**(EXTRA Trigger warning for blunt and not pretty ED talk)**
The glow and flame and burst of light you think you’ll have. The silver insides, the fluttering clean, the glorious empty, the lightly skipping steps of a person who is perfectly thin.
It’s a rose-tinted lie.
Here’s what an eating disorder really is for me:
It’s two am and I wake up with those sudden feelings of self-hatred and the flab seems to be clinging, clinging, Something has to be done. It doesn’t matter that work is in the morning and I really shouldn’t be a shell at work. I reach for the pills.
It’s living a life where measurement of pills are dolled out by shakes of a bottle and tosses into a shaking palm. Proper dosage is only “more”.
It’s making sure I have enough ephedrine to curb the hunger pains and exhaustion. It’s reading the articles that talk about it being mostly outlawed because when it was coupled with caffeine and aspirin it caused dramatic weight loss (and a lot of health problems). And my only reaction is “gotta get some low-dose aspirin”.
It’s telling people I love eating hot sauce straight because I’m a weird nut about spicy food; when it’s really because it acts as a natural laxative and adds next to no calories. And loving that it burns the shit out of my tongue so I don’t want to eat more.
It’s the burning and painful tenderness of my behind after I’ve had a particular violent bought with the laxative effects.
It’s sobbing in the middle of a weekend afternoon because I desperately want to bake something (baking being my secret passion) but knowing I’m not seeing anyone soon that I could pawn the results off on. So I have to stop myself from doing it. Otherwise I’ll just eat the results and cow’s don’t deserve desserts.
It’s being a little happy deep down when a particularly nasty migraine results in multiple days of vomiting.
It’s hating myself so deeply, so darkly, in a twisting thorn of rage, for the days after those migraines where I can’t eat enough.
It’s telling coworkers that I ate before I came to work and I would prefer to just work through lunch.
It’s shaking and trembling in the bathroom after those handful of laxatives, the cramping in my stomach so bad that I’m pretty sure I’m going to die.
It’s unexplained bruises and scratches when I wake up in the morning. The only clue is a echoing cry of despairing self-hatred in the back of head. It is almost childlike.
It’s hearing my best friend tell me I look like a pinup model in a swim suit and wishing, just wishing, that I could see myself that way. I’m not dumb, I know my eyes are broken.
It’s hearing my mother say “You would never treat another person the horrible way you treat yourself” and being stunned into silence by the truth of it. I am my own worse enemy.
It’s hoping, hoping, hoping that something will change. But nothing ever does.
It’s a rose-tinted lie.
pen, paper, and crazy 