Title: Chapter Eight: She’s Back — The First Relapse

In this chapter summary, I return to the time just before my wedding. To the moment when ED Me began to reemerge, quietly and convincingly. What looked like discipline was really disconnection. What felt like control was actually collapse. This was my first relapse, and like the returns that came later, it didn’t announce itself loudly. It slipped in through the cracks.

In Chapter Eight, I return to a time in my life that didn’t look like a relapse. At least not for a while. From the outside, I appeared successful and composed. I was planning a wedding, finishing graduate school, and preparing to begin my professional life. But inside, something was breaking.

This chapter traces the quiet return of ED Me in the months leading up to my wedding. What started with a skipped dessert or a few extra miles slowly morphed into a full relapse. I lost weight. I pulled away from Husband. I fell into old patterns I had convinced myself I had outgrown. Self Me tried to stay present, but hunger made it nearly impossible. Without nourishment, connection became impossible to access.

As our relationship became strained by miscommunication and unmet needs, I leaned into therapy with Stacia, hoping she could help me find clarity. But when she gently questioned the health of my relationship with Husband, I shut down. Then, just a week before the wedding, my grandmother died suddenly. Her death was devastating. But Husband’s presence in the days that followed softened something in me. When we stood under the chuppah, I felt a flicker of hope. Unmistakable connection. For a moment, Self Me was there.

After the wedding, ED Me took over. I was a doctoral student studying eating disorders while privately living inside one. I was running, performing wellness, and receiving praise from others for how put-together I seemed. But I was unraveling. The more others admired me, the more disconnected I felt. I tried to hide the relapse, but people around me began to notice. I told myself I had it under control. I didn’t.

When Stacia was diagnosed with cancer, I sank into a depression I could no longer ignore. And yet, she kept showing up for me. Her presence, despite her own illness, planted a seed. Maybe someone besides ED Me could care for Little Me. Maybe there was another way to be okay.

Eventually, I told Husband the truth. We started couples therapy. It wasn’t a dramatic breakthrough, but it was a beginning. I was still sick. But I was no longer entirely alone.

The relapse didn’t end with insight. It ended with pregnancy. Biology interrupted the eating disorder, but it didn’t resolve it. Healing had begun in small, quiet ways: in therapy, in motherhood, in moments of honesty. But for that healing to last, I would need more than a baby. I would need to learn how to protect Little Me from a place of Self. And that meant I would need to stop letting ED Me do it for me.