Thigh Gaps, Epiphanies, and a Coming-of-Age: My Anorexia Story

by Shannon Frost Greenstein

Listen to Executive Director Gabriel Nathan read this post aloud:

My coming-of-age story is a bit atypical. It doesn’t look like Stand by Me or The Goonies or even Stranger Things; it doesn’t look like any of those tidy stories that involve discovery and growth and an eventual understanding of Life with-a-capital-L, in all its wonderful and horrible permutations.

My coming-of-age started at thirty. It served to prepare me for my eventual path; enabling me to eventually find my way home to myself. My coming-of-age, to be clear, was the culmination of decades of angst that made me stronger instead of killing me…but before that could be allowed to happen, it almost killed me.

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Some people with mental illness are lucky; some actually have access to resources, clinicians, and effective insurance. Others cannot easily obtain the treatment they need, due to time, finances, stigma, or environment. Some never receive the support they need to finally address their conditions; others never even get that far.

I am one of the lucky ones.

My anorexia was a decades-long struggle, an omnipresent companion for more years of my life than those without. It waxed and waned, falling into remission, rearing itself during relapses. It was always at the foundation of my living experience, but varied in the volume of white noise it liked to create in my forebrain—inner voices calling me names, informing me of my worthlessness, desperate for control, desperate for bone, desperate for relief.

In the eating disorder recovery community, you hear a lot of stories about people’s journeys. There’s often a moment of reckoning…a moment when the magnitude of your eating disorder strikes you, when you finally accept that you have a problem, when the seed of fear is planted that you are permanently destroying the only body you will get in this lifetime. It is a brief second of true self-awareness, through the haze of body dysmorphia that hangs over your reality like a scrim, and it is often the catalyst for real change.

While I have heard all manner of these reckonings before—overdoses and fainting episodes and car accidents and loss—my own was far less dramatic. Nonetheless, a full decade later, it stands out as the start to my rather-delayed coming-of-age—and it was all because my phone kept falling on the floor.

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It was a Thursday, or some such unimportant day, and my husband and I were sitting on the couch. We were watching television; the cats were lounging about; all was as it typically should be. It had been eighteen months of restriction and depression and self-harm; it was the lowest I had ever felt.

My cell phone, sitting on my lap, suddenly fell to the floor.

How annoying, I thought, and leaned down to pick it up. I replaced it on my lap, resumed my discussion with my husband, kept pretending I wasn’t hungry.

My cell phone fell to the floor again.

“Goddamnit,” I said because, when you have been starving yourself for days, you are disproportionately irritable, all the fucking time. I picked up the phone, again, and dropped it back in my lap, again.

We discussed our upcoming weekend plans; my husband poured a glass of wine; we watched another commercial.

My phone slipped down to the ground yet again, precisely as it had before.

As I bent to retrieve it—apoplectic with anger, on the verge of lashing out at my husband for no reason other than having no one else upon whom to project my misplaced rage—I realized what was happening.

The space between my thighs—growing ever wider the more I restricted my food intake, the more my body began to digest its own muscles—was now large enough that my phone could not sit squarely on my lap.

Society calls this a “thigh gap”, and I had wanted one…oh, how I’d wanted one…since the term first entered the lexicon.

Influencers on Instagram were showing off their thigh gaps in short skirts and tight jeans. Friends in my circle were employing the term to show off the success of their new diet or trainer or exercise plan. A “thigh gap”, in my mind, became synonymous with “thin;” with “discipline;” with “worth.” It became a symbol of all the control and dopamine and validation I was craving by starving my body and punishing my mind. Ultimately, it became far too important a concept for something that literally requires absence and loss just to exist in the first place.

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My feelings upon this insight were overwhelming.

There were, first, those emotions anorexia had conditioned me to feel since the age of eight when it came to weight-loss…triumph; accomplishment; value. I felt worthy. I felt strong.

Then came that which always followed this conditioned response, the feelings that weren’t just products of my reptilian brain, the ones that were instead from my rational mind. These were the feelings that incorporated logic and empathy and that uniquely-human ability to problem-solve; and those feelings were guilt, fear, apprehension, and failure.

