I wrote this for a creative writing class at my university not too long ago. It is a story that is very dear for me. Your criticism would be much appreciated.
As Our Cries Fell Silent -
Many people have this construct of anorexia that makes them believe that those who go through it choose to do so on their own. I wish they understood that it is one of the hardest traps one could ever fall into -- much worse, it is one of the hardest traps to ever break free from.
I say this because no anorexic can remember how it is to fall into the obsession. I surely do not remember. When I try to think about it, I cannot picture in my head if this was something that progressed over time or if this was something that I woke up attached to one day and could not let go of.
You see, that is the magic of anorexia. It has this absolute tyrannical power over the mind. It can make you see things you have never seen before; it can possess your thoughts to the point that you know you have no control over them and have no other choice but to succumb to the hand that drives you. It sounds insane, but that is how it felt for me.
Ana would not let me eat, but she also would not let me forget the thought of eating. She showed me that I was skinny, but made me believe I was not thin enough. I can picture myself in my room being drowned out by her command. I can still feel the cold running up my spine when I think back; a cold that made me feel I had my thoughts squarely tucked into the back of my mind. I felt like I could not do much about the life that was melting out of my reach. I was like an a ice cube wasting away in the sun, knowing that nothing and nobody would come and save me before it was too late to rebuild myself all over again with the same pieces I broke into.
I remember sitting on my brown carpet in the morning every day before school. I can replay the image of me clawing my hands deep into the rough fabric to lengthen my arms and spread out my back. I sat in front of the mirror exposing the bones that trailed down me like scars burned deep into my skin. The first time I counted every single one of them I was afraid. Nothing had ever felt so real and so scary.
That is how I lived my life for a very long time. I would check my back and my waist and my ribs and my cheek bones and my wrists and my knees and my clavicle. It was as if doing so would give me the energy I should have otherwise been getting from food. The energy must have come from this; it was this static energy that felt absolute yet so surreal. It was my fuel, until one day I fainted in my English class when I was walking up to the board to point out prepositional phrases in the sentences the teacher had written in yellow chalk across the blackboard.
If I close my eyes, I can feel my legs moving, one knee lifting, the other knee following. "Aboard, about, above," I repeated to myself as I had memorized, "According to, across…" When my eyes opened, this cloud was lifting from over my eyes as if life were throwing me the hint that I was getting another chance to give up the obsession. I could not focus too well, but the eyes of speculation sunk deep into my brain. I rolled my pupils back slowly and put down the lids over my eyes like curtains signaling the end of a play.
That scene was not the last time that cloud kept trying to hover over my eyes. When it kept lingering over me, I knew I was getting sick. My vision faded into darkness when I tried going up the stairs, when I made a sudden move that was too much to handle. There was no static energy feeding me anymore. I felt consumed by this lethargy, especially when I woke up from a deep sleep. The morning was always the hardest part of the day for me to deal with. My eyes would open and I would just hurt. It was as if my bones weighed too much for my persona anymore; I would just lie there for what seemed to be an eternity each time, my eyes watering from knowing that I was the sole culprit of my own decomposition.
I am not quite sure if I started eating a bit more because of that, but hunger started coming back in intense waves of desperation. When nobody was looking I would crawl on my kitchen floor like a baby. I felt small and helpless like a newborn child, but at the same time the rage that made me grab any food in sight overpowered me. I would then break down and slide my back on the cabinet door like the tears that poured down my face in agony. Soon after I would realize it would be hell if someone found me, so I would run up the stairs and bawl up in a fetal position on the tile of our two-story house. It was not my room that I always picked to cry in until the tears stopped coming, rather it was my mother's room, for no other place would serve me for comfort. Maybe it was that; maybe I just wanted her to find me.
And she did. One of the last times I had one of the tormenting binging episodes, I heard her coming up the stairs slowly. I stared at the ceiling searching for a way for the earth to swallow me whole as she approximated me. I knew that she was totally conscious that I was lying on the floor because my stomach could not take all I had eaten. I hurt silently, trying to avoid meeting her eyes too quickly.
I remember her eyes searching me for a soul to feed herself with, for her eyes looked dead from the beating I had taken on her when I stopped eating. She took a place next to me on that cold tile and held me in her arms like she used to when I was a child and would wake up in the middle of the night, crying loudly because my were legs hurting. "Oh, Sorayita, what are you doing? You are too beautiful to do this to yourself." Her tears would come slowly, as if she had been crying for me forever. Seeing her cry hurt more than anything anorexia had ever put me through; waking up in the mornings, or fainting, or even eating too much for my stomach to hold. I would try to keep the tears from coming at first, but when I felt my breath warm and overbearing and drowning out the sound of my whimpers, I would explode with an immense heartache. She would sink my face in her chest and hold me hard until our crying fell silent like a blanket of comfort that covered us in that immense, cold room.
