#anybody who uses their eating disorder to mock fat people knows exactly what they do

[yrtse]

Watching old videos from a time when I was super-anorexic is so weird, because I remember all my thoughts about all the people’s bodies, it was literally all I was thinking about, but since I’m not like that anymore those thoughts are also so estranged to me, I do not understand them, and I can see how weird and obsessive they were. Healing from such an illness is so strange, because there is such a clear distinction between the « you » at that time and the « you » that you are now that you see them as someone else entirely. Someone who didn’t think like you at all. But somehow they were you.

[extraterrestreilegal]

Chapter IV

My skin, the one I was born into was the thing I hated the most. I hated waking up everyday and having to look at whatever appeared on the mirror. I say appeared because for the past few years, all I ever heard was that I was fat and ugly. Mind you, I never cared for what anybody had to say about me, but those things were coming from my mother. I knew she’d suffered from bi-polar disorder and was getting treatment for it. But every time those words came out of her mouth, no matter how hard I tried to ignore them, they haunted me. I made myself believe these things to the point where I no longer recognized myself when I looked in the mirror. All I saw was everything I hated. Everything I was disgusted by was always staring back at me when I saw my reflection. I started developing a hatred for my skin. I started cutting and it was the first time in a while that I’d had relief from these emotions I had bottled up inside of me. And it felt great to finally feel something else other than emotional pain. Physical pain is what I fell in love with. Every time I sliced my legs open, I felt relief and the stress flowing out of me in little rivers of red.

I never wanted to become this self-hating person. My whole life I really tried to love myself, but everything in my surroundings kept on telling me that I was wrong to be me. I woke up in a home that never felt like a home. I went to school with people who didn’t know the pain I hid every day that I got on that bus. I was growing up feeling like the only thing I had left was my passion/addiction to art and my new found pleasure for cutting the skin my mother spent nine months to create inside of her womb. I had nothing in my life worth living for but those two things. Strangely enough, it was these addictions and the many more to come that strangely enough, kept me alive all these years. I am an addict and those addictions saved me more times than anyone could ever possibly understand. I spent my life chasing the next high/rush because it was the only thing I had to live for. I grew up hating myself, doubting my potential, denying my abilities, and hiding my intelligence because none of those things had helped me like my addictions did. They gave me the love and emotions that I wasn’t receiving from my parents. They gave me the love and emotions that I wasn’t receiving from myself. They gave me life.

Shortly after I started cutting, I started going deeper and deeper into my depression. Deep enough that one day after hearing the same thing from my mother after dinner, I went and gave myself a new way to relieve my negative thoughts. I remember her telling me that I probably wouldn’t be so fat if I could stop eating. So I did just that. Whenever I would eat, I couldn’t keep it down. It would make me gain weight. Every dinner we had was as a family at the table. And every day after dinner, I’d make my way to the bathroom right after because I felt disgusted by the thought of even letting my stomach process the food. This went on for months because it seemed to be working, I was losing weight and my mother finally made it seem like I was doing something right. She even told me to keep doing what I was doing because it was working. I cried the night she told me that because what I was doing felt so wrong to me. It felt right because it gave me relief, but I knew very well what I was doing was wrong. I knew that forcing myself to throw up could eventually lead to me having a heart attack at an early age. I knew that forcing myself not to eat could cause my body to start eating itself. But I did not care because for once, I was making my mother happy.

I know I speak a lot about making my mother happy and not my father. That’s because to me by the age of nine, I knew exactly what kind of man he was. He was an alcoholic. He was abusive. He was narcissistic. He was everything I despised. So by the time I was nine I can honestly say I stopped caring about pleasing him. He only liked what he wanted, when he wanted it. And if he didn’t get it his way, he threw a fit and became that angry abusive man I grew to hate. That’s why I always worried about my mother, because I knew what kind of man she wanted me to call a “father”. He didn’t even deserve that. He was anything but one my whole life so I grew to hate him and not care for him or what he thought of me.

Despite trying hard to quit cutting myself, I couldn’t because the feeling it gave me was better than the feelings I felt. I really tried to quit but I couldn’t until one day I found myself passing out after 52 cuts on my legs and 3 days of nothing but water. I remember I would drink a bottle of water before and during my meals to make it easier to throw back up. I remember that day. We had just finished eating milanesas (fried steak) and I was on my way to the bathroom. For some reason I remember wanting to cut myself, at this point I had found that surgical blades worked best because it glides through the skin. So I made my way to my bedroom and grabbed one of the blades I’d kept secretly hidden in the crevices of my closet’s interior frame. Shortly after thinking about the choices I was making, I made my way to the bathroom.

I finished relieving myself of the meal I’d forced down my throat. I caught my breath and started unwrapping the blade. I remember holding the blade in my hand and asking myself why I was like this. My mind became flooded with a million excuses to justify this behavior. Millions of thoughts that had no where to go because I couldn’t tell anyone. I knew what would happen if I told my religious, immigrant parents. I would be looked at as insane. I’d tried to tell them before that I didn’t feel loved and they mocked me for it. I never understood it because my mother was getting treatment for her bipolar disorder. How could she think like this even with her receiving her own kind of treatment for her own mental disorder. I couldn’t wrap my head around it for years. But in that moment, when all those thoughts of never feeling at home or loved came too unbearable to handle, I cut myself. I felt that same relief that I’d felt every time that I dug deeper and deeper. I couldn’t get the thought’s to go away this time though. I dug into my skin one time too much and I started feeling dizzy. All of a sudden I was starting to feel cold and when I tried to stand up I started falling. I fell into the tub and I remember laying there looking at my legs and just as I was about to pass out, I managed to turn on the water to the tub and I started drinking water as much as I could. My vision shortly started coming and I was finally able to move again. I got up from the tub and all of a sudden I was hearing Alex knocking on the door asking if I was alright. I caught my breath and wiped my face from the water still on it and I told him, “Yeah, I just dropped the shampoo.”

