Young or old. Rich or poor. Black or white. Anorexia Nervosa shows no prejudice in the choosing of its victims. Once chosen, their lives are never the same, turned upside down with obsession and lies. There is nowhere to hide. Anorexia will always find you. You spend your whole life trying to rid yourself of this demon only to realize that in the end you will never erase the marks it has left on your soul. Forever you will be branded from your fight with battle scars that wont ever heal. You will question what is real and what is just an illusion. Your idea of the world narrows and life seems at a standstill, until death slaps you in the face.
Anorexia creeps up on you slowly at first. Changing what you think, one thought at a time, until you are a robot ready to obey its every command. Quickly you absorb yourself into a world centered not on you, but on your appearance. You have created a place where nothing else matters but the numbers on the scale. You have stepped into the mirror, so to speak. At the time, you never considered the colossal consequences on the other side of this newly created world, but who often does? Sitting down and weighing the pros and cons of an eating disorder is not something a person with one does.
Riddled with self-doubt and an overwhelming sense of failure, you turn to the one thing you feel can turn your life around: anorexia. From the outside it looks so grand, a life of discipline and self control. Everyone envies you and comments on how strong willed you are. It then rapidly develops into a monster that gains control over you. At some point you lose your life to this disorder. You no longer control your life, it controls you. Everything you do is centered on pleasing your eating disorder, as if it were a person living inside your head. Nothing is ever good enough now. Those first five pounds just weren't enough, maybe ten will be better, or fifteen. Once you start, the numbers are never low enough. You feel as though you can always do better, achieve more and weigh less. Your days are spent lying to your family and friends, and with each lie anorexia grows stronger. "I'm fine," you say so many times you feel like a broken record. You can almost perceive the changes in your personality. You are slowly morphing into a person that is willing to do whatever it takes to secure your goal of emaciation. You are now a ruthless shell of a human that has no regard for the tears you are bringing to the eyes of the people that once meant the world to you. Now they are merely objects in your way. You are willing to lie, cheat, and steal because morality is no longer an issue as you have stripped it away in your hunt for embodied perfection.
People say that you just aren't the person you used to be. Of course you're not, now you're thin! Yet, to the contrary they are praising you for the weight you have lost. "Wow, have you lost weight? You look great." Which only furthers your obsession with this monster. You feel like an actress given the part of a normal person, which to you is quite a challenging role. An exhaustive effort is given to appear happy and healthy. You allow your days to be ruled by your rituals. On one hand these behaviors are your comfort, your identity, and your life. Yet on the other hand you are tired of submitting yourself to this mindless torture. All the while inside you are screaming for help. Your body feels like it is being pulled in two directions at the same time, rendering you helpless to just sit back and watch.
When you are in public you act as though nothing is different and life is the same as it always has been but alone your anorexia spirals out of control, as if you are leading a double life. You spend your nights in secretive rigorous exercise. Hours are spent calculating the calories in this and that and determining how much you will allot yourself for the following day. Were you a bad girl or a good girl today, you ponder? How many sit-ups make up for that piece of gum you chewed in class today? You wonder if others see you as the true pig you feel you really are. As you glance over into the mirror, scrutinizing yourself from head to toe, you wonder who is lying, the mirror or you. People say you are too thin but they must be lying because there is no such thing as "too thin." They must be jealous of your self-control. You have filled your head with these ridiculous lies for so long that you soon start fully believing in their accuracy. You feel as though you have become two different people. Everyone else has become the enemy. You isolate yourself because you are convinced that everyone else is crazy and they only want to ruin the one thing that brings you happiness.
After a certain amount of time starvation will take its toll on the body, mind, and soul. You become very textile. Your senses seem to become more keen and whatever you do allow yourself to eat you want to taste intense and last forever. In attempts to satisfy the epic hunger that follows you everywhere, you submerge yourself in anything to do with food. You find yourself studying cookbooks or reading calorie guides. You have this profound need to cook for anyone and everyone, and then watch them enjoy what you will not allow yourself. The amount of food others eat at any one sitting now perplexes you. You don't understand why people would eat so much if it were not needed to sustain an existence. You almost want to laugh at them because they are under the delusion that food is necessary for their survival. If only they could feel the high you get from starvation.
You begin to live your life with the sole intent of avoiding contact with food of any kind. You no longer see your friends because the chances of food coming up in a social outing is highly likely. You have become the best darn liar there is coming up with any and every excuse in the book as to why food never touches your lips. " I'm not hungry", " I don't eat meat", " My stomach hurts", "and I have the flu." People are so gullible, it makes you snicker. It has become a game now. You against everyone, with your anorexia positioned as the devil's advocate.
Soon people's reactions suddenly change from compliments to concern. They're just jealous, you reassure yourself. Everyone is telling you that you look sick and that you need help. You take this as meaning you look fat because that is how your anorexia has trained you. You start cutting back on your food intake and upping your exercise in hopes that you will meet that magical number in your head. When you get to that number everything will be okay again you tell yourself over and over.
