-The first time I notice that my body is too big, I am ten years old. I am in the bathtub, looking at my stomach and my thighs underneath the water, and I realize for the first time that I am not skinny enough. My stomach is too round and my thighs are too squishy. I am too big. I think that I am too big because I am not all bones, and I am noticing that I should be all bones like the girls on TV.
-My grandmother pinches my waistline when I am twelve and tells me that I am gaining too much weight. I am told that if I want to have a career as an actress, I cannot be fat.
-I read that Audrey Hepburn weighed *** pounds her entire life, and that becomes my driving force when I am thirteen and need an idol. I learn that feeling my hip bones jutting out is a good thing, and I also learn that I should drink entire bottles of apple cider vinegar without watering it down.
-In high school, I try sticking two fingers down my throat hoping that a purge will come, but I don’t have a strong enough gag reflex, so I’m resigned to living with my choices. Girls I know take laxatives after dinner every night. I am told that I have a ‘good’ body and by ‘good’ I know people are saying ‘small’.
-In college, I start to worry about whether my body is seen as sexual enough because my first boyfriend tells me that I am ‘boring’ and ‘not hot’. I run on a treadmill after we break up and let my unfinished dinner start to rot on the kitchen counter before throwing it away, a loss of self that comes with a loss of appetite.
- I gain weight during the pandemic, like many of us do. My clothes don’t quite fit the same anymore. I notice that when I try to sleep like I always do, on my stomach with my leg bent up towards my ribs, I can’t do this comfortably anymore because my waist gets in the way. I feel like I don’t recognize my body, or really, that I don’t recognize how my body feels anymore.
-I think that eating disorders are something I have aged out of, something for teenagers. I am twenty-four when I start to starve myself and don’t realize that it is happening until I am twenty-five.
-I think I conflate losing people to needing to prove to them that I don’t take up too much space. I am not too much, I promise, I can make myself less for you. Love is a form of hunger, at least it has always been for me. A sagging waistline means that I’m doing a good job. I’m not taking up too much space, and maybe love can stay now.
-My hair starts to fall out in clumps; it clogs my shower drain, and I have to empty out my vacuum filter every week. My skin looks shallow, but people keep telling me that I look ‘good’. My doctor tells me that I weigh a number that I haven’t been since I was fifteen, and I am proud of this.
-My period of hunger coincides with a worsening depression, and I don’t start eating again until I have almost died.
-I started eating again six months ago. Eating breakfast every morning for a week straight feels like a victory and a loss all at once. I’m still working on eating lunch. I’m better at dinner and I am excellent at dessert. I will always eat breakfast and I will always eat dessert. I just want to be satiated; to have enough for once.
-I cry less when I’m not hungry.
-Women at my work are always asking me for non-fat milk, ordering egg whites, and not finishing their plates. I feel their losses for them. What is life without desire? A life lived without tasting and enjoyment? A life lived without even eating the whole of an egg?
-My clothes from last summer fit differently now. A boy tells me that I am beautiful when I am naked, and I don’t assume he’s lying to me. I’ve worried too much about how I look and not enough about how I feel: my body in a soft sweater, my body plunging into a cold lake on a hot day, my body in the sun, my body in the morning, my body with a mouth between my legs and a hand on my stomach, my body eating strawberries on my porch, my body when it moves, my body looking forward to dinner.