Before I met my husband, I’d had one other significant relationship in my life, and it was with my eating disorder. The thing about being entangled with your own illness is that you can anthropomorphize that sick part of your psyche and blame it for all your relationship problems, leaving you the victim in an abusive, manipulative partnership.
I can’t speak for everyone who has lost a chunk of their life to an ED, but this is my experience. However, now, surrounded by assisted reproductive technology print-outs and $5,000 worth of fertility medications, I can’t help but feel senseless guilt. As if I chose to prioritize a toxic beauty standard over my health and starve away a menstrual cycle that had run like clockwork since age 12.
Through the years, doctors reassured me that if I restored my weight to a “healthy” range, my period would return, and my fertility would be spared. I dutifully attended appointments, completed two intensive outpatient programs, kept food logs, reduced my exercise, and watched the scale steadily creep up—however, my period remained MIA. Over two decades, I repeatedly tried and failed to earn the prize I’d been promised, and every time I reached and maintained a goal weight but failed to regain my cycle, I slipped back into my disorder and started all over.
From 16 to 36, this dysfunctional dynamic with my body remained the primary relationship in my life outside of family. When I tried to date, the prospect of an actual human infringing on my long-term relationship with my eating disorder overwhelmed me. Somehow, someone broke through that barrier. Four years later, I’m married to that someone, sickeningly in love, happier than ever, and completely consumed by guilt, convinced my decisions led us to take up residence in the uncertain, astronomically expensive land of infertility.
Two facts are important here: eating disorders are not a choice, and neither is infertility. About 14 million people worldwide experience the former, and a startling 1 in 6 experience the latter. Every case of each is complex, nuanced, and the result of myriad factors. But intellectually, knowing these facts hasn’t halted my shame spiral, even though I know them better than most. I’ve penned so many stories on EDs, I’ve lost count. And for the last six months, I’ve contracted as an editor at Carrot, a global fertility care benefits platform that spares employees from incurring the full costs of treatments like in vitro fertilization (IVF), egg freezing, and—what I’m currently doing—embryo banking, which is the process of freezing one or more embryos to save them for future use. The irony is that as a non-full-time employee, I’m not eligible to benefit from the benefit company I contract for. I’ve never understood my Canadian husband’s gripes about this country’s tie between employment and healthcare like I do now.
What Carrot has been able to offer is unusual: full access to their platform, which includes unlimited clinician consultations, a resource library, and all the expert hand-holding my fertility clinic can’t provide. They’ve also covered a portion of expenses, an abnormally generous perk for someone who is, by corporate standards, a non-payrolled nobody. This, I suppose, is the payoff for part-timing at a company designed to address the innumerable stressors of infertility. But I lucked out in that regard; far too many workers—full-time or not—are left to foot fertility bills on their own.
In the absence of solid benefits, the average cost of IVF is around $12,400. In our case, creating, genetically testing, and freezing embryos will cost about $14,500, plus the cost of necessary and apparently arbitrarily priced medications (we were quoted everything from $4,000 to $16,000). If all goes well, we’ll owe another $5k or more for implantation, i.e., attempting to turn the embryo into a baby. All of this financial, emotional, and physical sacrifice guarantees nothing, by the way: women under 35 undergoing egg retrieval have a 51.1% chance of eventual live-birth delivery. That success rate drops dramatically every couple of years, and at 39, I’m hovering around a not-at-all-comforting 23.7%.
Hence the guilt. My recovery has been worth it in every sense, but it didn’t deliver back my period. My endocrinologist says my reproductive system suffered an “insult” at such a specifically vulnerable age, it permanently shut down menstruation. Hypothalamic amenorrhea (a communication glitch between the brain and ovaries leading to a lack of menses) usually resolves in a few months through weight restoration, proper nutrition, and reduced exercise. My situation wasn’t usual. So as we’ve researched costs, scrapped for funds, and tried to make sense of how the hell people just have free babies by having free sex, I’ve suffocated in guilt, wondering if my disorder might rob my husband of fatherhood.
But somewhere between bargain hunting for meds and pinching my once-loathed stomach flesh to inject said meds, I had to acknowledge how truly brutal this process is all on its own. Piling on unwarranted guilt—no matter how warranted it feels—will not improve our chances of success or turn back time. So I’m working on letting it go.
Another fact: eating disorders thrive on isolation, depending on their victims to retreat into the all-consuming obsession. Recovery has required a reintegration of connection and community, and so far, navigating infertility seems to require the same. But in my experience, finding safe spaces to heal from disordered eating has been challenging in a world rooted in diet culture. Finding unconditional empathy, compassion, and guidance through infertility? Totally the opposite.
Going on this journey set off a domino effect of acquaintances and strangers coming out of the woodwork to help—but it required me to come clean about what I considered shameful. I confided in women who’d gone through IVF, starting with my longtime yoga mentor, Kristin McGee. She wasted zero time in connecting me with Pamela Hirsch, founder of Baby Quest Foundation, an organization providing IVF grants. Hirsch connected me with board member Leyla Bilali, founder of education and guidance platform, Fertility Together. Without hesitation, these women scrambled to ensure I was on the right path, pointing me to the most affordable pharmacies, doling out priceless wisdom, ensuring I wasn’t alone.
These conversations sparked the motivation to seek out more nurturing and support—two words I routinely scoffed at in ED recovery. I started seeing a fertility acupuncturist who recommended the Egg Whisperer Show, and I realized I’d once interviewed host Dr. Aimee Eyvazzadeh. I wrote to thank her and my former coworker Dr. Ellen Vora for an episode they recorded on infertility-related anxiety. Both wanted to know how they could help me, what they could do, who they could connect me with next. This outpouring of care from individuals I barely know, and employers that owe me nothing more than a transactional paycheck has been staggering and somewhat disorienting, given the secrecy, shame, and seclusion I’ve grown accustomed to through my ED recovery.
Much like an ED, infertility is grueling, painful, and often prohibitively expensive to treat. I’m learning that neither can be addressed while entertaining guilt and solitude. In her interview with Eyvazzadeh, Vora said something that struck me. “There is a tension that exists between wanting to do everything we can to support our bodies and help with the success and then to not feel so responsible…it invites this feeling that we’ve failed or we didn’t do enough if [treatment] doesn’t work.” Vora said she hopes those navigating the infertility journey can feel “less shame and self blame in the psychospiritual journey of childbearing.” I’m hoping for the same.
If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, you can call the National Eating Disorders Association Helpline at 800-931-2237, text “NEDA” to 741-741, or click here to chat.