I’m silent as a stone. You’ll never be able to get through this wall and see what’s underneath this hard exterior. You won’t be able to see my thoughts and crawl around inside of my feelings. No one will ever get to because I’m smart about this. I’m oh so smart and oh so proud of the way I conduct myself.

The days are longer when you know you can’t eat. They stretch out before you like the months on a calendar. Each day you tell yourself that you don’t really want this or you don’t really need that or that you’re really not hungry, even if you are starving. If you feel hungry it means it’s working. It means you’re empty and hollow through and through. That’s the goal isn’t it? To be weightless , perfect all around. Yet its sad because deep down you really don’t want this. You want to be able to sit down to a dinner with the family and eat pasta covered in marinara sauce. You want to laugh with your mom and dad and put food in your mouth and swallow it. You want to feel its warmth as it goes into your stomach. You want to enjoy being full and happy. You don’t want to feel guilty after each and every bite. You want to be normal.

I hate this disease. It’s killing me from the inside out. It’s ripping up my mind. Most people find the disease selfish and stupid. They think that you can get over it. You can just start eating normally and talking and feeling good again. If only it were that simple. In reality if I could eat without having an hour long fight with myself I would. I would stuff myself full of sunshine and happiness wrapped in bacon. I would shovel thin mints into my mouth. I would eat potato chips and enjoy chocolate ice cream. I would eat frosted flakes and have bagels with cream cheese. If it were as simple as just deciding one day to be better and to eat again I would have been baking cookies in the kitchen with my mother months ago. I would have gone to the movies with my best friend last week and had popcorn. I would have been drinking blue slushies all summer and letting my tongue taste hamburgers at my dads company picnic. I would have lived every day and put as much food as my body needed in my mouth and let it go all the way to my stomach. If it were as simple as waking up one day and just eating then I would never have ended up the way I am now.

In reality everything is a constant battle. Its always a fight with what my brain wants for my body and what I want for it. It’s a fight against the scales that rise and lower constantly. It’s a fight against unhealthy food. Hell it’s even a fight against healthy food. In my mind five almonds could be the deciding factor between a size 0 and a size 00. A carrot could be the deciding factor between me being at my goal weight or me being at the same weight I was yesterday. Its always one fight after another and sometimes it’s a fight with the people you love. It’s a constant war fought both on the outside and the inside. It kills every part of you that ever seemed to matter. As you begin to control the food the food begins to control your life. The scales that weigh your sins for the day are the deciding factor between whether you leave the house that day or not. Every calorie starts becoming so so important. You forget who you are. You forget your dreams and your hopes. You isolate yourself from your family and friends because you feel to ugly to even walk outside of your room anymore. The constant hunger drives you damn near insane. Every single thing in your life is controlled by weight, food, and all those little voices screaming. It literally kills you and it hurts so much but at the point you start to feel like its getting out of hand you’ve already dipped your foot to far into the water. Anorexia sucks you up and keeps you prisoner indefinitely.

I used to love shopping. I can remember being thirteen and going to malls with my friends and laughing at the food court over sandwhiches or milkshakes and enjoying the summer afternoons comparing what we bought versus what we still needed to buy. I remember that at one point in my life my size didn’t matter to me. It was just a number. In the mirror I saw skinny. All my friends saw skinny. There was no problem. Even if I was a size bigger than my friend I was still skinny. Being skinnier wasn’t important. It didn’t matter. I remember how carefree and perfect those days felt. I remember sliding on a gorgeous pair of jeans and loving how they looked. I remember scouring the racks of shirts for just the perfect ones. I remember feeling confident and happy. It didn’t matter what the others thought around me. I was having fun. I was enough for myself then. Then the mirror started to change. Overnight it seems I went from enjoying shopping to dreading it. Hiding out in the dressing rooms trying on jeans and not feeling happy enough because I still wasn’t double zero yet. I began to feel helpless because even though a bone girl was standing in front of the mirror I couldn’t see her. I could only see the ounces of fat I still needed to lose. I didn’t see a thigh gap or ribs or skinny wrists. I saw fat , fat, fat everywhere. Each time I went to shop I was alone. I stopped looking at how the jeans looked on me and just bought ones that fit. I stopped looking for perfect shirts and grabbed any tshirts I could find and purchased them. I tore out of clothing stores no longer caring about the outfits I picked out, avoiding the food court at all costs. I had no one to laugh with and nothing to laugh about. Milkshakes scared me and the thought of a fattening meal from the food court terrified me so much that I had to run into the bathroom and cry and cry and cry. The disease had begun to slowly take over my mind and I just couldn’t be a kid anymore. I was a broken sad girl crying in front of a dirty mall mirror with a bag of ugly clothes that had been picked out in a rush.

I became completely isolated from the rest of the world and it hurt. I never could be better and I could always get worse. I fell down this deep dark hole and there was no one to rescue me. This dumb disease has mixed up what is and isn’t imporatnat about a person. It’s ruined my perception of beauty upon the world. Its made it so a simple piece of pizza would make me break down and have a panic attack. This disease has turned me into a strange little monster with a mind that’s out of control. It has left me skipping school lunches and hiding in bathrooms crying my eyes out. If one day I could just wake up and be better and eat believe me I would not hesitate. I miss having a life. I miss living every single moment of every single day not controlled by food. I miss smiling and swimming and enjoying friends. I miss it all so much. If I could magically just tell my brain to shut up and finally be okay, be a normal girl I would do it in a heartbeat. But the thing is I can’t. I’m powerless against the disease. It isn’t about the body at all. It’s all in the head and that’s what makes it the most horrifying thing ever. That’s what kills me. It is all inside of my head and I can’t stop it. So yes it may be selfish to you, a person who’s never had to deal with all the guilty feelings and self loathing for the person in that mirror. It’s selfish to you but for me it is a loop that I cannot seem to find a way out of. It is an accidental turn on the wrong road that has left me a completely broken kid. I would do anything to get better. Eating isn’t the problem. It’s what comes along with it. It’s the mindset that this disease throws you into. I am trying to get better. I’m attempting but most days I feel too closed off, to mentally broken to handle getting better. The voices inside of my head are vicious. I am trying my best to not be what people call “selfish” but it isn’t easy. This disease is very real to its sufferers. It hurts us. It hurts the sufferers so much. We just can’t find a way to say anything and we can’t find a way to ask for help because we, unlike everyone else, know that this disease doesn’t go away just by gaining weight again. It doesn’t go away with anti depressants and a healthy body. The voices will be there and they will stick like molasses to our insides. We try to live with them. That’s the only way to get over the disease. To live with the voices and to ignore them as much as possible. But all to often we fall prey to their words and we are left right back where we started. So we do try. It’s not easy though when you have a mind that isn’t yours and a body that seems out of control.