the unseen and the seen

the pain of a dehumanizing existence & the yearning to feel whole again

Trigger warning: mentions of eating disorders and suicidal ideation.

It’s New Year's Eve, 2012, and by some miracle, I was, rather unceremoniously, shooed from my prison. Allowed, or instructed rather, to seek refuge at the house of my best friend, M.

The uncharacteristic nature in which my mom sent me packing after nearly a year under constant scrutiny probably should’ve begged a few imploring questions as she drove me to M’s house, but I knew better than to question her surrender. So instead, I reveled in my victory and ran from the car before she even made a full stop in the driveway of my third home.

me walking up M’s, 2013.

M’s house had character in the way ours never did. Niche, but personal design choices and the unmistakable signs of a family in motion. Since the day I first set foot in it, after rather boldly asking M to be my friend nearly 8 years prior, I coveted the familial aura that radiated from every corner of the place.

Child of divorce that I was, there was always something fractured about my existence. I would often say I rode the gap in my parents’ awareness; I existed in the liminal space that formed like a barrier between them following their separation.

So to walk into a house that was whole and to feel, however fleetingly, like part of a family that was the embodiment of that wholeness…. I exhaled the minute I flopped onto M’s bed, and she cued up Titanic for the hundredth time.

M and I didn’t need to talk about it. We rarely did. She knew things were bad, but they’d been bad all year, and maybe to her, kindred spirits as we were, she, too, hoped that a new year would be just what I needed.

I couldn’t believe I’d made it out of 2012 alive. I almost hadn’t on several occasions. Two hospitalizations, both brutal and demeaning. Pounds lost and gained, my will to live vacillating as wildly as the numbers on the scale.

But it had been almost 5 months since my last hospitalization. I had made it through my first semester of freshman year, and aside from weekly appointments to measure and monitor, I had remained imprisoned only at home.

I knew my grip was slipping; it was bordering on unmanageable. I had lost more weight than I could feasibly replace with water before my weekly appointments. But I couldn’t, wouldn’t, let them put me back in that hellhole.

M knew too, hell, she was the one who refilled my water bottle at school time and time again before my appointments. Not because she condoned the behavior but because she had seen the depths of my desperation, and she loved me.

Despite how fragile my disguises seemed, no parent or therapist had yet challenged me. I sold them my line, and they seemed to be accepting it. How else was I supposed to make sense of this unreluctant freedom?

No one to monitor me and ensure I ate dinner? Breakfast?

I eased into our evening of movies, the lack of scrutiny washing me clean. That perfect mask of the healing girl slipping into oblivion, because here in this house, I too felt whole.

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I was picked up the next morning at a lazy time for my ever-punctual mother. She seemed tense during the ride home, but these days that wasn’t out of the ordinary.

My mother is a kind, though sheltered person. Anxious and guarded, yes, but her nature is fundamentally good. And I knew how my illness weighed on her. She had lost one child already, and for a year, I had been dangling on the edge of a cliff that it seemed no one could pull me back from. Tense was… normal.

What was utterly abnormal was my dad’s car parked in front of my mom’s house when we pulled up. The previous evening’s wholeness drained from me as my liminal space lost oxygen, and I knew I was about to be suffocated.

They had packed my bags.

The hospital had failed. My mom had failed. And I was to permanently move in with my dad and step-mom, D, until they beat the sickness out of me.

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The Unseen

Not at all to my surprise, D had orchestrated the coup and the militant regime that followed.

My phone was taken from me at the door, as were most of my personal belongings. I was allowed my school uniforms, a few pairs of pajamas, and my homework. They showed me to the sparsely furnished, grey basement of our temporary townhouse (our house having burned down a little over a year prior) and said this is where I would be kept until it was time to eat or sleep.

Everyone else would remain upstairs.

Meals would be finished before anyone (I) was allowed to leave the table.

My phone would be allowed to me for 1 hour every evening.

I wasn’t permitted to talk to my mom on the phone.

I could shower for 10 minutes at a time.

I would be checked every 2 hours at night.

It was to be assumed that if I spoke, I was lying.

For that matter, I could only speak if spoken to, and never to my younger sister, P.

And otherwise, I would remain unseen.

Whatever was left of me, June, was brutally stripped away on the threshold of this new prison until all that remained in their eyes was my disorder.

My dad, conflict-avoidant coward that he is, was not allowed to talk to me one-on-one. D knew he was weak, so she made sure he had his own set of rules to follow during this arrangement.

Occasionally, he would slip into the basement because he “needed to grab something” or “thought he heard something.” Honestly, I think he was doing this to make sure I was still breathing. Because, despite his adamant adherence to D’s rules, I know he knew what they were doing to me, depressed as I already was, couldn’t end well.

