Flowers Bloom in This Place of Pain: The unshelved archives of an eating disorder

Tw: Eating Disorder Experience

I didn’t want to tell you really,

I wanted to write it on a note and crumple it into a ball,

throw it in some body of water. Along a bank I’d never see again I wanted it to sink, to fall off my body,

I wanted it to burn, I wanted to go alongside it. To disappear. Our bodies carry valleys and rivers of meaning so deep

and unquestioned there are things the media tells us, our families tell us, our school, our friends, our peers, our societies, ourselves. And there is weight to their cadence.

Pruning in the water of restriction wishing to sink to the bottom I ran the bath every night trying to keep warm,

to distract,

to take up time,

trying to burn calories. There were days where I did nothing but count, days when all I craved was for someone to tell me I was sick and days where I wanted nothing more than to be speck on the radar of anyone who cared.

And so days were varied and meaning spread wider I couldn’t tell you the time to the second it all began I couldn’t tell you

the reason for its existence, the way toward recovery, I couldn’t tell you what I wanted.

The illness became everything at once I have a hard time putting pieces back together it scattered light through my head in shapes I couldn’t make out through the haze and noise drowned out any words to make out I would find a good corner, rest my head from travel. I got quieter through the years.

To be a weight acceptable to the tables in my heads was to be enough, to feed the flames of perfection.

But the tables shifted and rules changed I wasn’t in charge, grasping for control

it wasn’t actually me who decided I’d need to lose ten more pounds or that I couldn’t eat until I was under some weight, the numbers game was

made up by a disease, made for me to lose. It would whisper,

telling me my smaller self was the lovable one, and so I ached to cause no problems, make no noise, to become invisible, to be the good child, the good student the good friend

Even modes of perfection carried their mess I still wanted to ignore the reality of illness it was my way of communication

without ever having to say a word,

to be perfect through an outside layer which begged for rescue.

No one said anything. I spent two months of it eating two days a week. They’d just congratulate me on weight loss, tell me I looked pretty.

I never looked sick. I’d turn green some mornings almost fainting, yet my mom was the only one who’d ask me to please eat breakfast and remind me she loved me. But when I began to recover

I did it on my own, no one ever uttering the word,

and as one disorder flipped to another I gained the weight I’d lost two years before. People then felt comfortable making jokes, and

the shame piled on until I was buried under it I wanted to be invisible even to myself,

yet I had to buy an entire new wardrobe to fit me.

I spent years holding onto the ghost of my sick self, hoping to find her somewhere deep inside, hating who I had become, believing she was better.

I didn’t want to tell you, And yet here we are,

miles from the start, having flipped through the pages of my history.

Some things are so personal we don’t tell anyone about them, some things we are so ashamed of we don’t speak of them. My eating disorder was both, and

to publish these words is to unclench my fist. It’s still hard for me to write about an ending,

gaining weight might’ve meant healing physically but I never began the process of healing my thoughts, basing value upon the volumes of words and thoughts of others when I was skinny and starving

I could relax into the belief that I was accepted.

To be bigger and binging and purging was to have shame hidden in the shadows, shame I couldn’t vocalize because it carried a stigma in a society that didn’t care about those ‘indulgent’ eating disorders, everything I’d

been running from since thirteen.

I chose to write because I chose to actually recover.

I chose to confront the deeply rooted fatphobia within me. It doesn’t just affect me. It fosters biases,

creates assumptions,

it’s more damaging than we’ll admit.

Some days I’ll still hope she might return.

Some days I’ll romanticize her history, her beauty, the bags beneath her eyes. There are layers in this process we’ll crawl before we run. Perfection has an ugly head, positivity holds a tough standard I seek neutrality, knowing we are more

than layers of skin upon us more than a number,

knowing some days will be hard and some easier,

but we’ll take them as they come, holding out for a time when bodies may just be bodies, not a sliding scale of worthiness.

When I was younger and in pain my mom would tell me to imagine flowers blooming out of that place.

I work to not forget these past selves, but to embrace them and love them where they were, to plant a garden where it once was so dark. They needed it. I still do.