“I just want to be okay for a day. I want to wake up and be happy to be alive. I want to enjoy the company of people around me. I want to look in the mirror and be happy with what I see. I want to breathe the air freely and enjoy life.”
— things people with mental illnesses wish they could do
eating disorders need to be handled differently. Im going off, sorry in advance.
In high school, i was sat down with the rest of my health class, instructed by our gym teacher. This is where i had my “education” about eating disorders, though i was dealing with one secretly.
He talked about them as if they were a crime. He told us how to know if someone has an ed (they’ll wear baggy dark clothing, they’ll avoid food), and to tell on them. He told us it’s for women only. We made jokes about it. We had to watch a movie where a girl dies while having an ed and her best friend lives on feeling horrible about being her ed buddy while she was alive.
This movie was full of tips on how to hide an ed that i remember 7 years later. He must not have interpreted it that way.
I learned to be a better liar and i learned that people will hate me and pity me and find me revolting and call me ignorant and force feed me with a tube in a hospital if they ever found out.
So i kept quiet.
When i was 16 and my family found out i was purging, they sat me down intervention style and SCREAMED at me. My uncle, my aunt, and my grandmother all sat at a table and yelled at me about my biggest secret. They called me gross, immature, and compared me to my birth mother who struggled with the same thing.
They made me feel some of the most intense shame i’d ever felt. I felt stripped naked.
They took away my coping mechanisms (internet, tumblr account, certain TV shows, scale). They didn’t allow me to heal by choice or leave my coping mechanisms behind on my own because they thought my ed was a silly girl thing that I could quit whenever. But it wasn’t ever that simple.
Without my coping mechanisms, I turned to self harming.
To this day, the memory makes me shudder and reminds me to distrust them. They handled it horribly.
PEOPLE NEED TO STOP HANDLING THIS HORRIBLY. NOW.
The only thing that ended up helping was when i was forced to go to therapy. I was resistant at first. But my therapist was educated on the topic, took me seriously, and helped me handle my ed safely to slowly and comfortably to recover rather than shame me to shreds so i could stop being a nuisance.
Recovering took YEARS. It was not a simple decision like everyone told me it should be. But even with my current relapse, I know how to be safe about this and how to avoid hurting myself.
Here’s what i wished they told me in high school.
Eating disorders are treatable. You are not too far gone to try to get better.
Someones weight is not an indicator of whether or not they have an eating disorder. Anyone, regardless of size or shape or weight, can be dealing with an ed.
NEVER lower your goal weight.
Eating disorders will manipulate you. They are not funny, they are not cute, they are not just for girls: they can affect anyone and they want to hurt you. Eating disorders are not your friend, even though it will sometimes feel like it.
Bottom line: at the end of the day, there aren’t many endings to this aside from recovery or death.
Eating disorders can stem from other problems in a person’s life possibly regarding a lack of control, mental health issues, or other personal struggles that aren’t really centered around the way one looks. It is putting one “controllable” thing (your body) into your own hands and making it the center of your life so that the other uncontrollable problems don’t take up as much space in your head.
In other words, an eating disorder is typically a SYMPTOM of something else. Trying to “fix” someone by focusing on the eating disorder alone can just make the person turn to something else to cope (alcohol, drugs, impulsive buying, sex, anything addictive.) I turned to self harming.
Focusing on the ED alone is the equivalent of pulling weeds out, but leaving the roots.
You don’t have to drop your ED all at once! It can be slow. You may have relapses. But you can do it at a comfortable pace. As long as you recognize that you have to try eventually.
Having an eating disorder shouldn’t be such a shameful thing. No wonder people rarely try to get help on their own when it’s framed as a joke or when people can handle it so horribly.
It needs to stop.
We need knowledgeable people in schools teaching students these things so we can create more understanding eventual adults and overall, a less stigmatized culture.
UPDATE: i am not pro ana, so:
please stop asking me in the comments what the name of the movie was. I am just going to delete the comments asking and delete comments that mention the name of the movie. I don’t mean to be rude and i hope it doesn’t come off that way, I’m just doing the same thing i’d do if someone came into my inbox asking for ana tips. Even if that wasn’t the intention of the people who asked, i could see someone using the movie in that way and I’d hate to have enabled that.
For all my new followers: Some not-so-cute things about anorexia.
I want y’all to see the reality of this disorder.
EDIT: this is meant for those who are actively seeking out an eating disorder, or are romanticizing the illness, like “new anas.” this isn’t meant to cure anyone from anorexia.
1. being cold. all. the. time. you have to sleep with at least two blankets.
2. lanugo. think it’s cute to have thick hair ALL over your body??
6. you disappoint basically everyone important to you
7. it’s not cute to get smashed after one drink. it’s embarrassing.
8. forgetting everything. why did i walk into this room? where did i put my phone? why did i put my deodorant on the kitchen counter?
9. chewing food literally feels like you’re eating a live slug.
10. all those friends you love? you’ll basically never see them because you’re too afraid that they’ll suggest going out for lunch or try to give you food.
11. goal weights? not a thing. no matter how low your weight is, you’ll never be satisfied
12. this disorder literally kills you slowly, from the inside out
13. you have to sleep with a thick blanket or pillow between your knees because the feeling of your bones pressing against each other is too painful
14. your whole life feels like it’s a haze
15. concentration goes out the window. your grades will go down, you might even fail a class because for some fucking reason not eating is more important than getting a degree. think about that.
16. treatment is inevitable if you don’t get it under control yourself. and treatment is the worst experience you could possibly have – people FORCING you to eat, lots of crying, and its fucking expensive
17. you are so wasteful. all that healthy food you bought? you’ll eventually get to a point where you can’t even eat that and it just rots in your fridge.
18. it gets to a point where you care more about the number on the scale than your own fucking family
19. all your free time will be spent running. or walking. or working out. anything to burn off the calories you did (or didn’t) eat
20. eventually 50 calories is too much for one day
21. at a certain point, a size 0 is too big and all clothes look ill-fitting, not cute and baggy.
22. YOU ARE NOT IN CONTROL. no matter how much you think you are, you’re not. you’re a slave to your own brain.
23. YOU ARE A LIAR. you lie to your family, to your therapist, to your friends, and there’s no undoing that. once people know you’re lying, they’ll never believe you again.
24. this disorder does not make you special. it makes you sick. and it makes you look selfish and weak to other people. that’s the reality.
25. get help.
this is the reality of this disorder. it’s not cute. it’s not fun. it’s addicting. and it ruins your life. that’s it. it’s an illness and you have to see it for what it is.
Bitches be like “If you are suffering from any mental illnesses you should definitely talk about it with someone and seek professional help asap” and then never tell anyone about their own struggles.