But I still could not bare the thought of eating, and my mom could not bare the thought of me not eating, so she finally mustered the courage to take me to the doctor one morning before school. I could feel the glass case I had surrounded myself in falling apart before we even got there.
I knew what was coming, so I sat cold in that childishly decorated room shaking my leg up and down, rubbing my frail hands on the even frailer twigs I called my arms. It all happened too fast. The doctor weighed me and bombarded me with questions of all sorts. I saw him writing it in the file, but it did not hurt until she spoke the words "anorexia nervosa" and my mom placed her face in her hands and sobbed quietly.
The ride to school was unbearable. It reeked of a silence that said something had died within us. I did not want to leave her once we stepped on school grounds, but my mom told me to go because she could not deal with my image at the moment. I felt hurt, but I understood. The rest of the day went slowly until I entered the English class I had once fainted in and my teacher said I could no longer eat lunch on my own anymore. I was consumed by anger, but little did I know her company would fill me with an utmost joy until the day I graduated from middle school. I have never found quite a caring and loveable woman like her again.
I went into treatment shortly after that. I hated my therapist and my nutritionist and the scales and the group therapy sessions and the cold air that ran through the halls of the hospital. I snapped back constantly at their questions about why I would starve myself. "Do you think you are fat? Is that why you don't eat?" I could not stand it, so I threw it back at their face, "Of course I am not fat. I wouldn't be here if I was." I was put into heavy treatment shortly after that.
I do not like thinking much about what really happened after that, so whenever I tell this part of the story I collapse time so it does not pang at the pit of my stomach. I dropped out of therapy with the consent of my mother, particularly after I met this beautiful boy who had carved the word "FAT" on his forearm. I met people in that hospital who hurt more than I could ever bear to handle. I started integrating myself back into the daily routine, eventually the obsession subsiding to let me live on my own.
There are times when I still cannot shake myself free from the grasp of anorexia. I sit there on the tile of the shower in my mother's room, the heat of the water falling cold scalding my skin and gnawing back memories of the ice in which I lived in when I knew Ana. I hope the day does not come when I break down and lose all the strength I have to give. I do not think I could survive something like that again, especially if my mother is not here to hold me through the heartache.
As Our Cries Fell Silent -
Many people have this construct of anorexia that makes them believe that those who go through it choose to do so on their own. I wish they understood that it is one of the hardest traps one could ever fall into -- much worse, it is one of the hardest traps to ever break free from.
I say this because no anorexic can remember how it is to fall into the obsession. I surely do not remember. When I try to think about it, I cannot picture in my head if this was something that progressed over time or if this was something that I woke up attached to one day and could not let go of.
You see, that is the magic of anorexia. It has this absolute tyrannical power over the mind. It can make you see things you have never seen before; it can possess your thoughts to the point that you know you have no control over them and have no other choice but to succumb to the hand that drives you. It sounds insane, but that is how it felt for me.
Ana would not let me eat, but she also would not let me forget the thought of eating. She showed me that I was skinny, but made me believe I was not thin enough. I can picture myself in my room being drowned out by her command. I can still feel the cold running up my spine when I think back; a cold that made me feel I had my thoughts squarely tucked into the back of my mind. I felt like I could not do much about the life that was melting out of my reach. I was like an a ice cube wasting away in the sun, knowing that nothing and nobody would come and save me before it was too late to rebuild myself all over again with the same pieces I broke into.
I remember sitting on my brown carpet in the morning every day before school. I can replay the image of me clawing my hands deep into the rough fabric to lengthen my arms and spread out my back. I sat in front of the mirror exposing the bones that trailed down me like scars burned deep into my skin. The first time I counted every single one of them I was afraid. Nothing had ever felt so real and so scary.
That is how I lived my life for a very long time. I would check my back and my waist and my ribs and my cheek bones and my wrists and my knees and my clavicle. It was as if doing so would give me the energy I should have otherwise been getting from food. The energy must have come from this; it was this static energy that felt absolute yet so surreal. It was my fuel, until one day I fainted in my English class when I was walking up to the board to point out prepositional phrases in the sentences the teacher had written in yellow chalk across the blackboard.
If I close my eyes, I can feel my legs moving, one knee lifting, the other knee following. "Aboard, about, above," I repeated to myself as I had memorized, "According to, across…" When my eyes opened, this cloud was lifting from over my eyes as if life were throwing me the hint that I was getting another chance to give up the obsession. I could not focus too well, but the eyes of speculation sunk deep into my brain. I rolled my pupils back slowly and put down the lids over my eyes like curtains signaling the end of a play.
