i strongly suspect that most anorexics romanticize their disorders to some extent. i can think of a million reasons why doing so is a load of crap… and yet i’m definitely guilty myself.
Well, it looks like as of tomorrow I will have lost 10 pounds in 2 weeks which is about as fast as I could ever hope for. I’ll be back to where I was before my vacation where I lost the plot completely.
It’s unpleasant enough being fat in our society, but a formerly anorexic person has got to be the saddest thing on the planet. Here’s an excerpt from my day- keep in mind that this is all after having lost 37 pounds in the past few months and 5 pounds just this week.
looking in the mirror before leaving the house, thinking
ok, my stomach looks a little better. if i stand on my tiptoes and suck in it looks a little better. this shirt doesn’t make me look that bad, more chubby than fat if you don’t count my upper arms, maybe i don’t look too bad… NO! you look terrible. don’t you dare start thinking you look ok. you look fat you fat stupid piece of shit. you look worse than ever. you should be ashamed to leave the house. how dare you even try and pretend it isn’t so bad that sort of thinking will make you fat. that sort of thinking will make you binge. stupid fat person thinking pretending its not so bad. if anything you look fatter than ever.
while walking to the store
she’s thinner than you. everyone’s thinner than you. you look terrible. you look like shit. look at your reflection in that store window, you look awful. you’re disgusting. etc. etc. etc.
Once I’m at a “normal” bmi maybe i’ll feel better. Except I know that I won’t. Once I reach 120 lbs I will feel a little better I think, since I was okay for a while at that weight while I was in recovery. Won’t be enough though, it never is.
as we all know, parents are all powerful gods of their childrens’ lives, able to stop any and all harmful behavior if it starts or prevent it from happening.
oh wait, that was in fantasy-land, wasn’t it. i forgot i was supposed to be talking about the real world, because i’ve been reading mamaV too long.
mamaV is the mother of a young girl, and she’s probably a decent mom. it’s only natural for her to want to believe that parents are the solutions to their childrens’ problems. so in her simplistic thinking if more moms like her knew about proana they would be able to stop the young girls from participating in it.
i know, i know. it’s ludicrous, right? but she seems to believe this.
reality check: first off, even decent parents can’t prevent their children from experimenting with risky behaviors. and even decent parents that hear about a specific risky behavior probably won’t have any way to know if their child is participating in it.
but also let’s think about the types of girls who are attracted to proana or who are at risk for developing a serious eating disorder. i think it’s pretty fair to say that these girls are less likely than most to have great parents. one major factor behind the sort of borderline wannarexia/mini-eating disorder behavior that goes along with proana is almost always looking for love or attention, and that means these girls aren’t getting enough of it. not always, but often. and i would suggest that the ones who are truly at risk, as opposed to harmlessly flirting with a rebellious persona, are the ones with troubled family and social lives.
mamaV herself is an excellent example of why healthy people with good family lives aren’t at risk. sure, she dabbled in anorexia. but she did it for a job, and she came to her senses and went back to her priviledged life after a little while. that’s what happens when healthy people with good families dabble in eating disorders. they don’t get sick, they just go through a slight rough patch and come through just fine.
so, if mamaVISION is intended to inform parents and thus quell the rising tide of proana i’m telling you right now it ain’t gonna happen. as i said in my previous post more publicity will only strengthen proana, and more parents knowing about it won’t change that.
two things that should never go together, in my opinion.
well, i’ve had another debate over at mamaVISION, this time over whether mamaV will help or hurt the situation if she brings more publicity to pro ana by denouncing it in the mainstream media.
it seems so self-evidently obvious to me that the pro ana movement will only grow the more publicity it gets. but who knows, i figured, i could be wrong (never happened yet but always possible). so i asked the question over at my home forum and so far everyone seems to agree, and i’ve found one person who originally found pro ana after seeing something about it on oprah. negative publicity will bring a few people with eating disorders to proana forums and it will bring in a shitload of wannarexics seems to be the consensus so far. honestly, i think people who are against proana and most people who are themselves proana would prefer that not to happen. but mamaV has her ego and she wants to lead a revolution, so it’s likely that she won’t listen or will dismiss this argument.
i can just see it now. pro ana growing stronger and stronger, while a counter group of anti anas led by mamaV goes all over the media screaming about how this trend must be stopped and sharing horror stories. meanwhile they’re feeding the very trend they supposedly want to have stopped!
ridiculous.
Back when I used to be a person I worked with troubled teenage girls and I always preferred to see an angry girl, rather than a depressed or withdrawn one. Sure, angry kids were hard to take, they fought, swore, rebelled, broke rules, and made a staff members life difficult in a million ways. In contrast a sad, withdrawn girl would often be a favorite among other staff members. So easy, so polite, poor thing.
Thing is, though, when I saw an angry girl I knew they hadn’t given up. They had energy, they had life left in them. Deep down somewhere they must have hope, I figured. If only I could convince them to fight for themselves instead of fighting against everyone else then their own strength would carry them through.
So, here we are in the present day and I am a complete and utter fuckup. Near the end of that job, my first after college, I began losing weight for the very first time. It wasn’t exactly the start of my eating disorder, since I was over 200 pounds and I didn’t get that heavy by not already having some form of disordered eating, believe me. However, it was the start of my first anorexic phase. I left the job, applied for a masters program in social work, and screwed it up both years because of my anorexia. The second time I had to leave school and I haven’t had a real job since (that is, a job that fits my experience and educational background). Right now I’m on disability and unemployed.
