*I honestly don’t know what’s compelling me to make this journal in the first place. I had been keeping a traditional pen-and-paper journal for years, and while I still find it to be super cathartic, something about anonymously putting my thoughts all the way out there tempts me. *
My alias on here is Malcolm, because it is nowhere close to my real name. I first had the thought “I’m fat” when I was nine years old, getting dressed for an event with my community theatre. For some reason the way that my shirt clung to my stomach gave me a sense of discomfort, and ever since that moment I have been deeply dissatisfied with my own looks.
I was 11 when I first started taking measures to control my own weight. I was in a very strict school, which only had about 160-200 students total. There were other kids (almost exclusively girls) talking about their own body image, and experimenting with diets as well, but something about the subject had me obsessed beyond reason. I was skipping breakfast and lunch more and more frequently, and constantly staring at myself in the mirror.
These anxieties would come in spurts through middle school. At 13, I discovered what are known as “pro-ana” communities on the internet, full of people who felt the same way that I did. At that point I was stuck in the grips of OCD and intense underlying anxiety. Having a group of people that didn’t judge me for my mental illness felt good, but also led me down a lot of questionable paths. I started smoking cigarettes at 14, having read that nicotine suppresses your appetite. Being a textbook latchkey kid, and the son of a bipolar mother, nobody had time to notice that anything serious was going on with me.
It wasn’t until I graduated highschool that my eating disorder would latch onto me and take over my entire life. I hadn’t looked at my weight since before my AP exams earlier that year, and the number on the scale became the focal point of my anxiety towards becoming an adult, gaining independence, maintaining a social life, and everything else on planet Earth.
That summer I began religiously signing into pro-ana websites, painstakingly logging every single calorie, compulsively walking and fasting for days at a time. My list of rules started small in June, but by November almost everything I did and felt was dictated by food and exercise.
So list one
- Never eat between the hours of noon and midnight
- Always walk at least 10,000 steps a day
-Never exceed more than 600 calories in a day
Rapidly grew into list two
-Never eat between the hours of noon and 6pm
-Always walk at least 15,000 steps a day
-Fast at least 2 days out of the week, always aim for all days
-Never eat at work
-Avoid eating in front of people
-Take one laxative per 100 calories eaten
-Weigh yourself twice a day, once after using the bathroom first thing in the morning, and again right before you go to bed
-Do not eat meat, fish, eggs, dairy, palm oil, high fructose corn syrup or ANYTHING without clear, listed calories on them
-No liquid calories at all
People were starting to notice. Coworkers were asking if they’d ever seen me eat, but I would shut their concern down as quickly as possible. All that mattered to me was seeing my clothes become looser, my bones start to pop out, and my approach to my goal weight on the scale. At 5‘6”, I went from 141 pounds to 110 in the span of a few months. The hours not spent on school, work, and cruising with friends was taken up by walking. I would walk from one end of Cambridge to the farthest side of Boston in a night, keeping with me only enough money to take a train home, so I wasn’t tempted to eat anything.
At my worst, I was breaking down to a friend on the phone. I was 23, and on break from my warehouse packing job. I had been running on 0 calorie energy drinks and cigarettes for 4 days and had wrestled my weight down to 95 pounds. I had felt “fine” all day, but during that break, a wave of sheer exhaustion went over me and I felt like I didn’t have enough energy for the rest of my shift. My knees were throbbing with pain, my chest felt tight every time I stood up and all I wanted to do was lie down on the pavement and not get up.
Somehow I muscled through the rest of that night, but the Holidays were approaching and I was horrified of gaining weight and seeing family. I spent that Thanksgiving locked in my apartment drinking coffee in bed, and escaped Christmas early with the lame excuse that I had laundry to do.
I can get into everything eventually, but the gist is that I’m 25 and I’m still like this. I don’t know why outside of the fact that being empty feels right to me. I get a physical high that I can only really compare to cocaine when I am fasting and running on fumes. I say all the time that I’d give anything to just be a normal person with normal interests. I wish that I was like every 20 something and working on building my life, but I’m stuck here in a hole of obsessive thinking. I’ve tried to “recover” dozens of times, but I’m always paralyzed with fear. I usually feel like this is what I deserve. I don’t feel like I’m particularly good at anything else but depriving myself. I’m scared that I might put all that energy and money into “recovering”, and I’m still going to feel this way about myself anyway.
If I could stop myself from falling in love, and getting attached to people, I would slip off into the wilderness somewhere warm. I would never worry about someone looking at me and learning how pathetic I am. I would find a water source and let that be my sustenance until my time comes and I’m dirt. I don’t even know if I’m suicidal, but I’ve had the “starving to death in the woods” fantasy in my head for over a decade.
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