Ana
When I first met Ana, I thought she was a bitch. So superficial, so stuck up and judgmental. She had no filter. Hateful words would spew out like toxic waste. The vapors of what she said would linger around like a thick fog. I would listen and watch from what I thought was a “safe” distance, soaking it all in like a dehydrated sponge.
Maybe that’s where it first started to go wrong. There was no one there to stop her. No one to disprove her words or actions either. “Maybe she is right?” As children we are so absorbent to all that goes on around us. We are so quick to believe, almost anything really. Whether it’s the truth or a lie. We don’t tend to question it. Usually, the adults in our lives can correct us though, to steer and guide us in the right direction, down the right path. What happens though, when there isn’t anyone there for you to lean on?
I don’t know exactly why Ana noticed me. I was invisible, like an imaginary friend almost. Perhaps that was my mistake. She smelled my loneliness, my desperate need for someone to notice me. For someone to depend on. Either way, she found me, and once she did, she latched her strong jaws onto my very being and locked down onto everything that I was.
There weren’t any real red flags at first. We were pretty much normal, pre-teen girls. We would sit together, alone in my room, and just hang out. She would help me decorate my room even. My floor was littered with magazine clippings and cutouts of our favorite models. We would tape them up onto my walls. Next to their thin, tan bodies were words and phrases that stuck with us: “Skinny”, Beautiful”, “Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.” Ana called it “Thinspiration.” I liked the sound of that . . .
More and more, Ana and I started to hang out. At lunch she kept me company. I finally had someone to sit with! We shared all the same classes too. She was the only that talked to me, the only one I listened to as well. By summer we were inseparable. No one could pry us apart. It was like we were glued together. She even moved in with me! No one really noticed anyway. The turmoil of my home life guaranteed that. She became my best friend. Without her, I was nothing.
By the start of the new school year, I was starting to feel sick. I felt so cold, like my bones were made of ice. My skin and body felt heavy, yet I was translucent. I felt like I would melt away into nothing and that the ground would thirstily drink me up. I couldn’t sleep, my mind and body… Ana… wouldn’t let me. My days and nights blurred into one violently colored picture, moving around me so fast that I felt like I had to run faster and faster just to keep up with being alive.
I lost weight. A lot of it. People were now starting to notice. Doctors were now starting to notice. I was like a fragile little doll they said. But I like it. I like the feeling of being so empty it hurts. The feeling of when I drink ice cold water (the colder it is the more calories I can burn) and it slides down the back of my sore, swollen throat and crashes deep into my empty stomach. My knuckles were cracked and bruised. My eyes, dull and darker than night. I even lost my period. Has it really been a year?
“Keep going, you’re doing so well!” Ana would tell me. She wasn’t letting me eat anymore. Every bite I took, the scoreboard in my mind would flash like lightening and the numbers would illuminate behind my eyes. I had the caloric content of anything I could put in my mouth memorized. I was even afraid to lick a stamp—5.9 calories per lick.
My days were filled with Ana and I binge watching “My 600lb Life” and standing in front of the mirror bawling and hating myself. Ana was always there with something to say. Often words of “encouragement”. “You can’t stop now… you’re not there yet. You have to keep going. You don’t want to end up like them, do you?”
“No, I don’t”.
I often hear people telling those with an eating disorder to “just eat”. You see, it’s really not that simple. In order to eat, one must feel hungry. What happens when you’re so depressed you have no appetite, even though you can feel the bile in your stomach planning to revolt and force itself up inside your throat? In order to eat, one must get out of bed and find and then proceed to make the food. What happens when you’re so weak, that even lifting yourself out of your bed requires the help of someone else, and even then, once you’re on your feet, the simple act of standing has you breathless, as if you had just finished setting the world record for running the fastest 5k? What should one do, when even if they want to eat, they can hear the record playing over and over in their head about how food is evil, that they will become sick (as if they aren’t already) and that everyone and thing they love around them will leave them? How do you eat when the voice inside your head keeps saying, “Food is the enemy. YOUR BODY, is the enemy”?
Eating disorders aren’t about food. It’s about control, but what happens when the eating disorder becomes you and you lose that control you thought you had over yourself? Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate amongst all the mental illnesses. Often, it is because the damage that is done (with bulimia, the constant binging and purging and anorexia, starvation) is irreversible and sometimes even goes unnoticed. It’s a hard and long battle and once you enter treatment, you must stick to it your entire life. Much like an addict has to keep going to meetings in order to stay sober. It is something I struggle with to this day. I want to be healthy but at the same time, can I become too health obsessed? While Ana is only a whisper in the back of my mind now, there are still some days that I “miss” her . . .