Beginning

I've created this blog for a couple of reasons. First, to fill a void. I've looked for sites like this before when needing support, the anti-pro-ana (the anti-ana?) sites, and never found one. At least not one that was maintained for very long, and that alone is scary. So here I will wage my personal war against the culture of eating disorders as well as my own demons. Which brings me to my second purpose here. This will be the place where I will chronicle my uphill climb out of the pit that is anorexia. I've already done a lot of the leg work, but now comes the really hard part. I hope that this blog will help me in that battle. Third, I want people (or at least the few people who might stumble across this blog), to know the truth about anorexia. There are so many myths and stereotypes about eating disorders. They are sensationalized in the media and the victims are treated like freaks, despite the fact that EDs are as American as overpriced bottled water.

So this is where I tell the truth. The whole truth, the ugly truth, the inconvenient, unapologetic, unpopular truth.

Let me begin with some groundrules.

#1: I will NEVER post food journals. They are triggering to me and anyone with an ED who might read this. I will post all my scary thoughts about food, but listing what I consume is playing with fire.

#2: I will not provide my name. It doesn't matter anyway. I will try to give voice to the millions of faceless girls, boys, men and women who suffer with this everyday. Just think of me as your daughter, your sister, your friend.

#3: If you are a pro-ana blogger and would like to share your thoughts - bring it. Mine shouldn't be the only voice here.

These are all the rules I can think of right now. I'm sure more will come up later.

And now I'll tell you about me.

I am twenty-two years old. This whole awful trip started two years ago. For almost a year I had an active eating disorder. By that, I mean that I actively starved myself, eventually consuming less that six hundred calories a day. I was never a full-on faster. I would not have been able to function at all, and at the time, I was a fiercely competitive student in a poisonous university theatre department. But that's another post. I also took diet pills and abused laxatives. I vomited sometimes. Only when I felt like I'd "binged" (you know, like a muffin. or more than one piece of fruit). I was never a true binge-and-purger, since purging was one of the most humiliating, degrading experiences of my life. Imagine looking at yourself, and realizing that you have reduced yourself to being on your knees, with your head in a toilet, all the suspicious rings and stains of that toilet inches from your face, and the expulsion forces hot tears out of your eyes. Every part of your face burns and your body is sore and you feel like refuse. That was purging for me.

I got better and better at being anorexic (ooh, Rule #4, I will NEVER call it ana). Within months, I went from being the ideal weight for my height, to dangerously racing toward the point of no return. Oh, and there's Rule #5. I will NEVER post my weight or BMI stats. These are also triggers. When I say that I was reaching the PONR, I mean that I was significantly underweight, looked sick all the time (I look back at pictures and I literally look like a cancer patient), my skin was actually turning yellow, but I had not yet gotten to the skin-and-bones stage. The stage where you can't hide the disease anymore. The stage where force-feeding starts.

And after almost a year of it, I got lucky. For one thing, I had fallen in love. We had gotten together soon after the ED started. He was a fiercely intelligent and talented grad student. He also became my best friend. And the day he told me point blank that if I didn't do something to change, this disease would be the end of us, was the day I started eating again. But J's (as he will be referred to here) statement was just the catalyst in a reaction that was slowly taking place already. The way this disease felt and still feels every day is like split personalities. There is the disorder, and there is me. I know that when I am in the throes of disordered thinking, I sound like a person possessed. I have lost most of my friends through the loss of myself. But I was and am a surprisingly smart person, and that person was always keenly aware of just how fucked up my life was. And I was miserable. Everyday was hell because every moment, every single thought was devoted to food and my weight. I had ceased to be a person. And the sane one inside knew that I couldn't continue living like that. So, slowly and with a tremendous amount of effort, I started eating normally again. It took a good six months before it became habit, and the turning point was one night, at J's apartment, when I was incredibly hungry. I hadn't eaten dinner, and I was going to resort ot a veggie sub at Subway - a safe food - but they were closed. J was sitting there, eating a pizza, and not just the hunger, but the sadness and the feeling of injustice was gnawing away at me. After staring at the food, fighting with myself, crying..I ate a piece of pizza. And then another. And then a third. And then it was over. I had done it. I realized that I had control, not the disorder.

The eating got easier after that. I became obsessed with health and nutrition, yoga, homeopathy, and ayurveda. I started treating my body like temple, gained weight, and now I'm always told how much I "glow." But the secret is that my mind is still the torn cesspool that is was back when I starved. The sane me just puts up a better fight. But I still consider myself anorexic, I'm just an anorexic who eats. This is where my story begins and this incredibly long post ends.