The Diary of Thin

The Soul of Sickness

There's something beautifully dramatic about the thought that you have the power to starve yourself to death and no one else can truly do anything about it. There's something so adult, so mature about one's ability to say yes, I could eat, but no, you can't make me. I can choose for myself, you say.  I can reject a developed society, I can do it on my own, I can teach myself how not to need.

Our society romanticizes illness, portrays the ideal female as one who greets food with a sigh of indifference. To be beautiful is to wither away, pick at food, drink coffee instead of meals to wake up a body that wants to go to sleep. I'm not hungry.  Wake up, stumble around a bit, try not the think about food. I'm not hungry. Go to work, chew sugar-free gum, take the stairs to burn off the third of a tablespoon of creamer you used to make your coffee more bearable. I'm not hungry. Take three bites of an apple at lunch, toss the rest of it and go puke in the bathroom until you spit blood because you gave in to your own existence. Become a wintergirl, always cold and ghost-white because being cold burns calories and hey, you're almost dead anyways so you may as well look the part, nothing matters except losing weight anyways, right?

The problem with romanticism in a society full of hopeless romantics is that we only see half the reality. We see the model walking on the runway but we do not see her collapsing from malnutrition backstage. We see the smallness and apparent grace of the girl who substitutes tea and splenda for supper but we do not see the backaches, the bruises, the constant mental war inside her head. We see a future of success for ourselves, one in which power over our instincts means power over a career or family or finances but we do not see the months of shivering under covers, of only sleeping with someone with the lights off, of counting bones and pounds and calories and fighting to stay balanced on the tightrope between life and death.