In family therapy, which ironically my mom was barred from attending, my dad would lie for D, lie for himself. It’s working. We’re fine. And that therapist was either an ignorant fool, or he too wasn’t seeing me, gaunt and lifeless as I was in that room while my dad rambled on. He even congratulated Dad and D on a job well done.

Years later, it was revealed to me that my dad would call my mom every night when D went to bed, begging her for help. He couldn’t stop D. She was brutal and unrelenting, and he was too cowardly to stop it.

Every day, my wake-up call was 6 am, followed by two grueling hours at the dining table. Facing off against D and the plate of food she would set before me with a smirk. Some days, I could eat for the sheer sake of needing escape that only school could offer. Some days, the voices in my head would drown out reason.

Some days, I sat at that table straight to dinner, missing school entirely, until three meals piled up like a mountain before my weary eyes.

And still, no one looked me in the eye.

I was nothing more than cattle to be fattened for slaughter.

Even on the days I managed to make it to first period, my reprieve was short-lived, as my dad inevitably pulled up at 12 pm every day to feed me lunch in his car. No talking, no music, no eye contact. Just the bleak winter and the empty campus outside the car, reflecting back my own inner desolation.

me, M, and two other friends in that horrible basement on my birthday, 2013.

They made me into the very thing they fought against. My spirit was snuffed, and the monster within knew it. It took free, unadulterated rein of my behavior. Careful as D was, the monster was infinitely cleverer.

I learned to hide food in my sleeves, right in front of them, to be surreptitiously flushed down the drain at my next pre-allotted bathroom break.

I trained myself to wake up at 5 am and spend that hour before they retrieved me silently exercising until my weakened muscles gave out.

I found new ways of falsifying my weight at those weekly appointments, and I had more friends in on the ruse.

And because they weren’t really looking, they didn’t see my bones protrude, my face once again hollow, my skin pale. The monster was well fed, as I starved on.

If I felt anything during this time, it was a sense of triumph. D was always an insidious kind of evil. My first memories are of her wickedness and the pleasure she takes in it.

But I grew up playing her games.

I grew up in that liminal, unseen space.

Where she saw her own meticulously crafted arena in which to battle the monster for ultimate control, I saw a familiar playing field in which to ride the gaps.

It’s hard to hit an invisible target.

Long ago, my dad and D chose to forge a life of delusional ignorance. Their combined egos being what they were, it was a fortuitous alliance. D clocked my dad from day 1 and knew he’d be easy to manipulate. His inner darkness spoke to her own, and it was over for my mom and for me. Despite my fledgling existence on earth, mere infant that I was at the time, I never really stood a chance.

I was doomed to be a child extra in D’s show, the one persistent threat to her delusion. The one thing forever out of place in her meticulously controlled world. She punished me for it every chance she got.

She thought her dehumanizing tactics were “new” and infallibly designed to render me defenseless. The joke was on her, though, as I’d already spent years training for exactly this.

My eating disorder came into being by necessity of her making, and months in her dungeon only fueled the very fire she sought to snuff out.

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The Seen

It was my therapist in the end who finally saw me, who recognized the life leaving my eyes as our sessions ticked by fruitlessly. One weigh-in on an unexpected day unraveled my aqueous deception and unveiled the extent of D’s failure.

It also saved my life.

I was sent to a new hospital a week later.

Somewhere along the way, years of ups and downs in between, the switch finally flipped. Though my depression and anxiety remained, controlling my body stopped being the answer.

We never talked about those months again, we never talked about those years again. My parents collectively willed 5 years of my life into non-being.

It wasn’t until 5 years after that, living across the country, that my dad finally asked me on a phone call if I was “alright.” Whatever that means.

me in california, 2019.

The lost teenage girl with nothing to live for still exists in me, but I buried her deep to keep her safe.

The scars that remain from the prolonged dehumanization I experienced have left me walking through the world alone. Friends grew up and grew on. I went through the same motions apathetically. As long as I had a next goal, I’d do whatever was needed of me to achieve it. But I’ve always felt detached from the present and from how I feel in it, as if a part of my soul remains trapped in that basement.

Trapped with the belief that I didn’t deserve survival. That I don’t deserve to be treated with love, respect, or an identity.

I’ve spent 13 years undoing the damage wrought during my fragmented adolescence. I have a deep fear of locked doors, of being misunderstood, of not being believed, of being seen and being turned away from for it. Not realizing all the while that these fears have kept me trapped in a cage this time of my own making.

Running and hiding, though I’ve tried, I’ve still never found a space where I felt safe enough to be fully seen. I’ve never created a home for myself as whole as M’s.

Recently, I’ve been forced to reconcile with the knowledge that only I can create that safe space, that home I’ve forever coveted.

It’s time to resurrect that belittled little girl, unbury that dejected teenager, and take the hand of that woefully misaligned 20-something who ran 3000 miles from her pain.

To make us whole, I must look them each in the eye with clarity and sincerity and tell them, I see you.

-June
I invite you to stay and be seen here.

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