I will not sit quietly

It is with a heavy heart and an angry mind that I approach this entry. While in the grocery store on Monday night I walked past the montage of bony figures that currently decorate the covers of weekly tabloids. This story starts about a magazine article. It is in reference to the current People magazines, "Pressure to be Thin" articles. I used to worship those bony bodies that housed virtual emptiness. For awhile I was a home to a vacant soul. I have since moved away from that neighborhood, to a safer more accepting place. I have found through my own experience of ed-nos (eating disorder not otherwise specified) that there is a haunting curiosity surrounding this disease.

There was an article wrapped up neatly and tucked behind the pictures of a disappearing Nicole Richie. The article chronicled the lives of women who sought help at a treatment center in Coconut Creek, Florida. A highly regarded and respected treatment center called Renfrew. A treatment center I also called home for six weeks. I was challenged when I read this article; wanting so badly to experience the healing that I found in that place. That magic could not be found in the words telling of broken girls, thin girls, skeleton girls. Instead I found everything that Renfrew was not.

I attended Renfrew in the Spring of 2004. When I checked myself in I was 20 lbs above my lowest weight. One could regard me and not tell that I was battling this disease. Though I was physically representational of a normal weight, I was mentally dying. I bring this up only because I was so upset by the showcasing of extremely thin girls. Thin women, men are not the only representation of eating disorders. This is the point that disturbed me so. If the proper kind of attention was tuned into anorexia, bulimia, compulsive overeating, bingeing, then there would not be only super anoretic girls photographed for this spread. There is so much attention on this disease; yet it is so wrongly magnified. I am physically sickened by what I feel right now. I am entirely unable to understand how eating disorders are commercialized as a glamorous addiction.

I want people to be disgusted by this horrible life-robbing disease. Did you know that eating disorders are responsible for more deaths than any other mental illness? Did you know that more people with an eating disorder choose suicide than any other disease? Is it glamorous because there is this infinite control over every aspect, every moment of this life? I have heard it takes discipline, fuck yeah it takes discipline. When was the last time you didn't eat a god damn thing for three days surviving only on coffee? Has your stomach ever hurt so badly from hunger pains that you picked up a tray of strawberries and chewed them only to spit them back out? How about being 20 and aching to die? How about turning 23 and having multiple panic attacks a day because two pots of coffee would rest in an empty stomach undigested? What about making a choice at 24 to die? I laid down on my bed to die the day I turned 24. I was mentally exhausted. I thought I knew everything. I knew that I didn't want to live anymore. I believed I was filth. I have watched people die. I know this disease more than I care to admit. I know it on an academic level and I know it from a personal level. I am alive because of some sort of divine intervention that gave me the strength to focus on the smallest part of me that was not pure disgust. I was sick for 6 years with physical symptoms. But I never remember not being concerned about my body and what went into it. This is a brutal, disgusting, shameful disease that kills your soul. I want to believe that the more people who open up their eyes to the real story behind the socially acceptable protruding chestbone, the sooner we can move toward a path of healing. Until then we will watch girls, boys, women and men die under the hand of a glamorous disease.

It is important that I end this by saying that I do not blame the media for my battle. I write this because I see great importance of seeing the truth behind what is actually being shown. This is not about skinny, sick girls; it is about business and the bottom line. I will continue to wonder though, at what expense will we go to find the highest bidder. I pray that the currency we still use is a dollar and not an innocent's life.