Elva Júlíusdóttir is a 42-year-old Hafnfirðingur and mother of two children. She is the new podcast interviewee Strong together.
Elva has three brothers, two older and one ten years younger. She grew up with lots of love and care in a good stable home.
At a very young age, she began to feel bad about herself, she was unhappy with her appearance and often felt bad for no reason.
Self-harm from an early age
“I remember when I was eight or nine in the bath, pinching myself everywhere and thinking it would be better if I wasn’t there,” she says, adding that the self-harm started right away.
Elva is, in her own words, a belligerent, obsessive ball who has had a very distorted image of herself since childhood.
“I never found anything that could explain this. Once I was taken to a house by a child molester, but my brother saved me, he couldn’t do anything to me. It’s fine to have such big brothers, but he was still only about six years old there.”
Death of a friend
During her teenage years, Elva started drinking like other teenagers of the time, but never broke any rules about time outside or other things that her parents had established.
What changed her life a lot was a trauma she and everyone around her experienced when she was 17 years old.
“When I was 17, I was home alone, my parents were abroad and the four of us were going to spend the night together at home. It was Eurovision and Páll Óskar was competing. We are Went to a party and we were drinking, two of us got in first, but the other two kept drinking.
There was an accident and one of the survivors drowned and died,” Elva said, adding that it was a very difficult time.
“I immediately started thinking about everyone, there was no trauma care or anything like that. My parents brought the whole group of friends to our house and I was very worried about the parents of my friend who passed away but completely forgot about me”.
I went drinking every weekend
Elva was sent north to her grandmother and grandfather in a protected environment and these terrible events were not mentioned, as was the spirit of the times.
“I came back and I was not ready to deal with the pain. I started working a lot and in a bar on the weekends where I met people who were on drugs. I started drinking every day. weekends and more. There I met the father of my child and got pregnant soon after.”
Elva’s son is sometimes called Mr. Reykjavík, jokingly, because when she got pregnant with him, she was invited to enter a beauty pageant, which was a huge acknowledgment for the insecure little girl. she she always was.
“I participated, but then found out that I was pregnant and was very sick during the pregnancy, was throwing up all the time, had a little bump and was getting compliments all the time. .”
Bulimia for thirteen years
She recounts an incident some time after the birth of her son where someone told her she had put on a bit of weight, which should have been normal, having been vomiting for nine months.
“I made a conscious decision when my son was seven months old to develop bulimia and started vomiting. This disease had me for 13 years. After I made that decision and started throwing up, people went back to it. to compliment me, which is devastating and like a vitamin injection for this disease.”
An eating disorder is a serious illness that behaves like alcoholism. People who suffer from eating disorders are in the same kind of hide and seek and their lives are controlled by the disease.
In Elva’s case, family trips and camping were all about toilet location.
“If the toilets were in an unsuitable place where you could hear them clearly, where there were others, the trip to the residence was useless and I was in a very bad mood. I hid, everything like an alcoholic hides his consumption, for 13 years.”
Exchange Addiction
After those thirteen years and a car ride with her father that ended up in a psychiatric ward, Elva hit some kind of bottom and went to get treatment for her eating disorder in Hvíta Bandinu, and it turned out. went better than expected.
“I didn’t drink a drop of alcohol while I was in this treatment, but I fell into it the day I graduated and we had a three-day binge, it had to go party.”
Nothing happened after this treatment, so Elva actually changed her addiction and switched to mind-altering substances. There was still work to be done at the base, the thing she was running away from, the discomfort that still bothered her.
The alcoholism got worse and she recounts how she hit rock bottom about four years ago when someone rang her doorbell who had never done it before and took her home as she had written a farewell letter and was about to commit suicide.
You can listen to Elva Júliusdóttir’s interview in its entirety on the podcast Strong together.
