“We’re only as sick as the secrets we keep.” — Maria Nemeth
A gentle note: This essay focuses on what an eating disorder felt like — the secrecy, isolation, fear, anxiety, and loss of self — rather than specific numbers. The author intentionally omits weight, calorie counts, and other figures, noting that a number cannot tell you how sick someone is or what is happening inside their mind.
Morgan DiPrimo opens in 2010 — the year of the iPad, Angry Birds, and Bruno Mars singing “Just the Way You Are” — when she was deep in an eating disorder. As her body became more deprived, her world became smaller. Social life meant restaurants, spontaneous plans, and photographs: all things that complicated the rigid routines she had built around her illness. Every invitation required a new excuse. Eventually, avoiding everyone became easier than keeping track of her own lies.
When people stopped asking her to hang out, it felt like relief at first — no one questioning her, no one interfering. But what felt like freedom was actually isolation. She started choosing her eating disorder over everything else. Her thoughts grew darker and more obsessive. Leaving the house became anxiety-provoking. Panic became familiar. Happiness started to feel foreign.
The essay traces how secrecy became the illness’s most powerful tool — and how the weight of keeping the secret eventually became heavier than the secret itself. DiPrimo reflects on what it took to finally tell someone, and how that first act of honesty, however small, was the beginning of something different.
Originally published on morgandiprimo.substack.com.
