Everybody knows somebody.

This statement is, if anything, vague, and it can apply to just about anything. Sometimes it’s positive: Everybody knows somebody who’s climbed on top of our famous granite base with two other friends and pretended to be Alma.

But sometimes, this mantra gets a little dark. Everybody knows somebody who’s had their heart broken. Everybody knows somebody who’s had a grandparent die. Everybody knows somebody who has an invisible disability, one that affects their core emotionally or mentally, one that’s tough to spot, and that society refuses to talk about.

It just so happens that this premise — that everyone knows somebody — is the motto for this year’s National Eating Disorder Awareness Week.

NEDA Week, which starts Monday is a tricky one. It’s not a week that puts you in a constant good mood, like finals week when you have no finals. But it’s something you can gear up for. It’s not a holiday, but I’d argue that it’s more important than Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day put together.

But NEDA Week is especially tricky because of the way we look at eating disorders. It’s not something that’s proper to talk about in mixed company. We would rather talk about our diets, but not the dark extremes of dieting. The mention of anorexia, bulimia or binge eating makes us squeamish; these are terms that quickly come out of our mouth like wildfire, before we cover them up with a nervous pause and a change of topic. And that shouldn’t be the case, because the numbers argue otherwise.

According to a 2006 survey done by the National Eating Disorders Association, nearly 20 percent of 1,000 college students — guys and girls — have an eating disorder. We don’t often see the eating disorders because they are invisible, and we don’t talk about the issue. But that doesn’t mean many students in college, on this very campus, don’t struggle with it.

I know. Because I’ve wrestled with that struggle before.

I was once a mess of distorted body image, of issues projected into the physical realm, of urgent food intake and late nights doing that last sit-up to purge off fat. I went from casually thinking I wasn’t good enough to hating my body to not taking care of it. Instead of focusing on the 20 pounds of self-doubt and self-loathing I needed to shed, I focused on the 20 pounds of body weight I wanted to shed. Dangerously. 

The point of me digging up the past now is that I only started to get better once people around me started to have difficult conversations about my health, and me getting help. My wonderful, wonderful friends and family started to take notice. And when that wasn’t enough, they began to question, began to ask how I was doing, began to get real with me about getting counseling. And it was only through their honest conversations that I began to gain some semblance of me again.

How I felt about adding my story also shows how we perceive eating disorders. I originally wanted to delete these three previous paragraphs, going through my internal struggle: Will people think I’m sharing because I want attention? Will I get strange looks; will people see me as someone with a huge weakness? Will I be judged for sharing my difficult past? I finally just closed my eyes, added the darn story in and dealt with it. Because it would be hypocritical not to, because it’s a problem we can’t afford not to address.

NEDA Week is a week that we should ignore on our campus, and eating disorders and other major emotional or mental invisible disorders shouldn’t be packed away, purposely ignored and forgotten. But all day, every day, we should keep fighting the good fight. We should check up on our loved ones that we know need help, and the loved ones that we suspect need help. We should remove judgment from those who are struggling and take the time to learn about the struggle for what it really is. And we should never forget to tell our friends that they’re beautiful, our young cousins that they don’t need to look like Miranda Kerr or Channing Tatum or ourselves that we are perfect.

It’s time to stop the silence and start the conversation, no matter how difficult, awkward, nerve-wracking or hard it might be. Because everybody knows somebody.

Tolu is a senior in Media. She can be reached at [email protected].