ABSTRACT
When the author was eleven, she was hospitalized for half of sixth grade year for anorexia. This isn't the secret. Many people know this, and she share it willingly if in some conversation it seems appropriate. She presents it as something that happened a long time ago. When she talks about it with friends, colleagues, family, whomever, because she locate it in her past, she speaks about eating disorder in a displaced "long ago" or clinical sense. The secret is this: she still battling the disease, this eating disorder, and there's never a moment that it doesn't exist for her. Although someone can look at her and think there's no way she's battling an eating disorder. She think people without the experience of eating disorders, either their own or intimate others', don't understand that just because we're out of the hospitals and we aren't seeking active treatment, that the disease is gone, or at least that "the worst is over".
