neda week
Happy National Eating Disorder Awareness Week from your favorite depressed anorexic!
!!TRIGGER WARNING AHEAD!!
This week has been hard for me. Eating disorders are becoming super trendy and all week I have seen people post about their “disorder”. Unfortunately, it has really made me tap into my competitive nature. It has made (mentally/internally) invalidate other’s experiences. In a sense, I feel like if you have not been hospitalized, you don’t have the same level of disorder as me and the girls I’ve gone to treatment with. To be completely honest, I feel superior because I have been more sick than the girls who are just randomly posting about how they hate their bodies and they miss a meal every once in a while so their doctor said they have an eating disorder. I even go as far as to tell myself that they don’t have an eating disorder, they just have disordered eating and just wish they could be as sick.
It’s pretty gross when you think about it and it’s certainly not something that my healthy self is proud of thinking.
I think it comes from a place of struggle. I have been weight restored for two years now. I went from the size of a second grader to a healthy girl in her twenties seemingly overnight and that sucks. It doesn’t take me saying it for people to know I’m super uncomfortable with my body. I feel like I’ve lost a lot of my identity by being weight restored and to be fair, I’ve lost a lot of support. A good deal of my sorority sisters used to check in with me and ask how I was when I was sick. They would share their experiences with me and express their support. Now that I’m weight restored, I don’t really hear from anyone and their compassion is completely gone. I’ve seen this happen in a lot of areas of my life.
Being a hospitalized dying anorexic is what I am best at. It is the best part of me and the part that gets my needs met the fastest. It is so fucking hard every single day to not be that girl right now. There are very few people that understand that or understand what it is like to put your life on hold to sit in hospitals for months on end just to learn how to eat again. So, I do get pretty emotionally aroused (I hate the word triggered) when I see people trying to claim my experience. At least, that is how my eating disorder views it.
This week, I am trying my hardest to avoid contributing to that narrative. I am forcing myself to keep my sick pictures locked away on my phone and not flashed all over Instagram. I am trying to keep myself from needing to prove that I was sicker. I am not playing into my eating disorder’s need for approval and validation. I’ve spent five years in treatment, I have that validation already. I am attempting to bring compassion to the girls who want to share whatever their story may be. I am trying to feel proud that they want to share. I am trying to find happiness in the progress I have made- even when I don’t see it as progress towards healing.