My Story

I've heard it said that we all have chapters of our stories which we would rather leave unpublished. To that I say: it is only the published works that have the ability to change lives.

I would advise getting comfortable. Now is your chance to turn back! If not, grab a hot beverage and a fuzzy blanket and enjoy the ride.

Chapter I

In high school I was extremely active and involved. Everything I did, I did big. I didn't just cheer, I cheered for football, basketball, and joined my high school's competition team. I didn't just challenge myself academically, I pushed myself to crazy limits. My course schedule was overloaded with Honors and AP courses...because that's what was going to get me into a top-notch college.

Pushing myself to my limits didn't come without its consequences, though. I was chronically exhausted and I reached my breaking point multiple times...quite literally. I was always injured, and even had to have knee surgery as a 16-year-old sophomore because I had torn every ligament in my knee and broken my kneecap.

I was dangerously competitive and had completely eliminated the possibility that "mediocre" would ever be used to describe anything about my life. I did what had to be done to ensure excellence. I needed to be the perfect student, the perfect athlete, and the perfect daughter to strike a balance in an overly hectic life.

It's hard to pinpoint one specific moment in which everything started sliding downhill, but for the sake of my story I'm going to try.

Cheerleading has and will always be one of my greatest loves since I was six years old. I never needed hobbies because cheerleading took up almost every day of my life for eleven years. As with anything else that lasts eleven years, it was a tumultuous experience full of twists and turns. It brought me some of the greatest memories of my high school career, but it also caused a great deal of heartache.

Freshman: 
My high school cheer team was known for the coach. She had run the program for nearly twenty years... and she was excellent at her job. She had led our high school to multiple state and national competitions and was not a coach that played favorites or fell into the politics of high school bitchiness. [foreshadowing...] She was respected by her girls and she reciprocated that respect. She was the ultimate mother-figure wrapped into a fantastic cheer coach that I will never forget.

It was the end of my freshman year that my world began spinning. To be honest, it really hasn't stopped spinning since. The greatest coach I had known was retiring. I took it extremely hard and it is no melodramatic teenage tale when I say that I cried for three days.

Though I felt as if the "cheer world" had ended, I never questioned whether or not I would continue cheering.

Because Jordyn Davis was not a quitter.

For the next two years I continued to overload my schedule. I had practice three times a week with up to three games or competitions thrown in. Free time? Ha, that's cute. I didn't discover free time until my senior year.

Sophomore: 
The love / hate relationship I had with cheerleading continued to grow and change. My sophomore year brought a new level of competition, but the negative aspect that accompanied that almost was worth enduring. A new year brought the entrance of two new coaches. One of them was awesome--she knew what she was doing and she had the best interest of her girls in the back of her mind. The other coach... She was crazy... to put it nicely. I didn't get along with her, and she is the main reason why I didn't cheer my senior year. I will leave it at that, though, because it is tacky to post hate on the internet.

Junior: 
I loved to cheer, but I didn't love my pathological liar of a coach. I came home after every practice crying... The "love" in the love / hate relationship slowly dwindled. So it was the end of my junior year that I made the decision not to return to cheerleading my senior year. I thought it was going to be a decision that brought peace to my final year of high school. Little did I know that it was a decision that would create a sticky situation that i am still working my way out of today.

Chapter II 

"You're a failure for giving up."...."You aren't the best anymore."...."You are going to blow up like a balloon."...."You are mediocre."

Enter ED.

What does ED stand for you might ask... ED stands for Eating Disorder.

As you can probably tell from part one of my story I had an abundance of competitive, perfectionistic, overachieving genetic components--all of which are dangerous ingredients and when activated by any kind of trauma create the perfect breeding ground for an eating disorder.

Senior: 
My senior year was characterized by much more than just stressing out about college applications. It was characterized by feelings of failure, of inadequacy, and of imperfection. I no longer ate lunch at school, I went through cases of water and gum each week. My mind wandered during class. I was no longer focused on my work; I was now focused on calories, my weight and size, and a fear of anything that challenged that.

