I have often stated in the many conversations I have had with young women that anorexia and eating disorders are a silent epidemic amongst young women suspended in this simulacrum adjacent reality that places the brunt of focus on being seen. Women must exist to be beautiful, to be the muse and never the creator, to be gnawed on the sharp-toothed ridges of life and spat out. Always stuck performing. It is alarming that anorexia is estimated to occur 0.9% to 4.3% of women in Western countries at some point of their life (E. Smink and Hoek, 406-14), all the while women from the Global South go severely underrepresented because it is chalked to be a ‘Western’ phenomenon (Makino et al., 49) or at least not until the illness has truly ravaged them. I ask you to imagine– just as my best friend did– a troll living in the confines of your head. This troll acts as if an inhibitor, ugly, squatting and murmuring: “One more morsel and your body will combust. Look in the mirror. Will you ever be enough with all that fat on your bones? Throw it up. Quit eating.” Now imagine living with this murmuring entity for so long that it becomes your only friend and companion. Looking in the mirror every morning, tracing the shape of your body reduced to plateaus and sharp, striking contours, barely a person and only an illness. That is what anorexia does.
My anorexia came from a place of hurt and punishment– I wondered that if everyone in my life was so set on causing me immense pain, then why should I hold back? I was the creator of my own misery, my own pain because it was easier than coming to terms with the fact of the absolute pain of existing as a vessel for others' pain and baggage that they inevitably put on the individual that is most vulnerable. When you are assaulted, every bit of your body keeps score– and the troll again whispers: “This would not have happened if…” The if-s are all redundant; what has happened has happened, and it is horrifying and jarring, seared into the flesh, balm and sinews of your soul but acceptance and grief don’t get space. They’re throttled by the troll of self-loathing that blames you, the victim and not the doer of the evil. How can you, then, ever survive the calamity? Years of harassment and bullying get to you 2 too, at least they did to me. I remember being ten and scared to step onto the scales because what if I was fat. My nickname, a friendly blow in highschool, was ‘fat’ or ‘fatty’. I was never the attractive friend, always the ostracised one. I was writing an elegy to my own grief and personhood. The voice in my head told me the only way I could ever be desirable as an individual was to starve. And I did, for months at an end till I stepped into college and everyone loved me. “You look like a model! I wish I was anything like you,” they said, not realising they were fueling the voice that smugly smiled. My very bone and marrow was plagued by the wish to be wanted and seen and it finally happened– till it got too much. Then came the fainting spells and the looks and voices of concern, the heart racing up to 150-200 BPM, throwing up by the side of the road as I walked miles and miles on little more than salad and water. That was not supposed to happen– I was still fat wasn’t I? When I first talked to my Eating Disorder specialist she said something: “The goal weight will never come, but your body will give up. The goal will always get lower. Please don’t do this to yourself.” For two years, I tried to understand what she meant.
My life changed when I, a mostly agnostic woman (to date) found a verse from the Bible: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (1 Corinthians 13:4-8). That to me spoke volumes of the universe and all the love it had for me and God, somewhere out there, beyond the fields of right and wrong looked down on me with kindness. Even in the deepest and darkest of times, he would hold my hand. One night, I sat down and cried my heart out to Him– asked Him to show me a glimpse of light and joy in my life made dreary by the loneliness and alienation that haunts the Post-Modern, contemporary man, and how our relationships dissolve into an acidic vat of commodification. And He did, one day at a time. I decided not to hurt myself– especially when I read Rilke. In one of his letters from “Letters to a Young Poet” he says: ‘You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you- no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write, see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether 3 you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.’ So I did what I knew best– I wrote and wrote, pages upon pages of journals, poetry, stories, essays, threw myself into my Literature degree, which I chose after years of struggling with the qualm of choosing something that in my adolescent brain would leave me penniless, versus medicine. It was life-changing when I finally got my journalism break; from radio jockey at my university radio to slowly establishing myself as an art journalist where the field is barely explored. I looked at art and found the branches to light up with one thing–Life. The symbiosis of life sustaining art and art replenishing and fortifying life became a purpose for me and showed in my work; I wrote with my heart, incessantly. Slowly, I healed with my own words. Food became fuel for what I loved doing and not an enemy. The first time I ate bread in 4 months felt like someone drenched myentire body in cold water– I was changed, forever.
I started sharing and writing about my recovery, now one year strong, with other women; I was bombarded– very pleasantly but also to my heart breaking to realise how many of them suffered in silence– with messages. They told me about how their illness had taken away their voice and my words offered a balm and some noise in the draining silence. I never stopped talking about it and educating women about it after that. I turned my search for love that I always sought in others, inward. I was all that I needed– and nothing else. No one else could satisfy what lived inside my heart, and in my own solitude and ruminations I found the answer: “I”. A single syllable we forget too often in the chase for you, them, they and us. Even in my recent-most book, “Obituaries for the Dead and the Undead”, I wrote a series of confessional obituaries to myself, the state which holds us captive, and to the people that I loved. My work at The Friday Times as an art journalist grapples with the art and the artist not as a commodity but as people— when I ask the creator to introduce themselves I always ask: “Who are you, beyond the external? What does this work present to you? I want to truly explore your personhood in this piece, not give a surface level review.” In my recent manuscript in the works, I write about a woman who takes on the character of a monster, a jilted bride and a victim, running through a metaphysical forest through a series of poems. My creative endeavours saved me, and I found a community for myself.
In art and literature, as well as solitude and self-reflection, I found the answer to my struggles what I had always grappled with was being enough for others. The golden child, the perfect partner, a great friend, a great sister. I let go of the expectations I set for myself. Truly, the words of others and the artistic expression is a balm on the rotting core of the world. I threw my life’s purpose into being the said balm, perhaps, for as many people as I could. If the world had caused me hurt, I would take a look at the parts that were rotting away, falling apart, and take out the worms from the rind of it– one at a time. That became, and still is, my driving force– kindness and love, and an unabashed expression of creativity. I have always wanted to exist outside the boundary of the “accepted”— when we think of the quintessential poets and authors that as women broke the boundary of the widely accepted, they always received flak for it. I ask them, now: why can I not write an elegy to my own grief and personhood? To be a woman in a patriarchal society deserves an elegy in itself; and I want to highlight the dirt and filth that sinks under the nails of this very society. I want to represent the bone and marrow of the structures that plague us, and the beauty in the midst of it too. To spend the rest of my life doing so; that is my internal strength and power.