That scene was not the last time that cloud kept trying to hover over my eyes. When it kept lingering over me, I knew I was getting sick. My vision faded into darkness when I tried going up the stairs, when I made a sudden move that was too much to handle. There was no static energy feeding me anymore. I felt consumed by this lethargy, especially when I woke up from a deep sleep. The morning was always the hardest part of the day for me to deal with. My eyes would open and I would just hurt. It was as if my bones weighed too much for my persona anymore; I would just lie there for what seemed to be an eternity each time, my eyes watering from knowing that I was the sole culprit of my own decomposition.
I am not quite sure if I started eating a bit more because of that, but hunger started coming back in intense waves of desperation. When nobody was looking I would crawl on my kitchen floor like a baby. I felt small and helpless like a newborn child, but at the same time the rage that made me grab any food in sight overpowered me. I would then break down and slide my back on the cabinet door like the tears that poured down my face in agony. Soon after I would realize it would be hell if someone found me, so I would run up the stairs and bawl up in a fetal position on the tile of our two-story house. It was not my room that I always picked to cry in until the tears stopped coming, rather it was my mother's room, for no other place would serve me for comfort. Maybe it was that; maybe I just wanted her to find me.
And she did. One of the last times I had one of the tormenting binging episodes, I heard her coming up the stairs slowly. I stared at the ceiling searching for a way for the earth to swallow me whole as she approximated me. I knew that she was totally conscious that I was lying on the floor because my stomach could not take all I had eaten. I hurt silently, trying to avoid meeting her eyes too quickly.
I remember her eyes searching me for a soul to feed herself with, for her eyes looked dead from the beating I had taken on her when I stopped eating. She took a place next to me on that cold tile and held me in her arms like she used to when I was a child and would wake up in the middle of the night, crying loudly because my were legs hurting. "Oh, Sorayita, what are you doing? You are too beautiful to do this to yourself." Her tears would come slowly, as if she had been crying for me forever. Seeing her cry hurt more than anything anorexia had ever put me through; waking up in the mornings, or fainting, or even eating too much for my stomach to hold. I would try to keep the tears from coming at first, but when I felt my breath warm and overbearing and drowning out the sound of my whimpers, I would explode with an immense heartache. She would sink my face in her chest and hold me hard until our crying fell silent like a blanket of comfort that covered us in that immense, cold room.
But I still could not bare the thought of eating, and my mom could not bare the thought of me not eating, so she finally mustered the courage to take me to the doctor one morning before school. I could feel the glass case I had surrounded myself in falling apart before we even got there.
I knew what was coming, so I sat cold in that childishly decorated room shaking my leg up and down, rubbing my frail hands on the even frailer twigs I called my arms. It all happened too fast. The doctor weighed me and bombarded me with questions of all sorts. I saw him writing it in the file, but it did not hurt until she spoke the words "anorexia nervosa" and my mom placed her face in her hands and sobbed quietly.
The ride to school was unbearable. It reeked of a silence that said something had died within us. I did not want to leave her once we stepped on school grounds, but my mom told me to go because she could not deal with my image at the moment. I felt hurt, but I understood. The rest of the day went slowly until I entered the English class I had once fainted in and my teacher said I could no longer eat lunch on my own anymore. I was consumed by anger, but little did I know her company would fill me with an utmost joy until the day I graduated from middle school. I have never found quite a caring and loveable woman like her again.
I went into treatment shortly after that. I hated my therapist and my nutritionist and the scales and the group therapy sessions and the cold air that ran through the halls of the hospital. I snapped back constantly at their questions about why I would starve myself. "Do you think you are fat? Is that why you don't eat?" I could not stand it, so I threw it back at their face, "Of course I am not fat. I wouldn't be here if I was." I was put into heavy treatment shortly after that.
I do not like thinking much about what really happened after that, so whenever I tell this part of the story I collapse time so it does not pang at the pit of my stomach. I dropped out of therapy with the consent of my mother, particularly after I met this beautiful boy who had carved the word "FAT" on his forearm. I met people in that hospital who hurt more than I could ever bear to handle. I started integrating myself back into the daily routine, eventually the obsession subsiding to let me live on my own.
There are times when I still cannot shake myself free from the grasp of anorexia. I sit there on the tile of the shower in my mother's room, the heat of the water falling cold scalding my skin and gnawing back memories of the ice in which I lived in when I knew Ana. I hope the day does not come when I break down and lose all the strength I have to give. I do not think I could survive something like that again, especially if my mother is not here to hold me through the heartache.
Have you any idea if she has a facebook?