It’s impossible to ignore the damage that decades of an eating disorder inevitably inflict upon the human body. It is one thing to endure the pervasive voice of self-loathing which is anorexia; but the underlying fear you’re irrevocably fucking up your body beyond repair is a most unwelcome addition to that mental chorus.

So there I was—phone on the floor, thighs shrinking, stomach growling, devils and angels with my voice screaming between my ears, each attempting to drown the other out, both getting lost in the cacophony. I was left only with the fleeting ecstasy of having reached a goal, the only goal that was important at the time: Losing more, ever more, ever more weight.

But eventually, that faded, too.

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Next in this coming-of-age tale came the Herculean task of residential treatment—intensive care around the clock for individuals whose eating disorders have become unmanageable, for patients who have literally put their lives in danger by seeking an ever-decreasing number on the scale. There was constant supervision and Dialectical Behavior Therapy and occupational therapists to show us how to eat properly once again. There were nutritionists and counselors and medical doctors, all attempting to teach us the coping mechanisms we lacked to endure the discomfort of recovery and the grief of identity-loss. Next came weight restoration and the loss of my thigh gap and even more Dialectical Behavior Therapy; then came the monumental amount of emotional work in which I still needed to participate in order to heal.

Eventually,  I was lucky enough to conceive my first child…something my husband and I had wanted for years before it became a reality, something my underweight body had been unable to bring to fruition. A few years later, we were again blessed. Our children remain shining proof of what the female body can accomplish when properly nourished.

And we’ve now entered the chapter of my life in which I’m currently entrenched…being a mother, being a woman, being a writer and a literary citizen and a cat-lady. I’m still learning how to measure my worth in ways other than the scale; I’m still learning how to model healthy behaviors for my impressionable children. It is still a journey; it is still an education.

But it all started with my slippery phone and that flash of all-consuming rage, the epiphany they birthed that I might truly be in trouble this time. No part of this, I agree, was particularly earth-shattering; at the end of the day, it was nothing more than a phone falling through a thigh gap onto the floor. But it triggered an objective examination of the old beliefs buried deep within my disordered mind, ideas that always made me believe my discomfort was actually success, my suffering was actually happiness. It finally brought my attention to the sum total of pain I was enduring in pursuit of an unattainable goal, and thus became imbued with a lifetime of meaning.

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These days, this ten-year-old epiphany from an era I’d rather not remember represents something even greater. That prolonged period of illness might not have been a rock-bottom, in the strictest sense of the term, but it did represent the apogee of where I wanted my life to be…and where things have since come to stand. These days, my existence is fulfilling and rewarding and brimming with joy; these days, the phone that now sits smartly upon my closed thighs symbolizes all of the work.

It symbolizes the relentless struggle to recover; the trust and love I rebuilt with my husband; the arduous process of finally learning who I am and what I want…without weight loss being my sole source of validation or measure of worth. My thighs now having the mass to support my phone, in fact, symbolizes my entire coming-of-age—delayed though it might have been—and I am damn proud to have made it through.

Now, I’d love to say I’m fully recovered and anorexia is in my distant past…but life is not always that clear-cut, and I still struggle to varying degrees to this day. Like any chronic illness, there are good days and bad days, moments of ecstasy and periods of grief. But always…there is the work. My children are my motivation to keep working; my family is the product of that work; our lived experience together is my reward.

As I said…I am very lucky.

My coming-of-age was rather ungraceful—defined by a fair bit of failure and a lot of aimless stagnation—but it also served a purpose. It taught me how to channel strength, how to sublimate angst, how to become who I want to be through the power of sheer will and self-love alone. It all started with a thigh gap, but it all continues moving ever forward, filling my life with progress and growth and gratitude and love.

And that, I think, is a better goal than the thigh gap ever was.

​EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR / EDITOR: Gabriel Nathan | DESIGN: Leah Alexandra Goldstein | SITE ORIGINATOR: Bud Clayman