The Face of Anorexia

Anorexia doesn’t look like me.

How can I be anorexic? I have a healthy looking body. Or at least I seem to think so. I barely shy of 5’8” and weighed 127 before my friends took away my scale. Since I started “treatment”…or being accountable for eating per my boyfriend and family members…my clothes fit a little tighter, but still work. I’m not the picture of anorexia. I’m not the girl in the magazines who is skin and bones. I fill out my jeans just fine.
I look at myself and don’t see someone who is too thin. I see normal…I am normal. Obviously not in the head.

My doctor says that I am killing myself. I hear that in the doctor’s office but find it SO HARD to bring myself to eat otherwise. I get anxious at the idea of having to go to get a meal at a restaurant with others. I moved back in with my ‘family’ and now am accountable 24 hours a day. Accountable to people who don’t understand the mental STORM which brews within me all waking hours of the day. We eat out a lot, and to avoid fights I have to figure mental and physical strategy at least twice a day. Stress, eat, stress, repeat. I hate it. I hate myself. I hate the fact that I can’t see the beauty that everyone else can see. How did I get here.

The sad thing is that I don’t want to fix it. I do….but I am SCARED TO DEATH to do it. Scared to look in the mirror and hate what I am looking at. Petrified to not feel the satisfaction and sheer joy when I dress up in a small size and feel beautiful and WORTHY. That is all of it… I have taught myself that image equals self worth. If I let go of my image, then what do I have to offer. This being said by a highly intelligent woman who holds a masters degree who once had unstoppable confidence. Where did she go? What did anorexia do with that girl??