Sometimes I feel so light it's like I'm going to fill myself with helium and take flight to the sky, floating on the breeze as a soap bubble or loose feather. At others I'm a boulder, weighing myself down with all my ugly thoughts and feelings so heavily that I sink to the center of the earth [and roll it off its axis].

Hear me out first, let me explain my condition before I tell you the term for it; people are so quick to judge these days that I'm afraid to say anything before fully backing it. When I eat. . . I feel good, everything tastes so delicious and satisfying and I need to savor every moment [like how you open an Oreo just to lick out the cream]. But as soon as I finish a meal, my inner voice begins to berate me. "Wow I can't believe you just ate all those calories," it sneers. "You're so fat. When you wear shorts your thighs will jiggle and when you wear a bathing suit your stomach flab will hang out." and then I begin to feel self-conscious and only want to wear pants or a t-shirt when I swim. Every time I eat the voice will get louder and harsher, telling me how ugly I am and how if I ate a little less people might actually want to look at me.

It started out as frequent anxiety attacks, something I couldn't control but didn't occur very often. There was so much going on in life that I'd get so many emotions mixed up inside of me and I'd constantly feel full, so full in fact that if I ate I knew for certain I'd blast out with a Technicolor yawn [if you know what I mean]. After a while I found myself skipping meals more and more, avoiding the pangs of hunger that scraped the lining of my stomach, ignoring the snarling little monster deep within me that cried, no, demanded for food.

One day, after I'd managed to black out in one of my classes [thankfully nobody noticed] I realized how much of a problem I had. It took me weeks to even say the word, but after I looked in the mirror before a shower, ribs poking out easy to count as 1,2,3 below my breasts, I knew I had to tell myself the truth. So with a single, wretched utterance the vile word deformed itself from my lips and took to the air. "Anorexia."

You have to understand, before I'm branded with this label for life like a scar pasted onto my face for all to see. I thought I controlled my eating, and it was a long time before I realized that it, in fact, controlled me. And here is the gunshot, the big bang, the full out exclamation point: I'm not even fat and I hardly weigh a hundred pounds, my friends call me a twig. But all it took was for me to already be eating very little and for my father to tell me that my calves looked wide. Even in a joking manner it affected me far more than anyone could have expected. Already I had an inferiority complex, anorexia had just been an accident waiting to happen [if it wasn't already].

Now I try to eat, but it's so difficult when my mind won't let me. All day my stomach whines for food, but when I finally sit down with a semi-decent meal in front of me, I'm hardly able to choke down half of it before I feel all the food lodging in my gut and throat and I want to puke [hopefully nobody notices]. It takes all my strength to waddle to the sink to wash the dishes, and every fiber of my being to stop myself from running to the bathroom and purging all the nastiness from me.

Only three times have I ever purposely thrown up, and that was for reasons far beyond my influence in which I absolutely knew I had to or I'd do it in public by accident. This doesn't mean I haven't had the constant urge to shove my fingers down my throat and let lose all the calories and fat filling my system [and admit that I like what I'm doing], but so far I've been able to resist it. The urge to purge hasn't overcome me yet.

It's not just food I feel choked up with, it's emotions. I'm a very feeling person and sometimes I feel so much I can't stand it and it's like I'm just one, giant, raw nerve ending that takes everything at ten times its usual power. Not that I'm sensitive, just, aware; I'm aware of every negative feeling that piles up in my body, all the way up from my toes to my throat. When I eat I'm just piling onto that solidity, thus eating makes me sick [sick of myself]. Then, if I don't eat it's almost like a drug for me. So when I'm hungry I can't really understand or focus on anything but the pangs in my stomach and how everything is spinning like a carousel and floating up and down and away: that soap bubble feeling, childish and free.

Food is my temptation: eating is my sin: self-hatred is my eternal Hell. Anorexia is a term used to explain people with an "eating disorder", but it's so much more than that. I don't know how to explain it; a life-style, a choice, none seem accurate enough. It's not even a decision. In my eyes anorexia is an idea, one that goes wildly spinning out of control. The less you eat the thinner you get and the more free you feel, the more your bubble spins and floats upwards. But that can't last because at some point you will give in [always to your dismay], and the bubble doesn't pop, no. The bubble fills itself with lead and sinks so long and so fast you know all your hard work has gone to waste and you'll have to start from below the bottom again.

By the end of every single day you know that you're worthless and not good enough because you can't even keep from eating what you know is making you disgustingly undesirable. By the end of the day you wipe the condensed water off the bathroom mirror and realize that bubbly feelings aren't made to last [I see what I never wanted to become: myself] and that no matter how hard you try, it's impossible to live up to any expectations, even your own.