This is a very difficult article for me to write because it requires me to lay myself bare, but I believe that it could be necessary to better understand myself and perhaps provide some clues to understanding how one can fall into addiction.

TW: addictions, sexual assault, anorexia, suicide

In the beginning:

We are from Eupatoria in Crimea (south of Ukraine), The war in Ukraine started in 2014 for us. We lost part of our family there: my mother, Valentyna, my big sister and 3 of my grandparents.

The rest of us (Babusya, my dad and my little brother and myself) moved to Kiev when the war broke out and after a year my dad managed to get a job in Lyon in France, we left Ukraine.

I had been doing rhythmic and sports gymnastics since I was little at a high level. Once in France, they found me a coach to continue my activity. Let’s call him Svolota (it’s not a very polite word in Ukrainian, I’ll let you find the meaning for yourself). He had been training me for a little over a year, 6 to 8 hours a week. One evening, after training, it was late and night had already fallen, Svolota offered to take me home.

But he didn’t take the right road and took me to the middle of nowhere. He locked the car doors and threw himself on me… I was 13 years old.

It was after this event that my eating disorders began. Looking at myself in the mirror, I began to disgust myself. I found myself fat and ugly, I just wanted to disappear. So I wanted to end it all. I swallowed all of my mother’s sleeping pills, like they do in the movies, but it didn’t work. Although unconscious, I threw up some of it (a natural reflex of the body when it ingests toxic substances in too great a quantity) and the rest was eliminated thanks to the stomach pump I had in the emergency room. It was when I woke up that I confessed what Svolota had done to me.

There was a trial but it ended in a dismissal due to insufficient evidence. I felt like I had no control over anything. I had even failed at committing suicide. I had to regain control, and that came with food.

I first reduced the amount I ate and the number of meals I had, but very quickly my dad started forcing me to eat. That’s when I learned how to make myself throw up on the way to school.

The bad encounter.

I must have been barely 15 when a guy who called himself the “Waiter” started to take an interest in me. He was 27 and liked skinny girls. He was also one of the local drug dealers. He wasn’t even handsome, but one day he caught me crying and gave me some attention. I felt special. He offered me my first dose. I knew it was stupid to take it, but I was suffering from the images of my assault that I had constantly in my head and it was a way to escape from my unhappiness.

He made advances to me, uninhibited by the drug, and having the impression that I was really listened to I accepted. It was frankly crap but I continued several times to get my doses that I couldn’t afford otherwise of course, but also because doing it desacralized sex in my eyes which somehow made what Svolota had done to me less “serious”, at least that’s what I hoped.

It was my little brother who discovered that I was flouring my nose. When my parents found out of course it was war at home and I ran away to end up at my favorite distributor.

The shock

There I continued to lose weight, cocaine is an excellent appetite suppressant. One day the police finally showed up to arrest my boyfriend. I was 17 years old, I was 1m70 tall and weighed 39 kg, a body mass index of 13.5 instead of 18.5. I was hospitalized for severe malnutrition.

It had been almost two years since I had seen my family and here we were going to meet again but that’s when I had the biggest shock of my life. Symon, my little brother with whom I have always been very close, did not recognize me when he entered the hospital room and as for the face of my dad when they saw me… The hardest part was seeing the tears on Babusya’s face.

It was at that moment that something clicked in my head and when I looked in the mirror I finally saw myself as I had become, a real bag of bones.

We can get through it

It was that moment that gave me the will to get through it. There was the detoxification treatment which was long and painful. They say that you replace one addiction with another, that was one of my fears but it seems that this addiction has become sport.

For my eating disorders, it was in Ireland that I got rid of them. I underwent therapy in a specialized center in Dublin after my dad decided that France was definitely not working for me. Why Ireland? I don’t know. Maybe he’s discovered a passion for the Dubliners.

Today I still consider myself a drug addict. I always will be. I haven’t taken anything for over a year but the fight against relapse will always be somewhere in me. Indeed, when you fall into an addiction, you are more likely to fall into another one, like alcohol for example.
As for my anorexia, it is no longer there but has left after-effects. I no longer feel the sensation of hunger. It happens to people who are malnourished for a long time. So for each meal I have to have an alarm to remind me to eat. However, I have found pleasure in eating and cooking again. During my therapy I made friends who are still friends today.

Life goes on and it seems much better to me today, with my family and friends.