An eating disorder.
“This is not about food.
This is not about looking good in a dress or wanting to
be a supermodel. This is not about wanting the cute guys to turn their heads
and stare at your beauty. This is not about going to a store, sliding a size
zero skirt over your hipbones, and laughing all the way to the check out
counter.
This is not about wanting attention. This is not about
enjoying feeling death and refusing food until you need to be force fed with a
tube in an ICU. It is not about deliberately pissing off the nurses on the ED
unit by hiding your clif bar and boost under your sweatshirt and stashing
butter in the bed pans. It is not about selfless starving for all the children
in Africa. It is not about the latest fad diet or losing the holiday weight. It
is not about reading fashion magazines and pining for the Body Mass Index of
Paris Hilton’s pet Chihuahua. It is not about getting a good man/woman. It is
not about religion, G-d, the media or culture.
This is about having the self-esteem of an insect. This
is a polite way of committing suicide. This is about having no life because
it’s impossible to go out with friends to a restaurant and order a bowl of dry
lettuce. This is about weighing, measuring and counting pasta, cereal, raisins
and anything that passes your lips, including toothpaste. This is about secrets
and lies and shame. This is about not wanting to admit that you need to eat.
That you deserve to live.
This is about being scared. This is about being
terrified. Of everything.
This is about control. This is about numbing away the
feelings of abuse. This is about starving away the pain. This is about wanting
to disappear as to not be taken advantage of again. This is about hiding under
layers of clothing that are mostly black so that no one sees your womanly body.
This is about non verbal communication. This is about avoiding. This is about
denying the past. This is about intense self hatred.
This is about needing so much that you can’t stand it.
This is about wanting to not need anything at all. This is about not wanting to
be touched but afraid to be let go. This is about having emotions that bubble
up and spill out and scare people away. This is about being so overwhelmed and
traumatized that it’s easier to avoid everything by obsessing over the amount
of calories in a grapefruit. It is about getting lost in the mirror and scale
instead taking responsibility and just f*cking dealing.
This is about wanting to be safe. This is about wanting
to curl up in a nutshell and ignore the big bad world that’s too noisy and
dangerous and can’t be trusted. This is about not trusting anyone and relying
on food (or lack of) to give you an all enveloping comfort blanket when the
feelings bloat you up and make you feel fat, ugly and intolerable in your skin.
This is about really crappy coping methods. This is about
a way of life you’ve known for 13 years. This is about habit and second nature.
This is about making a choice that will quite possibly kill you. This is about
chaotic relationships, hospitalizations, devastated families, worried friends,
treatment programs, trying and failing, and more hospitalizations. This is
about losing your period, failed kidneys, and hollow bones. This is about
cardiac arrest at age 21. This is about being sick. This is about not being
sick enough to think you need, or agree to go into, treatment. This is about
being so sick that you have to be court ordered into a hospital.
This is about trying to be understood. This is about
fighting with all you’ve got and more hard work than you ever imagined. This is
about exhaustion and tears and needing support. This is about fighting a battle
with yourself and the world. This is about trying to survive.
This is not about food.”
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