I didn't want to be anorexic. I didn't want to be the girl, who morphed from flesh to bone. But that is what I became. I wasn't vain before the disease.
Everytime I slipped my lunch into the garbage, hurled my dinner into a plastic bag, I'd find logic in my actions.
"It's for the sport," I reassured myself, "It's for the sport."
I'd returned to gymnastics after a critical injury that had kept me out of training for nearly a year. It had been in this time that my body began to develop, and I began to be less cautious about my diet. After ten years of closely scrutinizing my caloric intake, I had freedom.
I weight 120 pounds, at 5'1 when I returned to the gym.
Even my docter had told me I was at risk of becoming overweight.
When my coach casually remarked, "Whoa, don't make a big splah," on a particularly sloppy landing, I went overboard. I think this is where the story gets familiar.
I stopped eating.
My family never ate meals together, so it wasn't hard.
It was school, where the true pugatory was. My entire dance class at school knew I was anorexic, thanks to the work of a spiteful girl who found it amusing to spread the fact around the school.
"I'm doing it for gymnastics," I told one girl matter of factly, "It's for the sport."
Everyday in the lockeroom, early in the morning, I would distribute bits of my lunch to whoever asked for it. That way, I wouldn't be tempted.
Somedays I was too repulsed to even fathom eating, and just threw the whole thing away.
"It's for the sport," I repeated, visualizing slender gymnasts.
When she told my boyfriend, he got worried. Out of all my friends, he was the only one who actually took action.
He told me what nobody else had: that I didn't need to change. Not for anyone.
But what he (or anyone else) didn't know was that Anorexia isn't about being thin.
You can be little more than lines, and that wouldn't be thin enough.
Anorexia is about finally having control.
Our body is essentially something that we all want to own. Anorexia is a way of exerting that power.
"It wasn't really," I'll tell him someday.
"It wasn't really for the sport."