Warning: this article features mentions of suicide.
Kerry Washington is opening up about a devastating time in her life.
The Scandal alum reflects on her past struggles with an eating disorder in college in her upcoming memoir Thicker Than Water, explaining how compulsive exercise and binge eating ultimately consumed her everyday life.
“I was good at control. I could party all night and drink and smoke and have sex and still show up and have good grades. I knew how to manage. I was so high functioning,” Washington told Good Morning America‘s Robin Roberts in an interview airing Sept. 24 on ABC. “And the food took me out. Like, the body dysmorphia, the body hatred, it was beyond my control and really led me to feeling like I need help from somebody and something bigger than me or I am in trouble, because I don’t know how to live with this.”
The 46-year-old continued, “I could feel how the abuse was a way to really hurt myself, as if I didn’t want to be here. Like, it scared me, that I could want to not be here because I was in so much pain.”
