I Was in an Assisted Living Facility at 23. Now I Travel the World.

The story of how I rebuilt my life through travel, adventure, and remote landscapes.

When I checked myself out of eating disorder treatment on New Year’s Eve, I returned to the assisted living facility where I was housed, threw my belongings in a black trash bag, and drove toward Chicago, never looking back. I was 23 years old, sick of being told I would always be sick. I was tired of locked doors and pills and fluorescent lights. I was over people with badges controlling my every move.

I left and drove toward the unknown, claiming a freedom no one would have offered me. I had to steal it. Take it for myself—against medical advice. The awareness of the risk got my heart beating again. I could feel the wind, see the moon. For the first time in years, I could do whatever I wanted, and that’s exactly what I intended.

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I’ve struggled with an eating disorder since I was small. Many of my early memories are of pinching my stomach, crying over the thickness of my thighs, throwing away my snacks at school. My brain was fixated on my size. I felt huge. Everywhere I went. No matter who I was around. No matter what size people perceived me to be. I felt I took up too much space.

It would take me years to understand that my body’s size wasn’t what left me so uncomfortable, but rather the ways that I felt I didn’t belong. I’ve always been a little different. Eccentric. Shy. A loner. Creative. “She’s just an artist.” I don’t make friends easily. I’m a deep-feeler, a lover of other worlds. I wonder about death, purpose. I crave truth. Connection, real connection. I want to know what it means to be alive.

At ages six, ten, thirteen, these personality traits never translated to popularity.

I was never seeking thinness as much as I was seeking an escape. Shrinking myself was about control in a world that felt upside down and confusing. I was a human who had a hard time being a human. I was missing a rulebook that others had for connecting. So, I built my own world. Calorie counting, restriction, food obsession, watching numbers go down. Turns out my world wasn’t original. It came with a name. It was called anorexia.

My anorexia was a mind-fortress. Inside it, I felt safe, in control, stable. The noise of society quietened. I was no longer lonely. There wasn’t any space in my starved brain for that kind of pain. Like a breath of fresh air, the world was finally quiet. At least, for a time.

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When I left for college, my eating disorder revealed its true power. I had gotten a scholarship to attend a fine arts college in Chicago and was, for the first time, among similar thinkers. Everyone was strange—sideways philosophers, inventors of ideas, builders of original thought and worlds. Art school was a place where people pride themselves in their isolated originality, where being different was desired. The place where normal was an insult.

I was in an environment that inspired me, but I became unable to participate in my education. I spent the hours that should have been saved for the studios, fighting with my own brain, staring at my kitchen cabinets, trying to force myself to pick something to eat. Anything. Just one damn thing, but the idea of food paralyzed me.

I fell so far inside my mind, my body wasted away. By the end of the first semester, my resident advisor got involved, then the school counselors, then the school. I was forced into eating disorder treatment.

From that moment onward, college became a sad little dance between a semester of school and then a semester in treatment. Back and forth. In and out. I’d be able to fight my eating disorder for a few months, and then I’d fall into that mind-fortress, taking shelter from the world. It was a violent dance. Each relapse broke my body a little more. Each fall extinguished a bit of my spirit.

Until, a few weeks before my twenty-third birthday, I decided I couldn’t do it anymore. I was a weary dancer with atrophied muscles and a shrunken brain. I didn’t know the necessary choreography to pull myself back into the world of the living. Or maybe I did, but couldn’t hear any music. I stopped trying. I let go and fell. I fell to a place I didn’t intend to return.

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Something happens when you wake to a life that wasn’t supposed to continue. You’re reborn. Thrown back into the world where everything’s the same, yet you’re experiencing it for the first time. The bright fluorescents of the hospital, staff members with purple lanyards, blinking red lights beside the doors to signal they’re locked, pills rattling in plastic cups, the vacant stares of the other patients, the dull drawl of the therapist running groups. Every movement you make, every word you speak, is a painful rejection of the fall. It’s a battle cry for the living. The final push toward the summit when you’ve got nothing left to give.

This fifth round of treatment for anorexia would be my last. I didn’t know it at the time, but looking back, it’s obvious. I moved different that time. I felt different. The clock turned, and I stepped into my 23rd year with a new set of eyes, having previously collapsed so far beneath the mundanity of things. Another dimension was added to life, and I didn’t just understand, but now saw its intricacies, its details, its fleeting nature. Time was unpredictable in its personal allotment. Who knew how much we were given?

