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Just me?
Since I can remember, my life has revolved around food, and not in a healthy way. One of my earliest memories is of a trip to the mall with three of my closest friends. We decided to buy matching leggings. While they tried them on and posed for mirror selfies, I stood there silently breaking down every part of my legs, wishing I could tear pieces of them away. I imagined things no eleven-year-old should ever imagine. It began as something small, harmless even, but it spiraled fast and far beyond my control. What followed was a rotation of people constantly checking on me, hovering, worrying. Grief soon became my excuse for having no appetite.
By thirteen, I weighed just thirty-seven kilograms, and I convinced myself that number still needed to be halved. In high school, everything shifted again. I gained thirty kilograms and began throwing up half of my meals each day. It was one of the darkest stretches of my life, the period when I learned about all the miracle potions the internet promised would fix me. Spoiler: they don’t.
Near the end of high school, I stopped taking the oh so beloved pill that doctors prescribe to every woman when they can’t quite figure out what’s wrong. The weight began to fall off rapidly. Maybe it was because of the new electronic device I carried everywhere, or maybe because I stopped eating meat. Whatever it was, I’ll always blame the doctor who handed me those pills without a second thought.
Now, six years later, I’m sitting in bed after a few glasses of wine, and I am angry. For years, I believed that when people said “I feel fat,” they felt what I felt—that they, too, imagined slicing the insides of their thighs off or secretly wished to fall into a coma long enough to wake up beautifully sickly and thin. But they don’t. The loneliness of knowing that no one truly understands how much this controls your life is soul-crushing.
I’m exhausted. I weigh myself every day, and if the number changes even slightly, the rest of my day collapses. I can’t say that out loud, of course, because I’d sound dramatic. I can’t enjoy sex, because I’m certain the other person can see nothing but my stomach rolls. I can’t eat too much, because then I’m afraid they’ll think I’m a pig. I feel an almost compulsive need to call myself fat before anyone else can silently think it. I search for reassurance in every person I meet, yet nothing anyone says ever feels enough.
The constant dizziness and pain blur my days, but I don’t speak about it, because I’m not skinny enough to be taken seriously. My hair is thinning, my period is wrecked, and still, the only thing that consumes me is the roll of flesh pressing against my jeans.
I’ve accepted that no one in my life will ever truly understand the scope of this, and maybe that’s okay, because not even I do. These words, no matter how raw or true, will never capture the full weight of the torment that lives inside my mind.
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