At this point in the game, it is beyond hiding anymore and you are beyond trying too. You have big black circles under your eyes, your hair is falling out, your fingers are blue from being so cold, you can't stand up without blacking out and people are noticing. Death is staring you in the face and you are laughing at it. You are testing the limits of your body's ability to sustain life on the smallest amount of food necessary. It is as if you were standing on the edge of a cliff experimenting how close you can get before you plummet back to earth. In the back of your mind a part of you is crying out to be rescued from this private hell. You know that this is a fruitless search for happiness as it is only rendering you a life filled with agony. Every ounce of strength you have left is slowly wasting away before your eyes. You have worked so hard to keep anorexia in your life that you don't know if you have the courage to live without it. You wish someone would hold you and tell you everything will be ok, but Anorexia tells you to fall in line and stop complaining
You feel so trapped in your own skin. You don't know right from wrong. Have you gone crazy? You want more than anything to be normal. It has been so long that you aren't even sure what normal means anymore, or if it is something you could ever achieve. You can't give this up not yet anyways. How can they even ask you to do something like that? Besides you only have ten more pounds to go, then you'll stop. Promise. You just want to hold on a bit longer, before you give it up.
Soon you begin to conceptualize that no one can make you eat. They can't chew the food or make it go down your throat! It's your body and you will do with it as you wish, regardless of outside forces pressuring you. This idea gives you the impression that you hold superiority over everyone else in your life for the first time, which fills you with a false sense of power that is hard to walk away from. Everyone is finally paying attention to you. What you do is now seemingly worthy of their attention. For once in your life people are worried about you and not vice versa. As much as you despise this illness you relish in the fact that the spotlight is on you and letting go could mean you lose this favorable admiration. You aren't sure if it is worth the gamble.
There is always a part of you that longs to go back to the way things were before your life was taking over by this unidentified thing that words fall short of describing. There are no words that can accurately describe the torture that an eating disorder puts a person through. For you, the world has simply stopped. As a matter of fact there is no world, just a wall lined with fun house mirrors. Nothing means more to you than your illogical pursuit for thinness. Left, right, you don't know which way to go. You want to scream and cry but you can't. You can't even remember the last time you smiled without effort or laughed without consciously making yourself. You want to stop, but it's to late. It is too powerful to stop.
Laying in bed at night, listening to the uneven rhythm of your weakened heart, you dream of the days when you were happy. You want so much to return to the times when everything made sense and life wasn't so hard. Why can't you just throw in the towel? Why can't you stop? You want to let go, you really do, but a fear washes over you. You remember that you are nothing without anorexia. It is a part of you. It defines who you are. Relieving yourself of it would leave you lost and vulnerable. It is just simply too much to risk. Anorexia is safe.
Anorexia is no longer a disease to you, it is your lifestyle. Every moment of everyday is consumed with numbers and rituals. Yet in the end what good is it? The numbers only grow smaller and the rituals more detailed. As you have come to learn small is never small enough and thin must always be thinner. You are at war with yourself struggling to love the person that stares back at you in the mirror. Your search for happiness on the scale is nothing more than looking for gold at the end of a rainbow. It isn't there and it never will be no matter how low the numbers fall. In the back of your mind you know this, you have always known this, but it doesn't seem to hinder your obsession.
You remember how great it seemed at first, like an answer to your prayers. You were finally in control of something, losing weight and feeling happy. Everything changed so quickly. With a blink of an eye it turned into you trying to obtain the unobtainable. The funny thing is that something you started doing to feel in control has left you with no control at all. You feel like you are being pulled apart. Anorexia tugging on your left arm and common sense of your right. What scares you the most is that you don't know which way to go. Everyone is telling you to stop and to just snap out of it. Your family is being ripped apart by your own pursuit of bodily perfection. You wish it was as simple as to just snap out of it but this is so much more complex than they could ever know.
Tears stain your pale face as you think of everything that you are destroying and all of the people that love you so dearly. The whole world seems like it has given up on you. Your family and friends are tired of having to sit idly by and watch you waste away and you know it isn't fair to ask them to suffer like this. You want to be normal you really do, but you can't. Why don't they understand? You wish that they could step inside your head, if only for a moment, to feel what you feel. Day after day the pressures mount against you. Your own body has turned against you, how can you fight back? You long for the days when life was easy and you weren't pitted against yourself. Is it too late to stop?
You look at yourself in the mirror and the ghostly figure staring back at you is barely recognizable. For the first time you realize that you don't know who you are or what you have turned into. You are being held captive in your own body. How did you get to this point? You used to have goals and aspirations of greatness. Anorexia was eaten away at your confidence, happiness, and your health. Now you wake up everyday with the sole intent of avoiding death. What happened to the person you once were? Is it buried deep within, or has it been lost forever? You think of everything you have sacrificed and worked so hard for, all that you have lost, what you have risked your life to obtain and you realize that you have but one thing. You are thin. In the end what good is it? You have nothing but your emaciated state you show for years of dedication and sacrifice. It is at this moment that you conceive the notion that thinness is insignificant compared to the loss you have suffered to achieve it.
An ending to this story would be ludicrous because there is no end to anorexia only a transition when the person suffering realizes they can successfully fight back. Contrary to popular belief there are no cures for anorexia, no pill or magic shot, just a state known as recovery. Recovery is the point at which the inflicted learns that they must fix themselves. There is no sudden jump from disordered to well. Only time can reconstruct what the illness has destroyed. Day by day you learn to reclaim your life. In a sense you must rediscover who you are and what life means to you. The journey is arduous and never really over. But at some point it gets easier and when you reach that point you have beaten the monster. I know because this is not just any story, the character is not just any character. This is my story…this was me. I am a will and testament that recovery is possible. You should never underestimate the strength of your desire. Being sick is much easier than the path to health, but sickness is a coward's way out of life. Once a person has made the decision that life is worth living the battle lessens and things get easier. No one can make you better. It is a choice someone must find within there heart. People can help along the way but in the end it is up to you to save yourself.