I’d outgrown the role of patient in my newfound wisdom and understood that, to become well, I needed to reject every part of my life that anorexia had touched. I had to use this rebirth not only to rebuild, but to become everything.

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When it became apparent that the same traditional, clinical models of mental health treatment weren’t going to heal me, I checked myself out of my final treatment center against medical advice. It was New Year’s Eve. The facility’s director handed me a black trash bag for my belongings and asked me to sign the forms, where I agreed to take full responsibility for this no-good, very bad choice.

“You’ll leave after dinner,” the director stated, and then silence. No words of encouragement, just a cold stare, and the click of her tongue. People who live in a three-dimensional world don’t understand choices made based on the fourth.

After dinner, I returned to the assisted living facility where the treatment center was housing one other girl and me. I’d been undergoing eating disorder treatment for two months by this point, and had graduated from the inpatient floor, which meant I only had to attend programming during the daytime now. The staff put me up in the assisted living community overnight, where the average resident was over 80 years old. My roommate and I were supposed to be practicing independence, as if being monitored by mental health professionals and staying in a retirement community in our twenties would ever translate to actual life.

I piled my belongings into the provided black trash bag, threw it over my shoulder, and headed toward my car. In the lobby, which was still decorated for Christmas, one of the residents exclaimed, “You’re taking my job!” pointing to the bag thrown over my shoulder. The resident was named Roger, and he liked to keep his wheelchair parked beside the automatic doors and the glass candy bowl. That evening, he was wearing a Santa hat and holding sleigh bells in his right hand.

I laughed, and Roger laughed, and I laughed some more. To him, I looked like Santa. To the facility’s director, I was a noncompliant patient. Interpretations could be so different depending on the context a person sees.

“Happy New Year,” I told Roger, my voice light with the absurdity of it all—discharging, the holiday, the Santa hat, the trash bag, the blank page, the spontaneity of my choice to leave when I’d spent years and years seeking out control.

“Where are you going?” he asked me as I stepped toward the doors.

“Home.”

“Home?”

I nodded. “To Chicago.”

“What’s in Chicago?”

I shrugged, and then I stepped into the cold, dark night, toward my car, which hadn’t been driven in months. Nothing was in Chicago, really. Not anymore. Just my apartment and a few people I loved, and I didn’t have any intentions in my return, just that, for once, I’d lead with yes.

The drive from the treatment center to Chicago was six hours. Alone, I watched the clock on the dashboard turn at midnight. “Happy New Year,” I whispered to my windshield, out to the empty highway, on the first of many legs of my journey home.

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“How many shirts are you bringing in your pack?” my spouse, Erik, asked me a few nights ago while packing for the West Highland Way, a 96-mile trek across the Scottish Highlands.

“Maybe one, and a pair of shorts,” I said.

“And do you have the snacks?”

“Some of them. We can get more when we’re in Glasgow.”

“Do you know what you want?”

“Whatever we find,” I said with a nonchalance that would have never existed in the throes of my anorexia. I closed my pack, threw it over my shoulder, and walked the length of our duplex and back.

“How does it feel?” he asked.

I paused for a moment, just a moment, before answering. I paused to relish the strength of my legs, the fullness of my stomach, the clarity of my brain. This body that had come so far.

“How does it feel?” Erik repeated, raising his eyebrows, awaiting my answer.

“Like home,” I said.

I’m 31 years old, but really, this version of me is only eight. Eight years of rebuilding. Eight years of getting to know myself. Eight years of yes, forcing a rejection of my desire for control. Saying yes to opportunities has meant leaping over self-consciousness and landing straight in the weird and bold and wild. Yes has led me to the farthest corners of the world. Dozens of countries. Different oceans. Across mountain ranges and desolate deserts.

I’m eight years young with a soul that’s lived multiple lifetimes. I carry the wisdom of pain, the wonder of a child, and out there in the world, in the unknown, on the long-distance trails and in the ocean’s depths, on the summits, and glacial lakes, I’ve found others like me. Deep-feelers and existential thinkers. People who have swam through hell. People who know what it’s like to rebuild.

I learned I’m a traveler, an explorer. Anorexia was a fortress built to survive in places where eccentricity was never understood. My sickness was environmental, not intrinsic. The farther I roamed, the weaker my eating disorder became. In the middle of nowhere, where my younger self would have never thought to look, my soul guided me to the edges of the earth, to the very places where I belong.