I Never Wanted To Be Thin. I Wanted To Be Invisible

I’ve always hated my body. It was never thin enough, curvy enough, muscular enough, tanned enough. You could say my anorexia was my solution to those imperfections, but then you’d be falling for the same lies I used to tell myself to avoid the truth of my disease. My starvation was never about thinness, but self-destruction. I wasn’t anorexic because I wanted a body that was easy to love, but because I found myself impossible to love.

I didn’t want to be thin, but invisible. Once you’ve dived beneath a survivable weight, your body becomes less beautiful, less female, less human. You turn into a ghost.

At my most androgynous, I had annihilated all signs of my sexuality, as though I could undo my rape that way. The woman who had been assaulted was gone, and the person who'd been destroyed was visible to everyone.

Anorexia was not an attempt to be pretty. It was an attempt to die.

The trouble is that it doesn’t provide a quick death. One day, you have enough energy to finish your workday, and the next, you can’t stand long enough for a shower. Your heart loses its rhythm. Your bones weaken. Your organs become sluggish and your immune system shuts down. You’ve arrived at your goal: to disintegrate, but anorexia's promises are empty. You find you’re exactly the same person you were when this all began. Your trauma remains. You still don’t feel invisible. Your self-hatred grows, and your ability to cope with it vanishes with your physical strength.

The first time you skip a meal, you have one problem. When you’ve skipped a thousand, your life becomes a war zone. You can’t work up the strength to cope with your next flashback. You can't keep track of your finances. Your career evaporates and your relationships degrade, so any love you once relied on to survive turns into loneliness.

Acting on an eating disorder is like dropping a ball from the top of a mountain. It will roll to the bottom no matter how much you try to control it, and down there, there’s more suffering than you ever imagined possible.

Eating disorders are set up to fail. They promise the sun and deliver a black hole.

Anorexia is a liar.

Nothing more.

These days, I have an imperfect body, which I nourish and take care of. Being around me isn’t like being in a war zone anymore, so my life is full of love instead of loneliness. I’ve worked through all the things that made me want to starve myself to death. Anorexia still comes knocking some days, and it always will.

But I don’t answer the door. I hope I never will again.