My journey

I am Sakura, a frontend developer attending a coding bootcamp, Technigo, a fully remote bootcamp based in Sweden. I have been living in northern Sweden with my two little boys and a husband since last April.

Today I want to share my story about my recovery journey from the eating disorder I suffered from for over a decade. It was self-recovery, as it was impossible to seek professional help, so it probably took longer than it should have. However, it has become my most valuable experience and the thing I am most proud of in my life.

It started when I was 15 years old, in high school, and someone told me I was chubby. I started anorexia (by the way, I had no idea what I was doing, I just wanted to be thin.) After 3–4 months, I lost over 10 kilos, but I still thought I was chubby. So I ate very little and calculated everything I ate and consumed. It became a sort of hobby of mine and I started to think about it all the time, which of course affected my grade. My grades went down and down because I could no longer concentrate on my studies but on food. My brain was thinking about food all the time. Gradually, I found a way to purge. I began to have a symptom of bulimia. That was the beginning of the hell.

After a few months of secretly bingeing and purging, my mother noticed that I had a problem with eating. (She had studied a bit of psychology, so she knew about eating disorders.)

My mother came to me and asked: “Do you throw up what you eat? “

I wanted to be honest and said “yes”. She was too shocked. We were both in a desperate state and we cried for hours. Then I realized what a huge problem I had and completely lost track of what I was doing.

We visited some doctors but came to the conclusion that we shouldn’t seek help from a doctor because they didn’t know much about eating disorders in Japan at that time. So most of the doctors had old information and thought that the reason for eating disorder was a relationship between a child and a mother. Nowadays, Eating Disorder has become a huge problem in Japanese society, as society’s expectation of thinness is extremely high. As a result, many more women and girls suffer from eating disorders than in the past, and there is more information about eating disorders.

In any case, I was too desperate to go any further and I could not go out of the house.

I felt that I was the most failed person and I believed that I was going to live like a failed person until the end of my life.

But my mother suddenly had the idea of visiting Paris. So we went. Although we only stayed in Paris for a few days, and as usual my mind was on food, so we visited many patisseries and bakeries. I could not stop myself from purging as well. However, during a flight back to Japan, I decided to become a pastry chef because I was so amazed by French pastries and loved to bake and cook since I was a baby (I started helping by cooking at the age of two and was always in a kitchen when I was little)

It also made me believe that I could recover from an eating disorder on my own if I kept trying and learning.

This was the starting point of a recovery journey that lasted for years. During that journey, I was a pariah most of the time. People looked at me like I was crazy, wired, and really stupid, unable to think. I also had a period of time when I also suffered from depression and a head voice coming from my back and making me so confused that I had no idea how the voice was controlling me. I suffered from concentration, sitting in front of a desk, so reading and studying was almost impossible. I used to love to read and study, so this was very shocking.

However, during my journey I also did a lot of things like traveling to many places, meeting so many different kinds of people who had totally different ideas, and experiences that I would never have had without the eating disorder and gave me such wonderful learning opportunities that were not on books and you have to learn by living. Most importantly, I met my husband who supports me when I need it and I have children who give me tremendous energy. Without them, I would still have the problem of eating.

I have learnt a lot from this recovery journey and I am so grateful to have had this opportunity. However, others might say that I wasted my time, my youth, and my energy. This is very true, as I have also lost so many other opportunities, such as academic, career, and more positive things.

I wasted myself on negative experiences.

But think about it. There is no utopia where everyone is happy and doing only positive and productive activities. There is always a shadow where there is a beautiful light, like where I live, an area close to the Arctic. In summer there is no darkness and just such a beautiful light, but in winter there is almost no light, but it is beautiful with darkness and white snow. I think life is just like that. There is a great moment where the lights are shining and it is just so beautiful. And there is a moment that is dark and depressing. But if you try to find something beautiful, you can find that too.

Now, I can finally concentrate on my study. I am so happy to be able to do this and have found my passion for programming. I cannot stop doing it and learning more and more. I would love to go to university and study computer science one day, as that has been my dream since I was in my early 20s. But for now, I need to find a job as a developer. This makes me extremely nervous as I have failed in this type of situation for over a decade. This is what I stand for and what I have to work for.

Conclusion: I think in the world we are in now, sometimes it is not easy to accept who you are. The world is growing too fast and there is just too much information about everything. The idea of capitalism, where there are only winners and losers, captures most people’s attention, so it is quite difficult to accept yourself when you fail. But don’t forget that even if you are a failure today, you won’t be a failure in the future. You can change the situation if you keep doing it. And in the much deeper sense of life, where there are only animal and nature concepts, there are no failures in the end.

Thank you for reading and have a nice week!

This is initially published on 

Medium