Laying in a hospital bed in Melbourne, a nasogastric tube ran down Peta's throat.
Warning: This article contains content about eating disorders that may be distressing for some readers.
The nerves in her stomach had stopped working; her teeth were cracked and rotting.
The culmination of a lifetime of hidden trauma.
"I'd reached a point where I couldn't walk," she says.
Since Peta was just a child, she has lived with anorexia nervosa and other eating disorder sub-types.
What began as excessive exercising and purging as an 11-year-old would see her spend years running the gauntlet of an at-times broken health system, until she received a dire warning from doctors at 18.
"If you don't stop, you will die."
"They did a test and noticed that my stomach had stopped working, it wasn't digesting food like everyone else can, and that's when I was given the tube," she says.
"My body was giving up, and that's the thing to me that made me go, 'Oh, I might actually need some help, and I might actually have to give it a shot.'"
The road to recovery is seldom straight or narrow, but across the country, young Australians are working to create open conversations around eating disorders.
Above all, they want others to understand the complexity of eating disorders, and to smash the stigma around seeking help to ensure that no-one has to go it alone.
'I didn't have to focus on what was actually going on'
Peta still remembers the moment her world became shrouded by self-loathing.
Her primary school graduation was coming up and her mum had taken her shopping for dresses. Looking back at herself in the changing room mirror, her childhood was inexorably changed.
"I really didn't like my belly, so I thought to myself, Oh, let's just start exercising more, and I really don't want to be eating this much,'" she recalls.
With the cycle of starvation and obsessive exercise kick-started at just 11, a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa binge-purge subtype emerged by 13.
A formal intervention by the health system at 14 saw her labelled with EDNOS: eating disorder not otherwise specified.
Reflecting on her early years growing up in the regional Victorian town of Bendigo, Peta recalls playing a game with her brothers, where they would weigh themselves after dinner.
One night, her mum joined in, and she "realised that I weighed more than her".
"In my head I was like, 'No, that shouldn't be happening,'" she says. "I stopped eating and I started purging."
Unbeknownst to many, she had been also been experiencing abuse around the same time.
Speaking candidly about her journey, she believes she started "engaging in these behaviours to distract from my day-to-day life".
"What starts happening is that you start to become consumed by it, and you just go 'I'm not going to eat, I'm going to work out, I'm going to go purge.'
"I look back on it now and I didn't have to focus on what was actually going on in my life."
'To them, it was early prevention'
In any given year, 1 million Australians are living with an eating disorder, while 9 per cent of the population will experience one at some point in their life.
A multi-faceted issue to which no-one is immune, Kevin Barrow, the chief executive of the Butterfly Foundation, likens it to firing a gun.
"Genetics load that gun and the environment pulls the trigger," he says.
"There's definitely a genetic link to eating disorders, but the social environment and the overall cultural context does make a difference.
"Schooling, social media interactions, friend networks, trauma — there's a whole variety of cultural factors that impact the development of eating disorders."
For Peta, who has a family history of anorexia nervosa, it's a sentiment that hits close to home.
After expressing thoughts of suicide and self-harm to a school counsellor when she was 14 years old, she was referred to Victoria's child and adolescent mental health services, which "picked up" on her purging.
"They said to my parents, 'We think Peta has an eating disorder: these are steps we're going to take and we're going to do it early,'" she recalls.
"To them it was early prevention, but for me it wasn't, because I had already [been purging] for a few years. It only takes a few months to start that cycle."
'It was almost like a form of acceptance'
Almost 300 kilometres south in the regional Victorian town of Warrnambool, Sienna understands the complexity of eating disorders all too well.
"I was eight when I was first diagnosed with anxiety and depression, and that kind of all unravelled around that time," she says.
"For someone who is so young, to go to someone and say, 'Hey, I want to kill myself because I'm fat,' I think that is a really jarring thing for any adult to hear."
The 16-year-old grew up in the age of social media — to put things in perspective, "Facebook was invented the same year I was born", she says.
For as long as she's known, there's been "this connotation that fat is bad". When she'd watch movies as a kid, "all the princesses had really skinny waists and their best friends were the fat funny ones".
"I'm not super proud of it, but I would take photos of myself and write ugly and fat on them and put them on my mirror," Sienna recalls.
"So I saw that every morning. It was almost like a form of acceptance."
According to Mission Australia’s annual Youth Survey, undertaken by 18,800 young people between April and August 2022, over one in three (34.5 per cent) respondents were extremely or very concerned about body image.
