When I was first diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, I immediately thought it was false. I immediately thought that there was no way that I was anorexic.
Trigger warning: Descriptions of eating disordered behavior.
When we look at the pasted photographs across the media, anorexia seems to equate to paper thin status. I was not paper thin. I was, however, malnourished, depressed and slowly killing myself.
My eating disorder was never a simple quest to mimic Photoshopped models, though I’m sure that our society’s emphasis on appearance and losing weight had some unconscious effects. But never did I wake up and think that I wanted to be like a model, because I wanted more than that.
See, for me and many other eating disorder sufferers, losing weight and controlling food was a path to perfection. I breathed a twisted sigh of relief because despite my other failures, I could always lose weight, I could always count calories, I could always meet society’s views of health. So maybe I wasn’t worthy of true love or of protection, but I was able to control my body. It was a belief that being thin would allow me to win the affection of others without being a genuinely good person, because for a very long time I thought that people liking me for me was impossible.
My eating disorder and depression were always incredibly intertwined. Physical malnutrition can lead to depression, but I believe my depression led to my eating disorder…
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