My Anti-Anorexia So Far

HELEN [22]

I’ve realized and concluded a lot and it’s all in my Anti-anorexic diary. And also what I am now seeing. I’m seeing through her and what she makes me do. I’m coming to hate her and her torture and her lies, deception and trickery. I guess what allows me to feel such a strong feeling towards hating her is what I realized through opposing her. This has allowed me to hate her. I guess it’s a matter of getting fed up with her and her pressure. I guess I started very slowly to see her through anti-anorexic eyes and by means of the experiments, tests and discoveries, I have become aware of her and her lies. If someones lies to you, you do hate it. Also that ‘lie’ has cost me a large part of my life so far and that is hurtful and painful to me. I do feel its important to hate her and you have to go against her as you cannot oppose something you believe in. There is no way you can go against someone you love, like or is your friend or who you believe, trust, value or honour. You cannot give up or let go of something you treasure or love. You asked me if I had to summarize everyone’s advice, counsel, etc., what would it all add up to. I think that it would be that I have to learn to love myself that that people do care for me and love me and that anorexia is evil, wrong, etc. Maybe the slogan could be ‘Freedom!’ and that anorexia wants my prison-dom and that she wants to kill me and that I die. She doesn’t want me to have a life. There is a great deal, I guess, to discover about anti-anorexia which I have included in my diary. But perhaps the most important discovery was that anorexia and her practices aren’t normal and they make you lose your person, your persona, your life, and yourself. And the wondering, questioning and asking I am doing is important. You asked me what allowed me to change my history and turn the corner and make a different future for myself. I guess it may have been getting fed up, wanting space and time, perhaps a decision or commitment. I guess when you asked what are the foundational understandings and the ‘heart’ of my anti-anorexia, perhaps it is the belief that I can have my own life, and not one shaped or dictated to by anorexia. Maybe the ‘heart’ of my anti-anorexia is the knowledge you can lead your own kind of life and you are not compelled to lead an anorexic lifestyle. In fact, there is a different kind of life and I can be anti-anorexic in living it. I know now I won’t die but at the same time it will be painful but through it, I will learn, grow, experience change and start to lead a different kind of life. You asked me how I formed my own ideas. I guess, maybe even for a second- although I can’t appreciate or acknowledge it, something in my mind was telling me that I formed my own ideas as opposed to anorexia’s ideas. If you oppose her ideas, this allows room for your ideas to grow. Perhaps by not listening to everyone else, I started listening to myself, not anorexia’s ‘cluttering shit’ . Or perhaps I was only listening to the ideas of people that allowed me to form my own ideas rather than the ‘cluttering shit’ that reaffirmed the picture I had of myself as ‘shit’. I guess also by practicing, I am learning from my mistakes and concluded or thought about concluding several things. It allowed new ideas to come into my head that perhaps were always there but had been suppressed or denied. Perhaps they had been sown but hadn’t germinated. Or perhaps they were totally new ideas. The substance that allowed me to form, develop and de-suppress my ideas were what I refer to as ‘anti-anorexia’. Thinking against her, not with or for her, and by seeing her and her ideas differently, has allowed me to form different ideas about her and about me.