Without any questions he said, “Oh, okay.”

I now know that these behaviors were the product of the childhood experiences I didn’t have, and more psychological and physical abuse than I’d realized. I understand that my parents were young and that I should’ve always been my own person like I always thought I was. But I wasn’t just lying to everyone around me about who I was, I was lying to myself. I was now gay, depressed, bulimic, anorexic, and lonely. There was no hiding that from myself but I tried hard to deny it. I didn’t want to continue disappointing my parents. Something worth mentioning is that I started smoking cigarettes when I was nine years old. I’d seen my parents smoke before so I thought maybe if I learned they’d like me again, since they used to find it amusing that I was able to drink before. They indeed did not find it amusing and they both beat me when they found some of their cigarettes hidden in my clothes. At this point I was seven, I didn’t know what was wrong. In my head I really was just trying to get my parents to be happy at something I did again, but instead my parents now had it engraved into their head that their middle child was doing bad things. So they treated me accordingly, like someone who was always going to be doing bad things. Which is ironic because I never was interested in doing anything but making them happy. In my own damaged mind I was really hoping they’d make me feel wanted. But that feeling never came for many years.

[jessica--white]

the spiral of toilet water

I read this article about bulimia once. Poor people, it really makes you sick, doesn’t it?

The lazy anorexic, the nom and vom, the supposed ‘eating disorder’.

It’s bulimia my friends, the eating disorder nobody wants to have. Anorexia on the other hand… jeez she’s in high demand from unhappy women, second only to love.

Bulimia and its stigmatized association has almost a comedic theme to it. I know I’m adding this comedic aspect to the whole situation; it’s a coping mechanism! I swear!

Humour me though, it’s not like you can say your eating disorder is about ‘control’ when that is exactly what you’re lacking.

As I write this, I feel as if everybody will understand what I’m trying to say. In reality, barely anybody will. Rather than an eye-opening piece of writing that will make the reader feel and recount back to thatrough time in their life, I’m just going to get a bit of awkwardness, and the rare sympathetic thought. Anyways, for those who don’t understand bulimia, so virtually everybody (including myself); binging and purging is mandatory, whether it is via exercise, vomiting or laxatives. I, personally, don’t have experience with laxatives. That shit’s not for me.

On a more serious note, it’s a compulsion where extremities of control are present.

Whatever serious note I just added to that was probably in one ear & out the other, or in a bulimics case, in one hole, out the same 20 minutes later. I guess it also could be out the other if you’re into that laxative thing… like I said before, not my cup of alpine tea.

This isn’t supposed to be some year 7 research assignment where the basics are stated, but here I am googling bulimia like I haven’t had first-hand experience for the past 6 years. I’m often introduced to this girl, Bulimia is her name, Mia for short. She is usually accompanied by a cliché dictionary definition. “Bulimia is an emotional disorder characterized by a distorted body image and an obsessive desire to lose weight, in which bouts of extreme overeating are followed by fasting or self-induced vomiting or purging.” But, I’m a cliché kinda gal, so I dig that for her. I’m the stereotype of an eating disorder. Female. Teenager. Divorced parents. Unhealthy upbringing. You know, all the cool stuff. Mia is thin sometimes, but on other days she resembles a heifer. Sometimes, she is determined, other times she seems dull and lost. It’s as if she needs to make up her mind, does she want to be thin, or massive? She definitelydoesn’t mind when she’s shovelling food down her throat, but, must do when it’s coming back up in the toilet bowl. Literal money down the drain…

This was how I saw her when she was drowning me. She was a person that I didn’t want to disappoint. Was she my mother, who wanted me to excel in sports rather than academics? Was she my father, who didn’t want a ‘fat’ daughter? Or was she my school, who thrived off appearances? To this day, I’m still unsure who it was that influenced the personification of ‘Mia’, but they weren’t kind.

If bulimia had a positive, you could say its lack of ability to be romanticized. For some reason, I don’t think that idealizing the vomit smell on her breath and marks on her knuckles compares to protruding hip bones and pale, delicate skin.

Clearly, none of those things should be romanticized, but this world is a sick place, I could add another pun here, but after a while of joking about bulimia, it gets a bit sad. Talk of mental illness or trauma induces this ‘sad’, awkward and uncomfortable reaction from folks on the receiving end of the speech. So, how are we able to stop the shame? As much as I preach to ‘stop the stigma’, I’m realizing what a hard task it’ll be. I could start the mission for destigmatization of mental illness with this terrible piece of writing; but the humour won’t be funny to an audience. Well, it may be funny… but then there is a sense of mockery! Mocking us bulimics?! I mean, fair, but still. If there was another tactic to destigmatize mental illness; It would be to talk about it. Again, people on the receiving end of this ‘mission’ can’t exactly say or do anything if they haven’t had first-hand experience! Agreement or ‘understanding’ without known background diminishes the purpose, hence why that approach won’t work. If you’re in to romanticize the perfect outlook for this ‘mission’ a little more, lack of agreement comes hand in hand with a lack of concern. The ideal lose-lose situation!

So, is it more funding we need? More publication? Less association? More talk? Less categorization? More, or Less?

Or, is it a magic skinny pill?

Mia tells me it’s probably the last option.