Still, I’m angry. This blog is proof. I’m not typical of eating disordered types. I’m not meek. I don’t try to hide my opinions, I don’t follow others. So I guess by my own logic it means I haven’t given up.
i miss recovery so much sometimes. right this second i’m back to plan A, which is lose about 30 more pounds and then go back to OA. i was so happy the year i participated in the program, my life was coming back together, i had friends, i was starting to like myself. it was wonderful.
but damnit if it isn’t a fucking crock! ok, the 12 step format worked for me, but i’m not sure i could go back after seeing it more critically. back when i was part of the program i was able to just shrug of the things that bugged me or turn a blind eye. could i give myself over to the program again after leaving though? there’s a lot wrong with OA.
and don’t even get me started on any form of traditional recovery. therapy, inpatient, outpatient day treatment, groups. absolutely none of it worked for me or stood any chance of working for me long term.
see, the way i figure it there are two types of eating disordered people in recovery. one type is able to recover, one type is resistant to treatment. the able to recover type has a struggle but can make it out of their ed completely. the resistant type might not be able to fully commit to recovering or like me they might throw themselves into it and desperately want it but find themselves relapsing the second they let their guard down. for us resistant types the eating disorder is an enemy that just lies in wait for years if necessary and the least thing cvan be enough to tip us back into ed hell. which was why i liked OA, constant vigilance for the rest of your life was the plan there and it made sense to me. but so few OAers struggled with anorexia and bulimia, and there were lots of other issues. sigh. i do wish i’d just kept going to meetings when i first began to relapse, that i’d done anything necessary to stay strong in my program rather than prioritizing my job instead. if only if only if only.
obviously, i top the list of anorexics i hate. even though right now i don’t fit the criteria for anorexia by any stretch of the imagination, of course.
all the other ones though, i also hate. we are such a shallow, stupid bunch of mean, competitive bitches. acting like being anal retentive is a good thing by saying we want “perfection”. and don’t give me any bullshit about our high IQs either, because by the time your brain’s been starved a while you have the IQ of a mushroom. give us half a chance and we’ll talk about nothing but calories and goal weights and what we ate today. we are selfish too, refusing treatment or trying to get around treatment when we are in it, no matter who it hurts. we are liars, and worse we lie to ourselves. and most anorexics have about as much self-awareness as a squid.
decent day today. my weight is going in the right direction again. i’ve been restricting well despite my fears that all my binging while on vaction would have formed too much of a habit for me to get back into things. haven’t even been sticking my finger down my throat too often. i’ve decided to scrap my goal weight of 120, unofficially for now, but in my minds 120 is now just a starting point.
see? see how boring and fucking self obsessed we all are? even me, and i consider myself intelligent, my brain isn’t starved (yet), but the thing i most want to discuss is my weight and my calories. and i want to whine about how fucking fat i am. i am just dying to get below 140- i was 140 before i went on vaction and gained 10 pounds in 3 weeks. stupid weak piece of shit. but the important thing is that my weight is going in the right direction. and when i finally make it back into the normal weight range it will be an awesome victory. after that, 120. the weight i maintained in recovery all of last year. the weight i thought i’d get to and go right back to the 12 steps. but not anymore, fuck all 12 of them, i want to be maybe 104 or so before i even think more about “recovery” also known as bullshit to those of us with the resistant-to-treatment type of eating disorders (or what i like to call the “real” eating disorders).
rant over. kisses to my nonexistant audience.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: eating disorders, magic 8balls, pro-ana
ok first off let me say i am in an absolutely awful mood right now. i spent about 3 weeks with my brother and had an awesome time- but now i’m home, i’ve gained back 10 pounds i had lost, and my brother is going back to school in a few days.
but, honestly, once i’m back into the swing of restricting things will be ok again. sort of a numbed angry scared ok, but way better than feeling like absolute shit, like i do now. and that’s been the story of my life… except for when i was in OA of course… but apart from that it’s been either restricting and mostly happy, things crashing completely because of restricting and losing too much weight, or eating too much and being COMPLETELY depressed and hopeless and miserable. there’s nothing worse than overeating- which is why i’d oined OA of course. but i can’t go back until i lose all the weight i gained since leaving. and unfortunately that’s a bit of a problem too, because by the time i’ve lost the 60 pounds i’d wanted to lose i’ll just keep going.
BECAUSE I’M FUCKING HAPPIER RESTRICTING. alright? what part of that is so hard to understand? and isn’t trying to recover and failing 3 times enough? can’t i just fucking die this time? i’d rather leave a skinny corpse than live fat and miserable or cycle this way forever.
well, i warned you i was in a shit mood.
in case anyone was wondering where all the black people are, apparently they all go to the aquarium on the weekend. ok, seriously, who knew that the aquarium was such a brilliant tapestry of racial and cultural diversity??? i went twice in the past two weeks with my brother- the first time we went with one of his friends and got high off cookies made with marijuana, the second time we went back sober just to see the fish. both times i noticed how much more diverse it seemed than everywhere else. i used to live in dochester and before then in mattapan, and that’s where all the black folks are, in case anyone was wondering. then recently i moved to cambridge and i can’t leave my apartment without being reminded of how i now am fitting in nicely with the rich white people and their college age offspring. but at the aquarium you had it all, from rich to lower middle class (i assume poor people can’t afford $20 per person to gape at sharks), white, black, asian, indian, foreign, american, bostonian, tourists… i saw a woman in a burqua for allah’s sake!!!
why on earth the aquarium would be the one small point of cultural convergence i can’t imagine. i guess because it’s both “educational” and has sharks. but my goodness more types of people go to the aquarium than i could have imagined. couples on dates? who knew. if i ever have a girlfriend again we are SO going to the aquarium.
