the shot—agrees that I should stop, but I haven’t, and I still have some refills to use. I told him I would try to taper off slowly, but that hasn’t happened yet either. There’s always the voice in my head that asks, What’s one more week of living in this body? How much damage could I be doing? I tell myself I’m waiting to see if it helps with the migraines. The truth is, I’m scared of what might happen when I go off of it—scared of wanting again, of needing, of being hungry in any sense of the word. At the same time, I’m scared of who I’m becoming while I stay on it and of the rich contours of life that I’m turning away from. Lately, my days have begun to feel like I’m moving through a simulation.
Every morning, I wake up and scan my body. Is it a whisper today, or a scream? It’s hard to tell what part of me is speaking: the migraines, the food noise, the appetite, or the old rules I once lived by. They all register the same language now—urgency without context, need without a clear source.