My grades were not great. They were acceptable by my family's standards, but the energy I had previously split between academics and cheerleading was now being funneled solely into my academic achievements. Nothing was good enough. An A- wasn't an A. An A wasn't even good enough. If I didn't receive a 101 / 100, I wasn't happy.

I can practically see you rolling your eyes. I know, it all seems ridiculous, but when my eating disorder first manifested itself, the intensity in which I approached everything morphed into something beyond the point of extreme obsession.

Fast forward to college.

College Freshman
My college career certainly hasn't been everything I dreamed it would be. The fall of my freshman year was positively miserable. I sat in my dorm room, never went to the caf, and slept. All. The. Time. I had no friends and I had no intention of creating a social life. I was there for one purpose...to get a degree. Everything else was just going to get in the way.

About a month into my first semester though, I realized something was wrong. I was constantly exhausted. I hated everything and everyone, and I wanted to quit. It was around midterms that I decided to see a counselor on campus. As scary as it was, it turned out to be one of the best decisions I could have made.

Talking to my counselor made me realize that my eating disorder was not something I could control at my own will. It also became evident quite quickly that my it was a bigger problem than either of us had realized. It was around the end of January 2014 that she told me that the extent of my condition was out of her wheelhouse. She had to refer me to The Center for Balanced Living.

I knew I needed some form of help, but I also knew that I wasn't going to take time away from school in order to make that possible. After a  few extremely uncomfortable conversations with my professors I decided I would do treatment and school at the same time.

The overachiever in me was extremely happy.

Since then, I guess you could say it has been a year of continuous treatment. I spent March 2014 - May 2014 in Partial Hospitilization and a step-down aftercare program, and transitioned into outpatient therapy in the summer. All was well and it looked like things might have been at a manageable level.  [condensed version of the story]

And then I started my sophomore year of college.

College Sophomore: 
School is stressful, what more can I say? I returned to school in September 2014 and immediately fell back into old coping mechanisms. This time, though the behaviors had changed, the idea was still the same. ED certainly wasn't gone.

I spent hours obsessing over grades that were excellent, but not perfect. I was no longer the smallest on the cheer team, and I was a failure because of that. Obviously I wasn't working hard enough to be the best.

Throughout the semester I stayed honest with my outpatient therapist and around the week of midterms she began to hint that going back into Partial Hospitalization was the best option for me.

I thought she was crazy.

I knew things were beginning to go downhill again, but I was convinced that I could keep it under control.

But I could not keep it under control.

If I couldn't control what level of care I was in, I would at least control when I changed levels. My plan was to wait until after finals in mid-December, and then take the months of December and January to complete another round of treatment.

But I found out the hard way that there is nothing about an eating disorder that can be controlled.

I am a documentary junkie, and I have seen countless shows about addiction. I never could comprehend how someone could not realize how adversely their  addiction was affecting their health. I was now there. I didn't care how much I was damaging my body and knowing the consequences wasn't enough to make me want to seek treatment again.

My therapist told me I couldn't wait until finals were over. It was only three weeks! I begged and pleaded with her to let me wait until I had finished the semester. But she wouldn't. She told me that I probably didn't have three weeks of fight left in me.

There it was: rock bottom.

Since November 24, 2014 I have been working my way through another round in Partial Hospitalization. It's not fun, but that's where I'm at. I'm climbing my way out of the pit that I have been stuck in for the past three years.

The past nine weeks have been painful, but it's getting easier every day, and I am finally in a place that I am proud of. I am not completely healed, but I'm getting there. My happy ending hasn't been pulled together with a bow on top, but that's what makes my story real. Real life doesn't always come with a bow on top (no matter how much the cheerleader in me would love that).

The purpose in me sharing this is simply to tell my story. Someone out there needs to hear it, and it would be selfish of me to hold on to this simply because I am embarrassed or ashamed. By posting I have no intent of magnifying my struggle or minimizing another. It's not a bigger or smaller struggle than someone else's... It just is. Everyone has something, and this is my something. 

So please, feel free to comment with your thoughts, your questions, or anything you have ever wanted to know about an eating disorder. Obviously this is a condensed version of my story with a great deal of the details omitted, but I am more than willing to shed light on something that will help others.

xoxo,
jkd