The Spaces Between

Going to college was a difficult transition for me.   Everything I had known was shifting, in a way that felt unpredictable and out of my control. It felt like everything around me was in a volatile flux. The autumnal descent into winter had begun, and I found myself wilting and greying with the deadening leaves.   Trigger warning: Graphic descriptions of eating disordered behavior.   When the depression set in, my body anchored me to a world I didn’t want to be a part of. So I cut it away. I starved it away. I ran it away, until I was just a naked body with craning neck standing over a grey scale; until I was just a number in retrograde. I occupied my mirror like it was a world. I was a two-dimensional reflection, a warped representation—an outline, the spaces between.   “She’s too skinny. There’s something wrong with her,” I remember overhearing a family member telling my mom when I came home for winter break. My family’s comments about my weight were coming from a place of concern, but they were still directed at my body. I found myself feeling perversely affirmed by their comments. I took their concerns and warped them into positive feedback about my body aesthetic. At the same time, I felt ashamed, like I was being accused of a pathology. I felt more alone than ever.   I justified my actions by saying, other people have it worse. Other people eat less, run more, weigh less, puke more. It was not until I accepted that I had an eating disorder that I could finally get the help I needed to break the dangerous habits I had formed.   This is important: My family member was wrong about something. There was nothing ‘wrong’ with me...   To continue reading the rest of these misconceptions in this story from our partner, Proud2BMe, click here.