Australian youth are being "bombarded with unrealistic portrayals of lifestyle and body image", the Butterfly Foundation's Kevin Barrow says.
So how do you combat it?
"I think it's about educating kids to value their body for what it can do, not what it looks like," he says.
"Kids change a whole lot in their early developmental years, so it's about understanding that and avoiding things like body dissatisfaction occurring, which can be a risk factor for an eating disorder.
"It's also about teaching healthy attitudes to eating and food, so not demonising good foods and bad foods — it's just food."
Sienna credits the early intervention of a counsellor, and a network of supportive teachers who gave her a "safe space to voice" what she was experiencing, for helping her to understand what her body was capable of.
But after moving from Melbourne to Warrnambool in her early teens, she found herself "regressing".
"It was about a two-month wait, probably even more, to get into a mental health service and Headspace," she says.
"The mental health system is so overworked and understaffed — there were so many other people who were on the waitlist for longer than I'd been."
'I was hiding all these behaviours'
It's a situation playing out across Australia, with well-documented barriers to care often compounded outside the nation's capital cities.
Research by the Butterfly Foundation, conducted in 2020, found that those in regional, rural and remote areas reported a lack of specialised services, support groups, and inpatient and outpatient services.
"Even with online health tools and phone lines that you can call, with so many of those, they'll answer and then they'll put you on hold for 40 minutes," Sienna says.
"They have so many other people on the line because it's just so understaffed."
In Peta's case, after being diagnosed with EDNOS at 14, child and adolescent mental health services "gave a broad statement and said, 'Let's try this,''" she says.
While she knows "everyone wanted the best" for her, "there just wasn't any counselling or support" for her or her family during that time — something she believes could have "changed the outcome".
"[The intervention] kind of stopped essentially at the six-month mark," she says.
"I was hiding all these behaviours, so they went 'Alright, you're good now.'"
Increasingly isolated from the world around her, and unable "to see a life without" her eating disorder, Peta's physical and mental health deteriorated as she approached the end of high school.
By the time she turned 19, her "body had given up".
"I could not digest anything at all," she says. "But my eating disorder was all I knew."
'That was the start of my body healing'
In 2020, Peta was involuntary admitted to hospital, where she was diagnosed with gastroparesis, a condition which causes the process of emptying the stomach to slow down.
She had dropped to an alarmingly low weight and was having heart palpitations. Blood tests were showing that her "body was not working".
"That was the start of my body healing and getting better and me starting to realise that I was not getting the nutrients that I needed," Peta says.
"Suddenly my brain was working and going, 'Oh, this is something I actually need to look after and this is the long-term effects of purging.'"
By Peta's own admission, recovery is a "lifelong" process. There's no switch you can flip that will negate a decade of trauma.
But through the ups and downs, young Australians with lived experience want to create an open dialogue around eating disorders, to ensure others don't have to struggle in silence.
"It's still a constant battle that I'm fighting, and I do have to challenge my thinking a lot of the time," Sienna adds.
"But I'm so grateful to have all the support that I have and the platform that I have to share my experience, because I know so many people aren't in a safe space where they can talk about what they're going through, or they simply just don't have the access or the resources to do so."
'Life is going to be amazing'
Little by little, day by day, Sienna can see the impact these sorts of conversations are having within her own life.
She's talking openly with her 11-year-old sister about body image and self-esteem, while those around her have developed a greater understanding of mental health and all its aberrations.
"Whether it's a young person, one of my sibling's friends or someone I've never seen in the school before, they come up to me and have a chat," she says.
Reflecting on the sense of isolation that marred her early years, Peta doesn't mince words: "If you don't discuss it, it's always going to be this hidden thing that no-one wants to talk about".
Now a qualified peer support worker in Kyneton, she knows recovery doesn't have a fixed end date, nor will the physical and emotional scars of childhood trauma ever fade entirely.
But with a strong support network, the help of a psychologist, and outlets like painting and footy, she's found something she never thought possible: hope.
"Life is going to be f****** amazing," she says.
The ABC's Heywire competition is open to all regional Australians aged between 16 and 22.
The annual competition provides a platform for the younger generation, in pockets of Australia that rarely see the spotlight, to "tell it like it is".
If you are aged between 16 and 22 and would like to find out more about the ABC Heywire Competition, go to the ABC Heywire website.
