I want you to read this when you feel like going back. I know that right now you are looking for something, you are chasing something through anorexia. Maybe you are looking for the validation of being hospitalizad, the breath that it implies, the validation of having a catheter, the validation of your light weight or the validation that comes with being the sick girl. But I need you to remember that you've already been there. Remember when you told yourself that you only needed to be hospitalizad to 'hit rock bottom' and finally deserve a recovery? Remember when at the hospital you needed to be the skinniest and the sickest? Remember when you told yourself that it still wasn't enough, that now you needed to have a catheter in you? Do you remember how when you left you told yourself that now you needed to go back in because just one hospital admission wasn't enough to be considered sick? Do you remember how in that admission it was no longer enough to have anorexia but now you also had to demonstrate how bad you were through self-harm, outbreaks and autolytic behaviors? Do you remember that when you left that hospital room and started school, it was no longer enough to have spent the summer hospitalizad, but that you had to show everyone the shit you had gone through to finally feel sick enough? Remember how self-harm and your obvious underweight still weren't enough? Remember how now you had to show the hatred you had for food? Do you remember how you stared for three days at a plate of food and had hatred thoughts running through your head? Remember how you didn't care anymore about anything, your whole life, and the only thing you wanted was to enter the ICU with a tube that would FINALLY make you feel sick enough? And do you remember how in the end the only thing you thought about was dying so you could imagine who would go to your funeral, who would speak to explain how sick you were? Yes, of course you remember. Obviously you remember that loop. How to forget that addiction? How can you forget those vicious feelings of euphoria and misery that fluctuated based on how sick you felt? An addiction is never forgotten. You spent an entire year of your life in an eternal pursuit of 'sick enough'. You spent an entire year chasing that feeling of 'I've finally hit rock bottom, I'm sick and now I deserve to recover.' And it blinded you completely. Because this is what anorexia is about, this is what an addiction is about: you deceive yourself and tell yourself that you need to reach that weight, or be hospitalised so many times to finally feel you are sick. But spoiler: that feeling never comes. It never does. You will always want more. Because the reality is that that goal you have (whether it's weight, body index, or whatever) actually covers another goal. So that I can be understood better, I will give you the most common example with which we all identify: we deceive ourselves by thinking 'when I reach this weight my whole life will be better, I will be happier and my problems will no longer matter so much because at least I will be slim'. But oops! What a surprise! When you reach that weight and you still feel as shitty as before, you think 'of course, I'm still not happy because my weight is not enough! I'm going to loos more.' Suddenly, your whole life is senseless because you're putting the responsibility of being happy on your body. You're desiring something that will never be satisfied. You're pursuing something even you KNOW makes no sense; you know that having the perfect body is never going to give you happiness. But you deceive yourself. You know that chasing a cloud is never going to get you closer to the sun. You know that your happiness has never depended nor will it depend on your physique: it depends on many other things. But of course, those other things are much more complicated, many of those things you can't even control so you take the body and focus on it. You make your body your mission to achieve happiness. And now that I think about it it doesn't make sense. None. But of course, when you think about it in your sick head you say 'but I want another body, a better one'. Well, now I tell you that what you want is not a body. You want what you think comes with it. You want the love and attention that comes with a perfect body. You want the validation of being the skinniest compared to your friends, you want to feel enough and superior in at least one way. You want the self-love that is supposed to come when you finally like yourself when looking in the mirror. You want to be able to upload photos of your perfect body and have others tell you how perfect you are. You want your life to improve. You want to be happy. But when all that doesn't come and you feel just as shitty as before you start to change your goals. Now you want to be the sickest. You want to accumulate one hospital stay after another to show how sick you are. You want them to shove a tube up your nose to show how unwilling you are to eat. You want everyone to be scared when they see your bones. You want to be the perfect anorexic. And as you sink deeper and deeper into your own shit, you start to want to die. You start to fantasize about death in the ICU due to being underweight. You start to think about how great it would be to finally have one of those heart failures you've been warned about so much. But stop and think about it... at what point did the desire for love, company, happiness and a perfect body become the desire for death? Damn. It's gotten out of control. It's out of control because it's a bottomless pit. It is an addiction and the only end of it is death. That path only leads you to dying. But it also leads you to a miserable death. Because on the day you die you're not even going to die thinking that you're finally skinny enough. No. Even when your body can't take it anymore, when you don't have a single gram of weight left to lose, you will still think that you could have done more to lose weight. You could have done more to last longer. You could have lost those little extra centimeters on your legs or that little bit of skin that bothers you so much on your belly. It's like that. You're going to die unhappy, dissatisfied and anxoius because IT'S STILL NOT ENOUGH.
Damn, think about it. It's like a dog chasing its own tail. It's an eternal loop that will never end unless the dog stops, looks ahead, and notices everyone in front of him. Let him realize that he will never be able to bite his tail and that while he tries he is missing out on the rest of the world.
