Anorexia nervosa isn’t a fashion statement it’s a mental illness that affects 1/4 people across the world. It is life threatening; it can cause your world to turn upside down in just a split second. You become the dancing, singing puppet controlled by the disorder. The disorder becomes your puppeteer. It becomes the master. It calls the shots and pulls the strings one by one. It slowly creeps into your life and steals everything that belongs to you, including your mind. All of sudden your health, your family, your friends, dreams etc., they don’t matter anymore. It’s replaced with weight, numbers, counting and starving. It isn’t a choice, you don’t just wake up one day and think “I am going to become anorexic”, “I am going to get an eating disorder” it’s a control and mind issue that gets worse overtime without the help. So off you go, carrying on smiling whilst inside your crying. Your body weight decreases in everyone’s eyes but yours. You are totally oblivious to what you are doing and what you have become. But deep, deep down you’re just tired, hungry and scared. The feelings you’re afraid to show to the public.
It’s confusing right? How can someone so happy and young develop an eating disorder? The answer is this: One lonely dark night someone stole something from me, something that every person has but only for a short period of time, something people forget to cherish. Luckily enough I was strong, I was brave, and I was fearless. I took this and made it into something different. I told myself I was too blame; I then started to believe this. I switched my personality into “I don’t give a shit” mode. I was careless. I didn’t care what people thought of me, I didn’t care what people said, I just didn’t care. I guess you say this is the best way to live right? Wrong. You become so heartless you hurt others to try and stop yourself hurting. It doesn’t work. You get hurt because you hurt them. It’s a vicious cycle. Life is full of hurtful people, I felt like I had been hurt by every friend I thought I had. One by one people left me, left me for other people; I started to believe this was my fault because of my “I don’t care” mode. But in reality they left because they chose to.
It all started to change, I became happy again. I forgot about my past and started to think of the future. Drama became a love, people became a love. I was sociable, confident and a normal teenage girl living her dream. Food wasn’t an issue. I ate what I wanted when I wanted. I got on with most people, a few petty arguments here and there, but I got over them. But then this desire to be “thin” became a trend. I heard several people say that they’re going on a diet. I guess that’s their choice right? I never followed this trend. I hated this trend. It angered me. Why were celebrities and media encouraging teenagers to lose weight when there is so much to live for, food basically! The media is awful - that’s why. It’s full of fake stories and fake people. None of them are real. I was real and that was all that mattered.
It started out as a diet, a simple diet which would get me to the weight all my friends were at. I was going to stop when I was thin enough to face the world. But that desire to become thin ended up as a powerful, inner, self-loathing endless mental battle. I slowly began to lose not only my weight, but my reality, my mind, my friends and everything else that made my life my life. “Deanna” disappeared, I became “Ana”. I became a lying, destructing, convincing eating disorder. The body that once belonged to me was taken. I had no control. The eating disorder was my only friend; protecting me from this place we called the world. It was my way of coping of my hatred of myself. I remember starving myself every Sunday and Wednesday, and on the other days I had a limit 0f 300 or less calories with exercise which I had to burn over 1000 calories. It was horrid. I wasn’t living; I was stuck by depression.
For a while I was in denial. Everyone assumed I was just losing weight because I wanted to be thin. But of course that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to die. I couldn’t live with these voices inside my head. I couldn’t live like this. I was bare. I was empty.
Luckily I was saved just in time.
I was diagnosed with Anorexia Nervosa October the 10th 2013.
