Scrubbing Wounds

After years of feeling like my body was broken, I finally looked back—and found answers that hurt, helped, and maybe, just maybe, offered a way forward.

It started with a car ride, like most quiet breakthroughs do. We were driving, my husband and I, and I saw a sign advertising some kind of metabolic weight-loss drug. I laughed, or maybe sighed—one of those reactions that carries more history than sound—and I said something like, “I started taking diet pills when I was about seven.” It was a throwaway comment, but he didn’t brush it off. He just said, without missing a beat, “No wonder your hormones are a mess. You were probably putting all kinds of stuff in your body way too young.” And that stuck.

It didn’t break me open in the moment, but it lodged somewhere deep, and over the days that followed, I found myself circling back to it. I started researching. I couldn’t stop. I wanted to remember what I’d taken—what those pills were, what they did. There were fat burners and appetite suppressants, sure, but also sibutramine—an ingredient banned years later for causing heart issues and psychiatric effects like mania. There were Chinese diet tablets in shiny foil packs, unregulated and loaded with God knows what. I remembered the green capsules. I remembered feeling proud that I wasn’t hungry.

I remembered being given my cousin’s Ritalin because under the guise that it would suppress my appetite. I was maybe 13. Maybe younger. I remember how wired I felt. How nauseous. How hungry and not hungry at the same time. And I remember feeling like it was my fault that my appetite even existed. I’d learned early that hunger was a flaw, a weakness, a thing to outsmart.

I was on Weigh-Less before I was a teenager. I don’t remember ever just being allowed to exist in my body without a plan to shrink it. And when I got incredibly sick around age ten—so sick I couldn’t eat for weeks because of blisters down my throat—I lost over 10 kilograms. I was weak, pale, exhausted… and I was celebrated. I got a new wardrobe. I remember standing in the fitting room feeling dizzy and small and a little bit scared—but everyone around me seemed so happy about it. I didn’t want to gain the weight back. I started skipping meals. I fainted sometimes. I told people I felt sick in the mornings. Eventually, I believed it.

This all came back in waves while I was researching those old pills. It started as curiosity and quickly turned into grief. And then into anger—not rage, just a slow, simmering realization that I was set up to fail. That the body shame I carry didn’t start with me. That the reason I’ve always felt disconnected from food, from movement, from rest, even from sex, wasn’t a flaw in my wiring—it was conditioning. Trauma, even, disguised as "health."

I once watched my dad scrub an open wound after falling on rocks. He used a hard-bristle brush, even though it bled. He said, “You have to get all the dirt out. Otherwise it’ll fester.” That’s what this has felt like. Unintentional, but necessary. Like digging at something old and tender, only to find that what you’re really doing is finally cleaning it. And yes, it stings. But the pain means it’s healing the right way this time.

For the first time in decades, I feel like I understand why my body has always felt like a battlefield. Why every diet, every routine, every “reset” failed. Why my energy tanks, why I feel inflamed all the time, why I can't seem to fix what doesn't feel fixable. Because I was never meant to be at war with myself in the first place.

This isn’t about blame. I’m not writing this to villainize anyone. I know my mom thought she was helping. I know she was caught in a culture that taught all of us that smaller meant better. But I’m still allowed to grieve what I missed out on. I’m allowed to feel angry that my body became a project before I even hit puberty. And I’m allowed to finally say: this hurt me.

But it also gave me clarity. And clarity gives me choice.

I don’t want to fix myself anymore. I want to care for myself. To treat my body the way I treat my kids—with patience, gentleness, and love. I want to stop overriding my needs in the name of being good. I want to stop apologizing for my existence. I want to stop handing my body over to systems that never had my well-being in mind.

I’m on a healing journey. One where I can say no to shame, yes to nourishment, and maybe—just maybe—begin to feel safe in my own skin.

It’s not linear. It’s not tidy. But it’s mine. And I’m finally ready to walk it.