i revisited a piece of prose i wrote at the beginning of summer titled 'measured' for my poetry class this week. an honest and open account of my eating disorder.
I wait to write about my eating disorder-wait until I’m smaller. Sicker. Wait until it’s undeniable.
It feels like fraud, writing in a body still visible. Embarrassing. A failure at what consumes me. I remember when I hit my smallest-bones knocking under skin like loose change-and still it wasn’t enough. BMI too high. Spirit too soft. And still, I starved.
While other girls planned dances, dreamt up dresses, I calculated deficit. I wanted to be wan, breakable; feel the hot water of a shower on my protruding spine. Emerging and collapsing, breathing in grout on the tiled flooring.
Pretty.
I wanted someone to say: you are wasting away. And then I wanted them to do nothing about it.
The first time I tried recovery, my therapist said: If you let go, and you're still unhappy, you can always go back. Like it was a hotel room. Like I hadn’t been living there all along-halls bloated with silence, wallpaper sloughing.
And I did go back. Again and again.
Each time, my body betrayed me-refusing to loosen its grip on those final five pounds. I hated its stubbornness. Its appetite.
Its will to stay.
I have no idea what I look like now. Just that it’s wrong. I don’t recognise myself.
I’m so far from the child I was-the loud, unashamed girl who laughed before thinking, who didn't yet know her body was a problem just for being.
I’ve lost her.
If I recover-
even if I gain weight, lose shame, find softness-
I don’t think I’ll ever get her back.
She’s in a locked room somewhere, down a hallway worn smooth by pacing.
I know the code. I hold the key. Maybe I swallowed it. Maybe I never knocked hard enough.
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