She saw the world through stained glass eyes
A living End
January, 1999: Emergency admission to hospital, suffering frequent seizures, total memory loss. Number of seizures unknown - several bruises indicate a large number. Basically, dying. They suspect that I have not taken my medication for epilepsy. But I don't have epilepsy. I have anorexia. The staff won't listen to my parents. In a moment of sanity in hospital I refuse to touch the epilepsy medication. And the seizures stop. It takes months for me to get my memory back. I have lost an entire year of work towards my first degree at university.
What are you looking at?
Think 'anorexia' and you image skeletal girls, mostly teenaged, who for some reason have grown drunk on our culture's obsession with Thin. Somehow, life will be perfect when they have starved themselves so much they look like the skeletons hanging up in biology labs at school. Anorexia is not just a diet gone mad. Anorexics are not freaks, they are human beings with a psychological disorder. All the confusion and self-hate we have we take out on our bodies. We cannot communicate our pain with our voices, so we use our bodies.
It's much easier to think about food than our lives. For me, it was always much easier to deal with the depression, the utter self-hatred I felt, when I was starving. Anything really bad that happened during the day could be wiped out by stepping on the bathroom scales and seeing I'd lost another pound.
At the freak show
Anorexia is characterised by an obsession with weight and appearance, especially a drive towards 'thinness'. The anorexic will take any measure in an attempt to achieve this goal, to the detriment of everything else in their lives. They will exercise obsessively, take diet pills, laxatives (despite the fact that laxatives have no effect on weight loss, they just drain the body of much needed fluid), diuretics. Anorexics develop strange phobias, a dread fear of 'unsafe foods'. They exist in a routine of eating the same thing every day, hoping all the time that they will eat a little less with each day. There are a thousand 'tricks', including looking at pictures of severe cases of anorexia. If you think you can scare an anorexic with these pictures, you put in their hands tools to encourage them to starve more.
What I see when I look at photographs of the starving, the tortured, I shudder, because I am aware of the dangers involved, and the internal pain they are going through. Because I myself have been there. The saddest moment of this whole thing was talking to a girl who gave me the URL of a website with pictures of girls who had died of anorexia. It was meant to scare sufferers out of it, but she was using the pictures to trigger herself. She said they looked so 'beautiful'. We don't look beautiful. We look like our own victims, the result of a long, complex and deathly battle with the self.
This site
This site is about my personal battle and experience with anorexia. I have included writing on being inside the anorexic mind, poetry and pictures. I have written of my own story, all in the hope that this may help our understanding of this condition, and offer those seeking to recover some hope that you can get better, you can have the things you long for so much - love, pleasure, sensation, life.
