“We need to reject the false narratives around anorexia”
“Even now I worry I’m telling the story wrong. Is E unhappy? Did my parents enable us in our sickness, or were they just powerless to reverse the tide? I can hardly conjure those years of my life in memory without thinking I’ve committed some grave narrative sin.
I’m not the most reliable narrator. (To be fair, you probably aren’t, either.) I spin stories about people in order to understand them better, or to soothe or entertain myself. I sometimes balance my sanity on unstable materials — love objects that don’t stay put where I’ve left them. It can be hard to accept that your “characters” — Mom, Dad, sister — don’t belong to you, the tale-teller…
We need to tackle the false narratives clustered around eating disorders in our culture — clichés that vex and complicate treatment, contributing to low recovery rates and a frightening death toll. By looking harder at both the literature and the science of anorexia, we can expose where the plotlines conflict, where the self-deception and self-sabotage sneak in.
The most specific thing I can contribute is my story. I want to tell it as honestly and accurately as I can…
Anorexia is the mental health equivalent of the red shoes that make you dance until you die. It is a performance — of femininity, of damage, of power — that turns into a prison. The choreography becomes so absorbing that you can no longer access your own will or desires. You may require an external party to confirm for you that you exist.’”
This was a beautiful reflection. I was trying to figure out why the feeling she describes resonate with me, given that I’ve never had an eating disorder. I think they are common to situations where people are performing a certain idea of themselves and embracing the unhealthiness and deprivation of that work. For me, and for a lot of the people I grew up with or have gone to school with, that projection was the perfect student/academic, this person with a purity of focus and work ethic who abandoned and was ashamed by their need to spend time and effort on mental health needs. Instead of refusing food, it was refusing free time or sleep or activities that couldn’t be rationalized as productive.
