Personal Narrative: My Developmental Crisis

Being a teenager is hard and being a teenage girl is even harder. In your teenage year’s, you go through many different developmental crises and ultimately it helps shape you as a person later in life somehow. Before I begin discussing my developmental crises growing up, what is a developmental crisis? Well according to A Guide to Crisis Intervention, “Developmental Crises are normal, transitional phases that are expected as people move from one stage of life to another” (Kanel, 2014). One of my developmental crises happened to be struggling with an eating disorder. Some of the questions that I will be discussing consist of how I dealt with it, if I dealt with it properly, and how I would help someone going through the same thing. Middle school

My eighth-grade year I became more into fashion and would be obsessed with reading magazines like Vogue and became obsessed with looking like the models in the magazine. That year I learned how to start dieting so I thought and I also started exercising excessively. I started counting calories and became obsessed with that and only ate once a day, in addition to that I started running on the treadmill for at least 3 hours a night. While this doesn’t seem extreme, it really started to show on my body. Being 5’2 and with the body frame that I have, getting down to a certain weight can make me look extremely sick, and the weight I got down to at the time was 98 pounds. Over the next couple of years, I was still obsessed with dieting and my weight always fluctuated but I eventually began to weigh a normal weight until my sophomore year of high school. My sophomore year of high school was kind of like my eighth-grade year, I began obsessed with counting calories again, over exercising, and began taking laxatives. One day I had to go to the doctor’s office for a visit and during the appointment he told me that

Aside from hearing what my mother and doctor had to say I decided to help myself by not taking the laxatives anymore, eating more, and just eating healthier while also exercising daily. Thinking about how miserable and painful it was when I took the laxatives is what helped me stop taking them and thinking about how tired and drained I was during the day it what helped me starting eating regularly as