“How many times have you been to rehab?” Kate asked over coffee.

“Once.” 

“Once?” Kate’s expression betrayed her surprise. She’d been through multiple facilities herself. 

I’d been hospitalized once, then transitioned to an outpatient program, eventually reentering the world with weekly therapy sessions. A year later, my parents, doctors, and therapist warned I was heading toward a relapse. My weight was dropping, my emotions were unraveling, and my obsession with food and my body consumed me. The conversations became more urgent—my doctor and parents threatened hospitalization, asking, “Is that what you want?” I didn’t respond.

All I wanted in rehab was to get out. But once out, I felt a strange desire to be put back behind those concrete walls again.

But it never happened. I was never readmitted—not because their threats worked. Nothing they said inspired me to better control my eating habits and improve my caloric intake. My doctor warning me of the consequences of my slipping weight did not quiet the insidious thoughts circulating in my head. Nothing anyone tried to warn me against was a match for the reflection I battled in a mirror. I was determined to go back, I even begged them. 

During  one of our many crisis sessions, admitting, in one breath, “I want to go back.” My therapist reacted by handing me a box of tissues, while I saw my parents  sink lower in their seats. Dad remained hyper fixated on the seam of the cushion under his lap before admitting, “I can’t. If it didn’t work the first time, what’s to say a second time would be any more successful? I don’t have much hope in what would come from another stint.” 

I was stunned. 

Most of the people I met during my time at UCLA were seasoned veterans—some were recurring students, while others were progressing transfers. Friends like Kate moved through various facilities, admitted into both public and private programs from the more traditional to the  more experimental. Growing up in Los Angeles, adolescent rehab wasn’t seen as a stigma; it felt like a rite of passage, a way to earn your stripes. So when I thought about going back, the choice felt obvious, even expected. 

But Dad said, “No.” Mom agreed, and to hear it felt like an anvil landing in my lap. 

During that session, I couldn’t admit why I wanted to go back-though it wasn’t from a place of wanting to get better. For one, I couldn’t imagine a life where I was better. Instead, it was comfortable and offered a way to live as I was. My issues were fully exposed and accepted around people who understood me, as opposed to being “ seen as a disappointment.” 

Since elementary school, my opinions shifted based on who I was talking to. I’d change my stance on Britney Spears’ music depending on my friend’s view. I avoided buying clothes until I saw what the most popular girl in my class was wearing. My opinions were slow to form because I feared what making a choice would say about me. Even in rehab, I continued to shape my judgments based on the majority. By some clever manipulation, I convinced the hospital staff I was a vegetarian, despite knowing the only lettuce I’d ever eaten was iceberg, and I'd never tasted an avocado. But the other girls were vegetarians, so I needed to be one, too. 

The things I initially hated in rehab-the structured schedules, the controlled meals, the lack of privacy–these limitations became comfortable.It was a relief to surrender my individuality to how someone else defined normal existence; and to my surprise, it was then that I got to experience some lightness while living fully aware of my messy truth. In rehab, nothing about myself had to be hidden, only the real world – made up of social circles, grades, personal responsibilities and self-confidence remained beneath a disguise. 

During my hospitalization, the real world changed. After six or seven months, Facebook shifted from a private college network to a public spectacle. My best friend had ended one relationship and was already deep into another. My classmates had new hairstyles and started to wear more make-up. There were songs played on the radio to bands I’d never heard of. Social plans no longer revolved around sneaking into movies but going to parties, where everyone drinks and snorts coke. And then there was me. The girl who entered rehab, thinking of herself as a teenager who was getting into great shape and becoming healthy; released, becoming the girl with anorexia and body dysmorphia. A shift that made all the confidence issues I struggled with before that much more difficult.

Coming out of the clinically controlled world of 2West, I felt more out of place than before I’d gone in. High school cast me as the main character among the crazies because normal people don’t go to rehab. But for crazies, the some that do, it was normal to be committed again. And I sought to be in a place that never changed. 

But there was more…returning was not just out of a need for something comfortable, it could justify my feeling that I was as sick as everyone seemed to think. 

I questioned how critical my case, or my disease, really was. Was I as sick as they’d said, or did I just want to think I was? I never threw up. My skin was bare of any self-inflicted cuts, just deep impressioned bruises. I didn’t do drugs, I didn’t drink, or need to have a feeding tube forced down my nose. I was a major in Anorexia with a minor in Body Dysmorphia – a solitary case with a single entry ticket. A second course of critical intervention would validate my experience and mitigate my guilt for putting everyone through this. If I was going to be branded the Anorexic, I wanted to feel worthy of the title. 

But my father said, “No.” 

“It didn’t work the first time. What’s to say a second time would be any different?” We were caught in a dilemma, each of us holding different views on what rehab represented. For me, it was a place to exist, a way to navigate life. For him, it was supposed to be a solution, one he no longer believed in. 

I don’t know what would have happened if I had gone back to UCLA. Would my recovery have improved? Would things have gotten worse? Would I have started an endless cycle of moving in and out of different facilities? Perhaps, over time, I would have acquired another hyphenate–cutter, coke-addict, alcoholic? What I’ve come to realize is how complex and challenging the relationship between recovery and rehab truly is. 

Rehab isn’t some magic fix–it’s just the beginning. Being discharged is the easy part. The real challenge is stepping back into the world and not going back. We’ve been fed this idea that treatment ends when you leave, but that’s when the real struggle starts. At least, that's what it felt like for me. Like the hard part wasn’t ‘getting treatment,’ it was figuring out how to live with myself after.