As I may have mentioned in the past, I have been in therapy a long time. I almost took for granted that I knew all there was to know about the various phases of my life.

Yet recently I was talking to my new therapist about my late teens to early twenties, and I casually mentioned how I had lost a ton of weight in that period. I hadn’t been chubby before, just regular size, but somehow I had convinced myself there was too much of me.

As I explained to her my behavior with food (won’t go into details), she furrowed her brow and said “well, that’s called anorexia.”

It really hit me like a ton of bricks. I knew of course that men can suffer from anorexia too, but in my mind the term had been subconsciously filed away under ‘eating disorders for insecure teen girls’, so it never truly came into question as a meaningful description for whatever the hell I was doing in that period.

While I still feel weirded out by the idea, another part of me is glad that there are still things I need to discover about myself.