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**Trigger warning**

This is a guest post from an anonymous Feministing reader.

You could say I’m a words person. Communications, in all forms, is what I’m good at, it’s what I gravitate towards. I’ll do the crossword puzzle over the Sudoku. Words to me are pieces to play with, tell stories with, pitch clients with. I’ve never had a connection to numbers, I didn’t mind math, with the exception of one number, one in constant flux, multiplying or adding or subtracting throughout my life.

Vogue published what anorexics would call probably the dumbest article of all time in its April issue. I’m paraphrasing here. It asked, “is anorexia for life?” I think, as a former anorexic (well, Ana is now a dull memory, but still with me, like a childhood imaginary friend you outgrow but remember from time to time) yes is a stunningly obvious answer.

Whoever wrote the piece clearly never met Ana.

I think about all the time I’ve spent ruminating about my body, looking down at my stomach in a certain way, measuring success or failure with each tiny increment as I snuck onto my parents scale. It’s easily 10,000 hours, which according to Malcolm Gladwell, I’m a useless prodigy at calories.

96

I am seven, and I am being told by my doctor that I am overweight. It’s blurring together because I am too young to know what’s going on, but old enough to know that I am really embarrassed.

I’m bigger than the other kids. I’m a sensitive girl, a hyper self-aware introvert, who isn’t liking the look I’m getting from my mother. She wants her parents approval.

The doctor suggests that we try salad before dinner. I have a salad before dinner every night until I go off to college. The sight of it, in a bowl, with a few onions, makes me cringe. I hate dinner, to this day, at 26, because of it. I go to friends’ houses and I am allowed to have things like grilled cheese and Slurpees. I eat until I feel sick. Ana and I haven’t met yet.

98

I am in third grade. It is my favorite day of the year – Valentine’s Day. You get to swap lunch with another third grader. You get to have whatever you want. I ask for what a kid being restricted only dreams of – a baloney and cheese sandwich, Cheetos, a king size butterfinger, and a FruitMondo – an exacerbated wax and sugar candy. My partner’s mother calls my mother. Her mother tells my mother that I’d better not be eating this sort of thing at home.

I had never had any of the aforementioned in my life, just in thought. I got it all, except the Fruit Mondo. The next year, my father would ask me, wasn’t I the biggest girl in my class? Ten years later he would sneer and ask me why I couldn’t “eat like a normal person” when home from a college break. It remains the most painful thing anyone has ever said to me. Read More »

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