Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bulimia, child sex abuse, child sexual abuse, Postsecret, secrets
I was talking to my husband about the Postsecret website. It’s something we talk about a lot. As someone with secrets that I share with the world in this blog, I applaud the courage that is Postsecret. Anyway, I decided to free myself of another secret.
I have bulimia. This part wasn’t a secret to my husband, as I told him about this part of me fairly early into our relationship. Bulimia, for me, is a somewhat direct consequence of having survived child sex abuse. Whenever I thought about what had happened, I literally got nauseated. (By the way, this is why you shouldn’t fuck kids.)
Anyway though, one time I was finished forcing myself to throw up, and my mom walked into the bathroom while I was cleaning the toilet and floor from my vomit. (Somehow I never quite got to the point where I was able to vomit without making a mess!) It was humiliating, having her find me like this, in such a terribly vulnerable embarrassing position. I tried to play it off like it was nothing, but she didn’t fall for it. She started to cry, and then I started to cry, and we just sat there in the bathroom crying together.
Anyway, here’s the secret part that I told my husband the other day. After she caught me that time, I didn’t want to take any chances that such a thing would happen again. So, whenever I had a bulimic attack, I would throw up into tupperware containers in my room and dispose of the contents later on when I knew for sure it was safe to do so. It was humiliating and shameful to do, and just as humiliating and shameful to recount to my husband. However, after telling him about it, I didn’t feel quite as disgusting as I did before.
That’s the thing about secrets. Secrets have such a hold on you when they are a secret, but once you tell someone, the secret no longer has power over you.
