Antidote

Chapter 6.

Warning! This chapter discusses anorexia nervosa, drugs abuse, and mental illness which may be a trigger for some. If you or someone you know suffers from anorexia, bulimia, or any other eating disorder, or drug abuse, please seek help! Your life is more precious than you know, take good care of it. ❤️

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I sit in my twelve o'clock one-on-one session barely able to focus on what's being said. She was ranting about why she was still struggling to eat and telling me that I need to give her a new diagnosis because I am wrong for telling her she suffers from anorexia nervosa. My mind is on my decision of whether or not I will go back to Seattle or stay here. I know it's wrong but I can't seem to stop thinking about it.

I'm torn between staying at this job and in my first apartment ever that's in my name, staying with my mother who moved only to be with me, and staying here to raise the baby on my own. Or going back to everything that I left behind, Hayden, the house, his life, the pain, his daughter. Going back scares me because it's foreign to me now. Everything has changed.

"Dr. Greene, are you even listening to me?" Her eyes are wide as they look at me. I can tell she isn't sleeping by the prominent discolored bags under her eyes that weren't there when she first came. She's been here for two weeks now and we're barely scratching the surface of her problems.

"Yes Victoria, you are under the impression that I misdiagnosed you." I say giving her my undivided attention, putting Hayden and the baby in the back of my mind. I can't focus on my life when I have to focus on someone else's.

"Yes because you did. I am not anorexic. I don't weigh seventy pounds like that other girl in this hospital."

"But you want to, you still aspire to be smaller than you actually are. You weigh eighty-two pounds at thirty, and it's not of muscle and it's not healthy. You aren't working out, you're restricting yourself of food and when you do eat you throw it up." I pride myself in being blunt and honest with them. That's why they always ask for me, word gets around that I tell it how it is even if it's harsh. I need someone to be that way with me becauseI can't be that person for me. "Why don't we go back, you tell me when this first started."

"I was never satisfied with the way that I looked, being here in LA, and the women that you see on tv or the Victoria Secret fashion shows my mother made me watch religiously, were always smaller than me and my mother wanted me to be just like them. I was twelve when she gave me my first bag of cocaine and said all models do it, so if I wanted to be one I had to start losing weight now."

"Did you want to be a model?"

"I thought it would've been nice to be one. It wasn't my dream though." Unconsciously she wipes at her nose and sniffles as if it's running. It's the twelfth time she's done it. I've been counting.

"But it wasn't really about modeling to your mother huh?"

"No, it was my weight. She constantly told me she didn't want a fat daughter. She would weigh me all the time and if I was ever over seventy pounds she wouldn't feed me, but would force me to take more drugs. That's just how I grew up."

Often times I'm thankful for my parents. No one's family is alike, and I'm glad I never had parents like other people. My parents aren't perfect and they've done their fair share of fucked up things but they've never been anything like any of the other parents I hear about.

"You have a child right?"

"Yes, a one year old. I was my biggest at that point. It felt so good to eat."