Navigating Thin Privilege With An Eating Disorder
Trigger Warning: This post contains mentions of eating disorders.
Nobody likes admitting they have privilege. Life is hard for everyone; so when someone comes along to tell you how good you have it, your immediate reaction is to tell them about how terrible your life really is.
I am the epitome of privilege.
I’m a white, middle-class, able-bodied woman with a graduate job and a deposit for a house. I attended private school and a Russell Group university, and never had to take out a loan.
One of the hardest things for me to admit is that I am also thin.
At age 15, I found myself locked in a bathroom stall at school, sobbing as I forced myself to expel my lasagna lunch from my stomach.
At age 17, I stayed up until midnight doing jumping jacks to counteract the 400 calories I had eaten.
At age 18, I got dizzy every time I stood up — from a lack of food, a lack of nutrients, and a lack of desire to keep on living.
All of which meant I was thin. I was a thin white girl with all the privileges thinness and whiteness afford women in this society.
I was also the most mentally ill I had ever been.
For a long time, having thin privilege was hard to reconcile in my mind. On the one hand, the social justice warrior in me knows that society has always valued me because of my thinness. On the other, the broken teenager in me wants to shove my eating disorder in the face of anyone who dares suggest being thin has made my life easy.
There’s nothing “easy” about planning every social interaction around how I can avoid eating; no privilege in compulsively watching Masterchef instead of eating dinner; no joy or success to be found in sobbing on your bedroom floor after eating a biscuit.
My thinness meant that people took my struggles seriously. Had I ever been brave enough to seek professional help for my eating disorder, I would have been given it in a heartbeat.
To this day, my thinness means I can buy clothes in every store I enter. I can order a large pizza without anyone judging me too harshly — because hey, that means I’m not anorexic. I can flit through life without my body being scrutinized at every turn because my body is what society has deemed acceptable, desirable, ideal.
As a rational person, I know all of this. I know what thin privilege is and how it operates in our society. But there’s still a part of me that turns a blind eye to my thin privilege, in a way I never would to my whiteness or wealth.
There’s still a distinct disconnect between my body image and the way society sees me. Although I’ve largely left my disorder behind, I still can’t look at my body without wondering what it would look like if I were thinner. I still have nightmares about binge eating and weight gain. I still weigh myself every morning.
But none of that matters to society, which deems me to be thin and therefore superior in beauty and in health. Whether I like it or not — whether I feel it or not — I am a thin girl with thin privilege. And I need to accept that.
